MINDFUL L2 TEACHER EDUCATION

Taking a Vygotskian sociocultural stance, this book demonstrates the meaningful role
that L2 teacher educators and L2 teacher education play in the professional devel-
opment of L2 teachers through systematic, intentional, goal-directed, theorized L2
teacher education pedagogy. The message is resoundingly clear: Teacher education
matters! It empirically documents the ways in which engagement in the practices of
L2 teacher education shape how teachers come to think about and enact their teach-
ing within the sociocultural contexts of their learning-to-teach experiences. Providing
an insider’s look at L2 teacher education pedagogy, it offers a close-up look at teacher
educators who are skilled at moving L2 teachers toward more theoretically and ped-
agogically sound instructional practices and greater levels of professional expertise.

First, the theoretical foundation and educational rationale for exploring what
happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education are established. These theo-
retical concepts are then used to conduct microgenetic analyses of the moment-to-
moment, asynchronous, and at-a-distance dialogic interactions that take place in
five distinct but sometimes overlapping practices that the authors have designed,
repeatedly implemented, and subsequently collected data on in their own L2
teacher education programs. Responsive mediation is positioned as the nexus of
Mindful L2 Teacher Education and proposed as a psychological tool for teacher
educators to both examine and inform the ways in which they design, enact, and
assess the consequences of their own L2 teacher education pedagogy.

Karen E. Johnson is Kirby Professor in Language Learning and Applied

Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Paula R. Golombek is Clinical Associate Professor, Linguistics, University of

Florida, USA.
 Esl & Applied Linguistics Professional Series

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ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
Mindful L2 Teacher
Education
A Sociocultural Perspective on
Cultivating Teachers’ Professional
Development

Karen E. Johnson
Paula R. Golombek
First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Johnson, Karen E., author. | Golombek, Paula R., author.
Title: Mindful L2 teacher education : a sociocultural perspective on
cultivating teachers’ professional development / by Karen E. Johnson and
Paula R. Golombek.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: ESL & applied
linguistics professional series | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035488 | ISBN 9781138189782 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138189799 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315641447 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Language teachers—Training of. | English teachers—
Training of. | Language and languages—Study and teaching. | English
language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers.
Classification: LCC P53.85 .J65 2016 | DDC 418.0071—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035488
ISBN: 978-1-138-18978-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-18979-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64144-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by diacriTech, Chennai
To Glenn, Elizabeth, and Lillian
To Michael, Alex, and Anya
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Prefacexi
Acknowledgmentsxv
Notes on Transcriptions xvii

PART I
Laying the Foundation for Mindful L2
Teacher Education 1

1 A Sociocultural Perspective on L2 Teacher Education 3

2 Mediation in L2 Teacher Professional Development 21

PART II
Vygotsky and Vygotskian-Inspired Theoretical
Concepts That Inform Responsive Mediation 37

3 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points 39

4 Interthinking, the Intermental Developmental Zone, and

Sociocultural Discourse Analysis 48
x Contents

PART III
Exploring Responsive Mediation in L2 Teacher
Development57

5 Reconceptualizing Engineering Student Participation 59

6 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 76

7 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 90

8 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity114

9 Conceptualizing Teaching in/through Reflecting on

Teaching140

PART IV
Mindful L2 Teacher Education 161

10 Responsive Mediation: The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher

Education163

Index176
Preface

The ‘training’ of teachers is a topic about which many people—from politicians

to parents—have strong emotional opinions, opinions that are rarely grounded in
a theoretical understanding of how humans learn, and subsequently how teachers
should teach. Indeed, uttering the word ‘theory’ when discussing teacher educa-
tion often sparks negative reactions as being abstract drivel. The current public
rhetoric surrounding the education of teachers has contributed to a de-skilling of
teachers and a de-professionalization of the field of teacher education—­similarly
affecting second language (L2) teachers and L2 teacher education. The goal of
this book, while in some sense a response to this rhetoric, is to demonstrate
the meaningful role that L2 teacher educators and L2 teacher education play
in the professional development of L2 teachers through systematic, intentional,
­goal-directed, theorized L2 teacher education pedagogy. We resoundingly say,
“Teacher ­education matters!”
Over the past 25 years, we have consistently sought to understand what we do,
why we do it, and the consequences of what we do through Vygotskian socio-
cultural theory. Our Vygotskian sociocultural stance has not only framed our
thinking and activity as teacher educators, but also our analyses as researchers
of L2 teacher cognition and professional development. And it is this interaction
between our thinking and doing as teacher educators and as researchers of L2
teacher learning that inspired the writing of this book. By looking closely at the
teachers with whom we work as they learn to teach and our activity in mediat-
ing their learning, we have, true to our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, explicitly
externalized our own L2 teacher education pedagogy. And as a consequence, we
have become increasingly mindful of our role in cultivating teachers’ professional
development.
xii Preface

