Teachers’ practicum learning is a central yet complex aspect of initial teacher education (ITE) which shapes emerging teacher identities and influences career orientations. The diversity of the Further Education and Skills sector, mirrored in its teachers, is also reflected in teachers’ variable practicum learning experiences. Through an examination of teacher educators’, teaching mentors’ and teachers’ conceptualisations of practicum learning, this thesis maps learning trajectories experienced through the practicum and analyses enabling and constricting factors influencing teacher learning. Viewing learning to teach as a social practice, this collective case study used 17 artefact-mediated synchronous online interviews to create a window on practicum worlds in a period of restricted social contact. The use of practice artefacts enabled the vivid retelling and re-enactment of practicum learning. From these accounts, six trajectories of practicum learning, some enhancing and some restrictive, were developed. The study makes an original contribution to learning by mapping the variation in practicum journeys experienced by teachers and identifying the confluence of presage and process factors around teachers, practicum settings, ITE programmes and supporting professionals which enabled more enriching or more impoverished practicum experiences. Time to engage in learning activities with others, aligned views of teacher learning and relational work in teaching settings led to optimal practicum experiences, where learning was co-constructed and diverse practice influences were synthesised through material mediation. These conditions created emerging teacher identities which encompassed and valued pre-teaching academic and vocational identities. The study’s recommendations include a policy level and sector-wide reconceptualisation of teacher practicum learning to reflect its social and collective actuality, a structural reconsideration of in-service teachers’ conditions to enable sustained learning with others and a renewed awareness of the resources new teachers bring to the sector, evidenced through the practice artefacts they co-create.
Shona Dunn (Thu,) studied this question.