Exploration of Norwegian student teachers’ reflective mediation during internships

Abstract

This study builds on and contributes to research on student teachers’ reflection during internships in teacher education. In order to gain insight into the research question ‘What characterizes four Norwegian third-grade students’ expressed collective and individual reflections during their internships’, the student teachers in question were followed during their internships for two periods of two weeks each. In this paper, video-observation from guidance sessions and the student teachers’ individual logs were used to collect data. In the analyses it appeared that that the content in the collective reflections during guiding sessions mostly concerned the concrete ‘how’ and ‘who’ of teaching. This result corresponds to former research on student teachers’ reflection. In the analyses of their individual logs, however, we found that that the student teachers not only reflected at a concrete level, but also at a more abstract level as their reflections contained contemplations regarding ‘why’ they sought to teach according to the expressed concerns in the collective reflections. The overall theoretical framework of the study is socio-cultural theory, and in particular the notion of ‘reflective mediation’ was useful both in the analyses of the data and in the further interpretation of the findings. As the findings partially contradict previous congruent research that argues for student teachers’ tenuous reflections, the paper concludes that this important aspect of student teachers’ development should be further scrutinized and discussed in a more nuanced manner than it has been until now.

Keywords:

• student teachers
• internship
• socio-cultural theory
• reflective mediation