Student teachers’ conditions for professional learning on and across the learning arenas of teacher education

Finn Daniel Raaen,Kirsten Elisabeth Thorsen

doi:10.7577/njcie.3736

Finn Daniel Raaen, Kirsten Elisabeth Thorsen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.3736

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Abstract

Teacher education is supposed to be able to offer student teachers professional learning that will enable them to deal with the academic and social needs they may be confronted with in school. This calls for teacher education based on a coherent and meaningful division of labour between the learning activities that take place on campus and in placement schools. This has proved difficult to achieve. Research shows a significant gap in the way teacher education is organised. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of a theoretically grounded account of the so-called “theory-practice” gap in teacher education, which can move us beyond the simple dichotomies that currently seem to annoy much research and practitioners’ interest in this field. We argue that achieving such an account will require the expansion of more equal and mutually negotiated professional learning in teacher education, that can contribute to enhancing student teachers’ professional learning, on and across the various learning arenas of teacher education. We seek to achieve this objective by following a theoretical line of inquiry, supported with empirical data. Our theoretical rationale is based on socio-cultural learning theory, where coherence, transboundary translation, and re-contextualisation are important subordinate theoretical-analytical terms.

Highlights

The legitimacy of teacher education depends on its ability to offer professional learning that will enable student teachers to meet formal requirements as well as taking good care of the actual academic and social needs they are to face in school
We argue that facing such challenges will presuppose the expansion of more mutually negotiated and coherent professional learning in teacher education
The learning processes are manifested in the participants’ competing ideas, in their willingness to take another person’s perspective, in their exchange of hypotheses, in their experimentation with different perspectives on learning, and in their ability to tolerate living with dilemmas and tensions, displaying an expansive type of learning

Summary

Introduction

The legitimacy of teacher education depends on its ability to offer professional learning that will enable student teachers to meet formal requirements as well as taking good care of the actual academic and social needs they are to face in school. Studies have shown that the meeting places between university and placement schools are often too few and/or too rare to develop the cooperation that is necessary to create an adequate coherent education (Heggen & Raaen, 2014; Heggen & Thorsen, 2015) This suggests that there is limited facilitation for the student teachers’ professional learning on and across the learning arenas of teacher education (see Korthagen, 2007). Placement teachers mainly describe the academic knowledge that students have been exposed to on campus as out of step with what is needed in an actual classroom (NOKUT, 2006; Thorsen, 2016; Zeichner, 2005) Overall, these studies indicate that there are major shortcomings in student teachers’ professional learning, on and across the different learning arenas of teacher education, and they convey how the dilemmas and contradictions affect the professional qualification offered. We argue that this requires a reframing of the conventional way of approaching the learning gap

Theoretical framework

Conceptual coherence

Structural coherence

Summary and conclusion