In this book, we empirically document the ways in which engagement in the

practices of L2 teacher education shapes how L2 teachers come to think about
and enact their teaching within the sociocultural contexts of their learning-to-
teach experiences. Because we view teacher educators as having greater respon-
sibility within teaching/learning interactions, our obvious audience for this book
is L2 teacher educators.Yet we also know from experience that graduate students
preparing to enter academia as well as experienced classroom teachers often find
themselves thrust into teacher educator positions with little or no preparation.
Thus, this book will provide both seasoned and newly minted teacher educators
with an insider’s look at L2 teacher education pedagogy. But in describing our
pedagogy, this book will also hold appeal for L2 teachers and researchers who
wish to examine the thinking and doing of their own pedagogy as well as the
pedagogy of others.

An overview of the book

In Parts I and II we establish the theoretical foundation and educational ­rationale
for exploring what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education. In
Part I, we lay the theoretical foundation for our own pedagogy, what we have
come to conceptualize as Mindful L2 Teacher Education. In Chapter 1, we ­provide
an ­overview of Vygotskian sociocultural theory and how it informs how we
­conceptualize L2 teacher learning and L2 teacher education pedagogy. Since
we characterize the nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education through the concept
of responsive mediation, we originally sought to fit this key concept into our title,
but through pointed queries from our editors realized how the word ‘mediation’
can have no meaning for some (what is that?) or a specific meaning for others
(like in a legal matter?). To rectify this, in Chapter 2, we articulate the central
role of mediation in teacher conceptual development, trace the ways that medi-
ation has been conceptualized within a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, and
discuss what such conceptualizations offer L2 teacher education pedagogy. We
then argue for the central role of responsive mediation in enabling L2 teachers to
internalize new psychological tools that support the development of L2 teacher/
teaching expertise.
In Part II, we draw on Vygotsky and Vygotskian-inspired theoretical
concepts that we use throughout the remainder of the book to conceptu-
ally articulate and operationally define the concept of responsive mediation. In
Chapter 3 we define Vygotsky’s obuchenie (teaching/learning) and perezhivanie
(emotional experience) in order to establish a conceptual articulation of the
qualities that necessitate teacher educator mediation to be responsive to the
dialogic ­interactions they have with teachers. We also draw on McNeil’s (2000)
construct of growth points as a moment or series of moments when teachers’
cognitive/­emotional dissonance comes into being and argue that responsive
 Preface xiii

mediation directed at the growth point creates the potential for productive teacher
learning and development.
In Chapter 4 we define Mercer’s (2000) interthinking, or how humans use
­language to carry out joint intellectual activity and to make joint sense of experi-
ence, and the intermental development zone, or how teacher educators and teachers
stay attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and understanding over
the course of an educational activity. These two Vygotskian-inspired concepts are
central to how we frame and trace the emergence of responsive mediation in the
practices highlighted in Part III of the book. We also outline our rationale for
­taking up sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004) as a methodological tool
for conducting microgenetic analyses (Vygotsky, 1981) of the quality and character
of teacher/teacher educator dialogic interactions and their educational signifi-
cance for the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.
In Part III, Chapters 5–9, we then use these theoretical concepts to conduct
microgenetic analyses of the moment-to-moment, asynchronous, and at-a-distance
dialogic interactions that take place in five distinct but sometimes overlapping
practices that we have designed, repeatedly implemented, and subsequently col-
lected data on in our own L2 teacher education programs. For each practice, we
outline our educational goals and pedagogical procedures. We then situate each
practice in the unique institutional and sociocultural context in which it occurred
as well as provide sociohistorical information about the teachers who partici-
pated in these practices. For each practice we highlight the linguistic, rhetorical,
and pragmatic characteristics of teacher educator/teacher dialogic interaction,
describe the quality and character of the responsive mediation that emerges, and
explore the consequences of responsive mediation on the ways in which teachers
begin to think about and/or attempt to enact their instructional practices.Yet, we
offer our analyses of the responsive mediation that emerges inside these practices
as illustrative. We do not wish to promote or promulgate ‘best practices’ in L2
teacher education. Instead, we seek to provide readers with an insider’s view of
what responsive mediation looks like as it unfolds and make visible what is required
of teacher educators to create conditions that support productive L2 teachers’
professional development.
In Part IV, we position responsive mediation as the nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher
Education. In Chapter 10 we propose responsive mediation as a psychological tool
for teacher educators to both examine and inform the ways in which they design,
enact, and assess the consequences of their own L2 teacher education pedagogy.
We offer Mindful L2 Teacher Education as theoretical learning that is intentional,
deliberate, and goal-directed by teacher educators who are skilled at moving L2
teachers toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional ­practices
and greater levels of professional expertise.
xiv Preface

