Search results for: Activity theory

This article explores the work of teacher education in England and Scotland. It seeks to locate this work within conflicting sociocultural views of professional practice and academic work. Drawing on an activity theory framework that integrates the analysis of these seemingly contradictory discourses with a study of teacher educators’ practical activities, including the material artefacts that mediate the work, the article offers a critical perspective on the social organisation of university-based teacher education.

This article describes the complexity of the preservice secondary school mathematics teachers' experiences in their use of action research as a tool provided for them in the teacher education program. It also examines what do the teacher educators learn about their repertoires and those of their students as they develop the research project within and across the disciplines. The findings show that the participants built trust overtime, which helped them to share their challenges with their instructors. The instructors realized that there needed to be a stronger connection between the PSSM teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. The participants had hands-on experience and they are more confident to continue doing action research and become more reflective in their own classrooms. Furthermore, they enhanced their skills for students’ mathematics learning context.

In this article, the authors explore newly qualified New Zealand secondary teachers’ varied accounts of induction. The authors claim that multiple interpretations of objectives for induction programs are a significant source of this variation. With reference to an activity system framework, the authors identify four primary objects of induction that were represented in the induction accounts as follows: ‘orientation to learning about the context’, ‘fitting into the school’, ‘completing registration requirements’, and ‘becoming a professional inquirer’.