Talk About Field Placement Within Campus Coursework: Connecting Theory and Practice in Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

Worldwide, scholars and policymakers have called for teacher education to link fieldwork and coursework. This article examines teacher candidates’ opportunities to talk about field placement within their campus coursework as one way of doing so. It reports on survey data (n = 270) and observation data (n = 52 hours) from 3 teacher-education programs in Norway, Finland, and California in the USA. Findings suggest that candidates have extensive opportunities to talk about field placement. However, the characteristics of the talk, the degree of specificity and detail provided, and the level of complexity and connectedness to theory vary extensively. The article argues that, to be generative for professional learning, talk about field placement needs to be systematically scaffolded within a pedagogy of teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary teacher education
• coursework
• practice
• comparative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Inga Staal Jenset http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0084-0072

Notes

1 K–12 signifies “Kindergarten—12th grade, primary and secondary schooling, or the first 13 years in school.

2 See Canrinus et al. (2015) for information on the design and structure of our survey.

3 See Canrinus et al. (2015) for more on the response rate.

4 “Telling versus not telling” addresses the dilemma of providing the pupils with the direct answer to a question or providing scaffolding (e.g., follow-up questions, hints) for them to find the answers themselves.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council [grant number 212289].