Resumen de Teaching as a discursive practice: new perspectives for teacher education
Teacher educators play an important role as models for the next generation of teachers. Through their teaching practices, they may have a strong impact on the student teachers’ views of teaching. Russell (1997) states that how teacher educators teach is the message that student teachers learn within teacher education programs. However, how do teacher educators enact this message with student teachers? Based on the work of Bakhtin, the current study proposes teaching as a discursive practice materialized by a pedagogical discourse that represents the message about how teaching is enacted. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with a sample of teacher educators from four pre-service teacher education programs. The interviews were analyzed using the Dialogic Discourse Analysis method.
Results showed that different pedagogical discourses coexist among teacher educators and teaching as a discursive practice involves the interrelationship of two elements: a discursive content taught and a discursive manner enacted. These two elements range from a greater or lesser degree of dialogism and alterity (otherness) in concordance with the complexity of the teaching practice. Finally, we discuss suggestions for improving teaching from a dialogical perspective.