References
McNeill, D. (Ed.) (2000). Language and gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mercer, N. (2000). Words & minds: How we use language to think together. London:
Routledge.
Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analyzing classroom talk as a
social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. V. Wertsch
(Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 144–188). Armonk, NY:
Sharpe.
Acknowledgments

This book has truly been a labor of love, involving personal and professional
introspection, theorizing, and insights about what we have thought, felt, and done
over our years as teacher educators, and importantly as teacher educators in dia-
logue with each other. The process of writing this book has strengthened our
commitment to L2 teachers and L2 teaching as professionals and a profession.
An enormous debt of gratitude goes to the many L2 teachers from across the
globe with whom we have worked over the years, especially those featured in
this book. Their struggles, success, and growth have consistently motivated us
to become more conscious of what we do, to experiment with Vygotsky’s ideas
concretely in practice, and to grow as teacher educators. We are grateful that they
opened their ‘inner’ worlds and their classroom worlds to us. We would like to
thank a special group of teachers with whom we worked at American University,
as our interweaving of the theoretical and practical with them pushed our think-
ing in the later stages of writing this book. We would also like to thank our
good friend and colleague James P. Lantolf and the Sociocultural Reading Group
at The Pennsylvania State University for deepening our understanding of dia-
lectical logic and the ideal/material dialectic. We are very grateful to Rebecca
Zoshak for her meticulous copyediting and attention to clarity in the written
word. Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers commissioned by Routledge
for their ­supportive feedback on an earlier draft of this book and acquisitions
editor Naomi Silverman and series editor Eli Hinkel for their professionalism
and ­recognition of the book’s potential contribution to the ESL and Applied
Linguistics Professional Series.
This page intentionally left blank
Notes on transcriptions

T: teacher
TE: teacher educator
S: student (not identified)
S1, S2, etc.: identified student
Ss: several students at once or the whole class
CM: classmate, CM1, classmate 1
[ [do you understand? overlap between teacher/student, student/
student
= turn continues, or one turn follows another without any pause
(.) a dot indicates a just noticeable pause
(2.0) a number indicates a timed pause, e.g., 2 seconds
? rising intonation—question or other
___ emphatic speech, usually on a word
wo (h) rd (h) to indicate the word is expressed with laughter
wor- a dash indicates a word that has been cut off
wo:rd colons indicate elongation of a sound
(word) a guess at unclear or unintelligible talk
() talk occurs but unintelligible
((laughter)) indicates paralinguistic sounds like laughter, crying, etc
((italics)) notes on gestures, actions, eye gaze, etc.

(adapted from van Lier 1988; Johnson 1995)

Johnson, K. E. (1995). Communication in second language classrooms. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
van Lier, L. (1988). The classroom and the language learner. London: Longman.
This page intentionally left blank
PART I

Laying the Foundation for

Mindful L2 Teacher Education
This page intentionally left blank
1
A SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON
L2 TEACHER EDUCATION

