Learning the craft during field experiences in pre-service teacher education: modes of transmission

Abstract

The difficulty of teaching teachers to teach has been conceived as a problem of distance between theory and practice. This paper reviews training within the spaces of practice through a perspective that deconstructs that tension. Our focus was the way in which teacher educators transmit their own wisdom of the teaching practice. From an ethnographic approach our fieldwork was set in a teacher-training institution in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the article explores modes of transmission (anticipating, showing, telling, letting (the other) try and correcting) and reviews their main limitations. The article contributes to the expansion of an approach of recent local development systematizing the wisdom of practice that teachers’ educators use daily to ensure the transmission of the trade.