Four discourse models of physics teacher education

In Sweden, as in many other countries, the education of high-school physics teachers is typically carried out in three different environments; the education department, the physics department and school itself during teaching practice. Trainee physics teachers are in the process of building their professional identity as they move between these three environments. Although much has been written about teacher professional identity (see overview in Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004) little is known about how encounters with the potentially disparate notions of “what counts” in these three environments feed into trainee physics teachers’ professional identity work. In this paper we try to capture the different ways the educational practice of teacher education is valued in the discourse of teacher educators. We use the concept of discourse models (Gee, 2005). Our research questions are as follows: 1. What is signalled as valued (and not valued) by members of the three environments physics teachers meet during their training (school, education department, physics department)? 2. What discourse models can be identified from these value statements? We carried out semi-structured interviews with instructors from the three environments. Our analysis involved iterative coding of the interview transcripts (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992) to construct discourse models. We identify four competing discourse models and discuss the ways in which these models can be seen to be at work, dictating how educational practice is valued