Introduction
This book is about what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education.
By practices, we mean the activities in which teachers and teacher educators
engage within L2 teacher education programs. Our interest in these practices is
not so much with the practices themselves, but what we, as teacher educators,
are attempting to accomplish through these practices, how we go about accom-
plishing our goals through the quality and character of our interactions with
teachers, and most importantly, what our teachers are learning as they engage in
these practices. We are deeply committed to seeing the ways in which engage-
ment in the practices of L2 teacher education influence how teachers come to
think about and interact with their students and the ways in which teachers come
to understand both the scope and impact of their teaching. We believe that it
is inside the practices of L2 teacher education, both the ‘moment-to-moment’
interactions (oral and written) between teacher educators and teachers as well
as the assignments and activities that teacher educators ask teachers to engage
in, perhaps face-to-face but many times ‘at-a-distance,’ where teacher educators
can best see, support, and enhance the professional development of L2 teachers.
By exploring these interactions as they unfold and within the sociocultural con-
texts in which they occur, we, as teacher educators, not only open ourselves up
for closer scrutiny, but we also hold ourselves accountable to the teachers with
whom we work and, of course, the L2 students they teach. Our goal in writing
this book is to highlight the unique contributions that teacher educators and
teacher education can make in cultivating L2 teachers’ professional development.
We firmly believe that learning to teach should not be a process of ‘discovery
learning’ or ‘learning by doing,’ but rather learning that is intentional, deliberate,
4 A Sociocultural Perspective

and goal-directed by expert teacher educators who are skilled at moving teachers
toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices and
greater levels of professional expertise.1

A sociocultural perspective on teacher learning

It will come as no surprise to readers of our previously published work2 that our
epistemological stance on teacher learning is grounded inVygotskian sociocultural
theory (Vygotsky, 1978, 1981, 1986). Representing a coherent theory of mind, we
take seriously Vygotsky’s conceptualization of the development of human cogni-
tion as inherently social; that is, it emerges out of participation in external forms
of social interaction that become internalized psychological tools for ­thinking
(internalization). We acknowledge Vygotsky’s claim that this ­ transformation,
from external (interpsychological) to internal (intrapsychological), is not direct, but
mediated. In fact, we see the dialogic interactions that unfold in the practices of
L2 teacher education as the very external forms of social ­interaction and activi-
ties that we hope, as teacher educators, will become internalized ­psychological
tools for teacher thinking, enabling our teachers to construct and enact theo-
retically and pedagogically sound instructional practices for their L2 students.
Moreover, our Vygotskian sociocultural stance is a transformative model of the
human mind, since Vygotsky argued that individuals transform what is appro-
priated for their own purposes and in/for particular contexts of use. It does not
represent an apprenticeship or reproduction model of the human mind. Rather,
we recognize individuals as actors in and on the social situations in which they
are embedded, being both shaped by and shaping the social situations of cognitive
development. Thus, psychological processes are at the same time both socially
­derived—­embedded within the historical practices of a culture—and individually
unique. For L2 teachers, this means that they are shaped in and through their
experiences as learners, the cultural practices of teacher education, and the partic-
ulars of their teaching context, all embedded within larger sociocultural histories
yet appropriated in individual ways.
With that said, we know from our more than two decades of working with
L2 teachers that the Vygotskian notion of internalization, that is, from external
(interpsychological) to internal (intrapsychological), does not happen independently
or automatically. In fact, decades of public lament has chided the lack of lasting
impact that teacher education programs have on moving teachers beyond teach-
ing the way they were taught when they were students or implementing what
they learn in their teacher education programs in the classrooms and schools
where they eventually work (Ball & Forzani, 2010; Cochran-Smith, Feiman-
Nemser, & McIntyre 2008; Edwards & D’Arcy, 2004; Kennedy, 2008). We recog-
nize that developing L2 teacher/teaching expertise takes prolonged and sustained
participation in the social practices of both becoming and being a L2 teacher.
Yet, in line with our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, we see teacher education
 A Sociocultural Perspective 5

