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Guests Bearing Gifts: the position of student teachers in primary school classrooms
Author(s) -
Edwards Anne
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
british educational research journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.171
H-Index - 89
eISSN - 1469-3518
pISSN - 0141-1926
DOI - 10.1080/0141192970230103
Subject(s) - politeness , psychology , content analysis , mathematics education , pedagogy , school teachers , sociology , linguistics , social science , philosophy
Conversations between intending early years teachers and their school‐based mentors were tape‐recorded and subjected to content analysis in order to reveal their focus and purpose. Analysis of the content of the conversations, which took place before and after sessions in which the student teachers had been working with children, indicated that both sets of participants used the conversations to limit possibilities for the failure of students while they implemented classroom tasks with pupils. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin and his collaborators, the conversations were also analysed to reveal the speech genre selected by the students as they spoke with their mentors. The analysis indicates that students were presenting themselves less as learners in their mentors' classrooms and more as fellow teachers who were positioned as polite guests in the classrooms of their mentor hosts.