An Analysis of Student Teacher Education Tools: Mediating Student Teacher Education Practice

Abstract

The case studies in Chapters 5 to 8 give overall impressions of student teacher education practices in the school departments of History, MFL, Geography and Science. This chapter looks specifically at how student teacher education tools were used and why they were appropriated in different ways. More examples are given from the data generated from the fieldwork and these are highlighted to further elaborate the organising concepts outlined in the case studies. The chapter identifies tools as units of analysis and considers how they were selected and appropriated by participants in the student teacher education activity systems in order to mediate the work on the object of activity. As explained in Chapter 3, tools are understood as anything that mediates subjects’ actions on objects (Russell, 2004) as in, for example, course handbooks, lesson plans, observation summaries and report forms. This chapter analyses tools in specific relation to student teacher education. The analysis is based on an understanding that the ways in which tools are used says something about the object as well as the culture of the department where the tools have developed (Engeström et al., 1999; Nardi, 2005; Stetsenko, 2005). An indication of how the link between teachers’ use of tools and the ways that they think is also revealed, and this helps to appreciate how the relationship between the participants’ thinking impacts on and is impacted by the student teacher education activity’s object (Engeström, 1999a; Kaptelinin, 2005; Miettinen, 2005; Wertsch, 2007).