programs (school learning) as the ideal venue for the systematic l­earning of
L2 teaching through intentional, well-organized instruction. Vygotsky proposed
that learning in the everyday world emerges out of common, concrete activities
and immediate social interactions resulting in everyday concepts, a kind of uncon-
scious, empirical knowledge that may actually be incorrect or misinformed.
School learning, involving what Vygotsky called academic (scientific) concepts,3 a
more systematic and generalized knowledge, enables learners to think in ways
that transcend their everyday experiences. Obvious parallels can be made between
Lortie’s (1975) ­apprenticeship of observation as learning about teaching in the every-
day world of being a student and school learning as instantiated in the content
and processes of L2 teacher education programs. In essence, teacher education is
designed to expose teachers to relevant academic concepts that once internalized
will enable them to overcome their everyday notions, possible misconceptions, of
what it means to be a teacher, how to teach, and how to support student learning.
Interestingly, Vygotsky did not privilege academic concepts over everyday concepts
since he argued that neither is sufficient for a child to become fully self-regulated.
In fact, in his critique of formal schooling he claimed that the “direct teaching
of concepts is impossible and fruitless. A teacher who tries to do this usually
accomplishes nothing but empty verbalism, a parrot like repetition of words by
the child, simulating a knowledge of the corresponding concepts but actually
covering up a vacuum” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 150). Instead, he argued that the goal
of concept development is for academic concepts and everyday concepts to become
united into true concepts; an academic concept “gradually comes down to con-
crete phenomena” and an everyday concept “goes from the phenomenon upward
toward generalizations” (p. 148). The internalization of true concepts through for-
mal schooling has several significant outcomes for teachers. Initially, true concepts
help to transform teachers’ tacit knowledge and beliefs acquired through their
schooling histories, enabling them to rethink what they thought they knew about
teachers, teaching, and student learning. When teachers begin to use true concepts
as tools for thinking (psychological tools), they begin to see classroom life and
the activities of teaching/learning through new theoretical lenses. Likewise, when
teachers think in concepts (Karpov, 2003), they are able to reason about and enact
their teaching effectively and appropriately in various instructional situations,
for different pedagogical purposes, and are able to articulate theoretically sound
reasons for doing so.
Although not drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory, a similar argument
has been made in general educational research by Kennedy (1999) who charac-
terizes ‘expertise’ in teaching as emerging out of the ways in which teachers make
sense of ‘expert’ knowledge, or knowledge that is propositional, written down, cod-
ified in textbooks, and publicly accepted as a principled way of understanding phe-
nomena within a particular discourse community (academic concepts), and their own
‘craft’ or ‘experiential’ knowledge that emerges through their own lived experiences
as learners (everyday concepts). As teachers begin to link this ‘expert’ knowledge to
6 A Sociocultural Perspective

their own ‘experiential’ knowledge, they tend to reframe the way they describe
and interpret their lived experience. These new understandings enable them to
reorganize their experiential knowledge and this reorganization creates a new lens
through which they interpret their understandings of themselves and their class-
room practices. Thus, ‘expertise’ has a great deal of experiential knowledge in it,
but it is organized around and transformed through ‘expert’ knowledge. From this
perspective, teacher learning is clearly not the straightforward internalization of
‘expert’ knowledge from the outside in. Instead, teachers populate ‘expert’ knowl-
edge with their own intentions, in their own voices, and create instruction that is
meaningful for their own objectives (A.F. Ball, 2000).This, others have argued, posi-
tions teachers not as passive recipients of theory but as active users and producers
of theory in their own right, for their own means, and as appropriate for their own
instructional contexts (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993).
Teacher education, whether for beginning or experienced teachers, may be
the only occasion when the learning of teaching is the result of the kind of
systematic, intentional, well-organized instruction that embodies the range of
psychological tools that will enable teachers to enact theoretically and pedagog-
ically sound instructional practices and thus develop greater levels of teacher/
teaching expertise. We contend that the quality and character of the media-
tion that emerges in the practices of L2 teacher education plays a pivotal role
in enabling teachers to come to understand their everyday concepts concerning
teaching/­learning through relevant academic concepts concerning language, lan-
guage learning, and language teaching, thereby enriching the academic through
the everyday, and building the capacity to think in and act through true concepts as
they develop L2 teacher/teaching expertise.
We also recognize that the extent to which engagement in the practices of
L2 teacher education will become internalized psychological tools for teacher
thinking depends, in large part, on the agency and motives of our teachers and the
affordances and constraints embedded within our and their professional worlds
(Feryok, 2012). Therefore, in order to understand what happens inside the prac-
tices of L2 teacher education more fully, we need to look at the social/professional
worlds from which teachers and teacher educators have come and now operate in.
To do so, we draw on Freeman and Johnson’s (1998) notions of schools and school-
ing to tease out the social influences of both settings and processes in the learn-
ing and doing of L2 teaching. Accordingly, we recognize schools as the physical
and sociocultural settings in which learning-to-teach, teaching, and learning take
place. Schooling, on the other hand, represents the sociocultural and historical pro-
cesses that take place in schools over time. Combined, schools and schooling create
and sustain certain meanings and values, representing the sociocultural terrain in
which the work of teaching is thought about, carried out, and evaluated. Similar to
Freeman and Johnson’s original argument, the dialogic interactions that emerge in
the practices of L2 teacher education cannot be understood apart from the socio-
cultural environments in which they take place and the processes of establishing
 A Sociocultural Perspective 7

and navigating the social values in which these practices are e­ mbedded (see also
Edwards, 2010). It is against this backdrop that we explore what happens inside
the practices in L2 teacher education.

