A discursive psychology approach to the study of pre-service teachers’ written reflections about teacher effectiveness

Abstract

This article reports findings from a discourse analysis, informed by a discursive psychology (DP) perspective, of pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teacher effectiveness as constructed in reflective papers. DP treats beliefs as discursive productions that are occasioned by an interactional task and are made visible through discursive features. Our analysis highlights the discursive features employed by pre-service teachers as they wrote about teacher effectiveness in relation to their field observations. We conclude that in their texts, the pre-service teachers went about constructing identities of knowledgeable and legitimate speakers on teacher effectiveness, particularly as they gradually gained firsthand experience via classroom observations.

Keywords:

• teacher thinking
• pre-service teachers
• discursive psychology
• discourse analysis
• reflections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.