Designing knowledge construction in pre-service teachers’ collaborative planning talk

Abstract

In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of student teachers’ collaboration in planning and implementing a course that integrated physics and the Finnish language. Audio-recorded planning sessions and interviews were examined using qualitative content analysis, first, to discover what kind of space for knowledge construction student teachers designed for learners and, second, to identify the characteristics of their collaboration in developing a new cross-disciplinary pedagogical practice. The analysis revealed challenges in integrating meaning-making resources for knowledge construction; especially the role of language remained mostly invisible. This indicates a need to develop teachable strategies of translanguaging. Student teachers' varied forms of academic knowledge were interpreted as a resource for their collaboration across disciplines. Consequences for teacher education were acknowledged: supervision is needed to make the collaborative process visible and more profoundly conceptualized. More studies on the phases of the collaboration are needed.