Our view of second language teacher education

We recognize that the particular parameters of any L2 teacher education ­practice
will no doubt reflect a particular view of what second language education is sup-
posed to be about, including the dispositions, or habits of mind, for what con-
stitutes good L2 teaching. Thus, by design, these parameters impart this view on
learners of L2 teaching through direct social interactions (teacher–teacher edu-
cator interaction) and cultural artifacts (theory and research, i.e., academic concepts
instantiated in books, articles, curricular materials, assessments), and through the
internalization of ways of talking about language, teaching, learning, and students
that represent this particular view. In fact, our Vygotskian sociocultural stance
requires that we take stock of our own theoretical orientation to L2 education
and the professional development of L2 teachers. Vygotsky was quite clear that
formal education must engage with what matters in society, and that education
itself implies transmitting something that is worthwhile, socially valued, and cul-
turally significant. Indeed, we feel it is imperative to articulate what we believe to
be informed habits of mind, productive instructional concepts and practices that
support student language learning, and the particular view of L2 teaching that we
expect our teachers to internalize and enact in the L2 classroom.
As teacher educators, our particular practices are imbued with values that
position second language education as, in essence, providing language learners
with a repertoire of semiotic resources for how to be and how to mean in the L2
world (Byrnes, 2012; Kramsch, 2014). Through theoretical learning in L2 teacher
­education, we likewise are providing a repertoire for how to be and how to mean
in the L2 teaching world. Therefore, our theoretical orientation toward language,
­language teaching, and the learning of language teaching positions social interac-
tion and meaning as central. We believe teachers, as well as the L2 learners they
teach, develop through the mediation of others, as Vygotsky’s often quoted phrase
suggests, “through others, we become ourselves” (1931/1997, p. 105). Moreover,
we view L2 teacher/teaching expertise as the development of what Johnson
(1999) calls reasoning teaching, defined as

the complex ways in which teachers conceptualize, construct explanations

for, and respond to the social interactions and shared meanings that exist
within and among teachers, students, parents, and administrators, both
inside and outside the classroom. Simply put, reasoning teaching reflects
the complex ways in which teachers figure out how to teach a particular
topic, with a particular group of students, at a particular time, in a particular
classroom, within a particular school. (p. 1)
8 A Sociocultural Perspective

By fostering reasoning teaching through our particular practices, we hope to

address the time, experience, and interactional constraints inherent in any instruc-
tional context. Reasoning teaching, as a form of teacherly thinking (Golombek, 2011),
is very much in line with Edwards’ (2010) notion of promoting “resourceful
teaching for resourceful learning” (p. 72), an educational stance that involves
much more than the delivery of curriculum or the acquisition of skills, includ-
ing the building of teacher agency by strengthening teachers’ knowledge of and
ability to manipulate a repertoire of linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, and inter-
actional resources that enable them to support productive student learning. And
we believe that the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise is best accom-
plished through high quality mediational activities with expert teacher educators
engaged in the practices of L2 teacher education.
Before we move on, what we mean by ‘teachers’ in this book needs some
elaboration. We recognize that our own BA and MA TESOL programs typically
cater to pre-service teachers since the majority who enroll are often newcomers
to L2 teaching and the university settings in which our academic departments
are situated. However, we note that a significant number of our teachers have
extensive L2 teaching experience, draw on multilingual resources, and have had
an array of international and intercultural experiences. Many of our teachers are
teaching part-time while enrolled in our teacher education programs. So, for us,
the traditional pre-service/in-service distinction becomes somewhat blurred. We,
thus, use the word ‘teachers’ in most cases to represent the varied sociocultural
histories and instructional experiences our teachers may have.
In sum, to understand the learning and development of L2 teachers/teaching
as it takes place in formal teacher education, it is imperative to examine the inter-
actions that unfold inside the practices of L2 teacher education. Empirically doc-
umenting the dialogic interactions that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher
education, tracing L2 teacher development as it is unfolding, and detailing the
consequences of these interactions on the ways in which L2 teachers begin to
think about and attempt to enact their instructional practices with L2 students is
the ultimate goal of this book.

