Co-teaching/co-generative dialogues in a teaching education program as room for agency and new forms of participation: ‘I found Jesus in [writing] the paper’

Abstract

Although the importance of understanding the social and cultural processes mediating pre-service teachers’ expansion of the power to act has been increasingly recognized lately, the way the concept of ‘agency’ is portrayed in most of the studies focuses almost exclusively on the subject of activity and therefore, there is insufficient theoretical attention to the reverse side of agency, the experience of being subject to and subjected to conditions. In this paper, the authors exemplify the process of conscientização and agential development in the case study of Jefferson, a new teacher engaged in a school teaching education program. The purpose of this paper is to show how new forms of consciousness, expansion of the power to act, and increasing control over conditions simultaneously emerge for teachers in training during praxis and how agency is played out by the relations between being subject to and subjected to conditions. Implications for teaching education programs are discussed.

Keywords:

• agency
• consciousness
• co-generative dialogues
• teacher education

Acknowledgment

This study is part of a two-year doctoral research investigation on co-teaching experience through the ‘Programa Interstitucional de Bolsa de Iniciação a Docência (Scholarship Interinstitutional Program for Initiation to Teaching)’ (PIBID) El Kadri 2014. The research was supported by a grant from the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil [5726/11-5]. Our thanks go to Jefferson Saraiva, who allowed us to tell his story and learn from it.