Guests Bearing Gifts: the position of student teachers in primary school classrooms

Abstract

Conversations between intending early years teachers and their school‐based mentors were tape‐recorded and subjected to content analysis in order to reveal their focus and purpose. Analysis of the content of the conversations, which took place before and after sessions in which the student teachers had been working with children, indicated that both sets of participants used the conversations to limit possibilities for the failure of students while they implemented classroom tasks with pupils. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin and his collaborators, the conversations were also analysed to reveal the speech genre selected by the students as they spoke with their mentors. The analysis indicates that students were presenting themselves less as learners in their mentors’ classrooms and more as fellow teachers who were positioned as polite guests in the classrooms of their mentor hosts.