The development of knowledge of and for second language

teaching
All professions have an accepted conception of what it is that people need to
know and be able to do to carry out the work of a particular profession. However,
it is also the case that a so-called professional knowledge base is not a static or neutral
entity, but instead grounded in certain values, assumptions, and interpretations that
are shared by members of a particular professional community. Johnson (2009b)
has argued that the knowledge base of L2 teacher education informs three broad
areas: (1) the content of L2 teacher education programs, what L2 teachers need to
know; (2) the pedagogies that are taught in L2 teacher education programs, how
 A Sociocultural Perspective 9

L2 teachers should teach; and (3) the institutional forms of delivery through which
both the content and pedagogies are learned, how L2 teachers learn to teach (p. 21).
It is this third area, the institutional forms of delivery through which both the content and
pedagogies are learned, that constitute what we are calling the practices of L2 teacher
education and the focus of this book. As we stated at the outset, we believe that it
is inside these practices, the moment-to-moment dialogic interactions as well as
the assignments and activities that teacher educators ask teachers to engage in at
a distance, where teacher educators are best able to cultivate teachers’ professional
development. Likewise, the choices teacher educators make about the particular
practices they enact in their L2 teacher education programs are neither static nor
neutral but emerge from and are situated in the social, political, economic, and
­cultural histories that are located in the contexts where teacher educators and teach-
ers live, learn, and teach. Therefore, the ­development of knowledge of and for
language teaching is embedded in and emerges out of “located L2 teacher
­education,” which entails constructing locally appropriate responses (i.e., prac-
tices) that support the preparation and professionalism of L2 teachers within the
settings and circumstances in which they live and work (Johnson, 2006, p. 245).
Attempts to document knowledge of and for teaching in general education
began in the mid-80s, most notably when Shulman (1987) and his colleagues
at Stanford University embarked on a research project to define the knowledge
base of teaching. They were interested in documenting not only the disciplinary
foundations of what teachers need to know about the subject matter that they
are expected to teach, but also the knowledge that teachers rely on to make
that subject matter accessible, relevant, and useful to students. Coined pedagogical
content knowledge, because it combines knowledge of content, pedagogy, curric-
ulum, learners, and educational context, Shulman emphasized pedagogical content
knowledge as being “of special interest because it identifies the distinctive bodies
of knowledge for teaching” (p. 8). Accordingly, pedagogical content knowledge is nei-
ther fixed nor stable, but instead emergent, dynamic, and contingent on teachers’
knowledge of particular students, in particular contexts, who are learning partic-
ular content, for particular purposes. As a result, the development of pedagogical
content knowledge emerges out of engagement in the activities of teaching since its
very nature constitutes and is constitutive of the interconnectedness of content,
context, students, and pedagogical purpose.
Given its dynamic nature, pedagogical content knowledge develops as teachers
engage in the actual activities of teaching. And this creates a conundrum for
teacher education programs because it requires that learners of teaching perform
as self-regulated teachers before they have the necessary competence to do so, or
before they have the appropriate pedagogical content knowledge to do so. Yet,
we see the developmental value of performance preceding competence (Cazden, 1981;
Miller, 2011), in a sense, placing teachers ahead of themselves, as it is precisely
through engaging in the activities of teaching and the dialogic interactions
­(spoken and written) related to those activities that teachers will develop deeper
10 A Sociocultural Perspective

