Supervision Dialogues in Teacher Education: Balancing Dis/continuities of the Vocational Self-Concept

Abstract

Teacher educators and student teachers are increasingly expected to reflect together on the student teachers’ image of self as a teacher. To better understand how to deal with occurring tensions, we studied 42 supervision dialogues, audiotaped in a 1-year, post-master, teacher education program. We analyzed in what way student teachers and teacher educators explored both sensed continuity and sensed discontinuity when they discussed development as a teacher. We identified three types of processes in which student teachers and teacher educators outweighed issues of discontinuity: (a) balancing with time, or accentuating specific perceptions of the past in relation to expectations of the future, or vice versa; (b) balancing with content, or elaborating on other self-attributes; and (c) balancing with salience, exploring the relative worth of self-attributes and/or intentions. The results support student teachers and teacher educators in explicitly discussing sense making patterns in the context of teacher education.