understandings of their actions and become consciously aware of the subject

­matter content and pedagogical resources that form the basis of their instructional
decisions and activities. With that said, we also recognize that conscious aware-
ness is not enough. While teachers may be consciously aware of the difficulties
that learners might encounter while completing an instructional task, they may
be unable to enact the most beneficial instructional strategies at critical points in
time so as to assist learners in accomplishing that task. Conscious awareness is
essential if teachers are to develop voluntary control, or self-regulation, over their
instructional decisions and practices. Enabling teachers to become consciously
aware of the academic concepts and pedagogical resources that form the basis of their
instructional decisions and activities is an essential, albeit insufficient, element of
the development of teacher/teaching expertise.
While most L2 teacher education programs do require a supervised practicum
and/or internship experiences, these often come near the end of the program,
remain disconnected from academic coursework, and are apprenticeship-like, in
that they invoke a ‘discovery learning’ conceptualization of teacher learning. If,
as the current research on teacher cognition suggests (see Kubanyiova & Feryok,
2015), participation in particular sociocultural practices and contexts shape what
and how teachers learn to teach, then L2 teacher education programs must create
multiple and varied opportunities for teachers to engage in theoretically and ped-
agogically sound instructional practices within the sociocultural contexts in which
they are currently teaching or will eventually teach. More importantly, these
opportunities, by design, must create spaces for teacher educators to offer expert
mediation that supports teachers as they are engaged in the processes of being and
becoming teachers. While traditional practicum activities tend to include teach-
ing a class, self-observation, observing other teachers, the use of teaching journals,
or discussions in seminars (Gebhard, 2009), new technologies that support com-
puter-mediated communication (discussion boards, Moodle, blogs) have helped
to open up these activities by exposing teachers’ thoughts, feelings, and concerns
as they are participating in the processes of learning to teach while simultane-
ously fostering greater teacher/teacher educator dialogue around the activities of
planning, teaching, and reflecting on teaching (see Johnson & Golombek, 2013;
Yoshida, 2011). Additionally, various forms of inquiry-based professional devel-
opment (i.e., teacher study groups, peer coaching, lesson study) (see Johnson,
2009a), particularly those that allow for self-directed, collaborative, inquiry-based
learning that is directly relevant to teachers’ classrooms, have helped to create
structural arrangements where teachers and teacher educators can engage in sus-
tained collaborative dialogue that make explicit the dynamic nature of the peda-
gogical content knowledge that teachers come to rely on as they make the content of
their ­instruction accessible, relevant, and useful to students.
In addition, we believe that teacher educators must frame their interactions
with teachers in such a way as to enable them to gain an expert’s understanding
of the subject matter content being taught and the instructional resources to
 A Sociocultural Perspective 11

teach it for their own purposes and within/for particular contexts of use. This
requires that teacher educators assist teachers in developing a deep conceptual
understanding of the subject matter content they are expected to teach as well
as conscious knowledge of the academic concepts that represent the scientific foun-
dation of that content. For example, most L2 teachers know, from their everyday
experience, that the present progressive tense in English is marked for regular
verbs with the suffix –ing.Yet, few may be consciously aware of the complex rela-
tionship between tense (location of time), aspect (flow of time), and mood (degree of
necessity, obligation, probability, ability) that work in concert to trigger language users
to make certain choices about how to denote actions in time and space or “the
construal of a situation based on the viewer’s perspective” (Langacker, 2001, p. 16).
In most L2 teacher education programs, teachers do have opportunities to learn
the academic concepts that represent the systematic generalized knowledge that has
emerged from theory and research of their subject matter content (i.e., knowl-
edge about language, second language acquisition, multi-literacies, etc.); however,
more often than not these academic concepts are not linked to the day-to-day activi-
ties of teaching/learning in L2 classrooms. General educational research has made
a distinction between the accepted disciplinary knowledge of a particular field
and the pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) that teachers use to make the
content of their instruction relevant and accessible to students (D.L. Ball, 2000).
We see, from our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, this disciplinary knowledge and
pedagogical content knowledge as being in a dialectical relationship, with each shaping
and transforming the other (i.e., true concepts) through mediated engagement in
the activities of L2 teaching.
A persistent challenge for language teacher education is to create learning/
teaching opportunities that foster the development of L2 teacher pedagogical
content knowledge. What makes this challenge so persistent is that, as the original
definition suggests, because it is emergent, dynamic, and contingent on teachers’
knowledge of particular students, in particular contexts, who are learning particu-
lar content, for particular purposes, it cannot be acquired in one context and then
simply applied to another. At the same time, we recognize that teacher educator
pedagogical content knowledge is also partial and dynamic, and thus what we know
about particular content or the particular pedagogical resources we suggest will
most certainly shape how we mediate teacher learning and development. This is
precisely why some have described the activities of teaching as ‘unnatural work’
(Ball & Forzani, 2010) as it requires teachers to unpack something that they pre-
sumably know so well, and may have fully internalized, yet now must make acces-
sible to and learnable by others. We argue that the same can be said for teacher
educators. Exploring our practices as teacher educators, as we do in this book, is
one way to unpack our expertise.
The development of knowledge of and for second language teaching involves
a complicated, dialectic, socioculturally situated process of becoming and being
an L2 teacher within various communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
12 A Sociocultural Perspective

Yet, from our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, knowledge of and for second
­language teaching is not, and cannot be, separated from the individuals who both
internalize and enact it in the settings in which they live, learn, and work. Thus,
we next turn to the development of L2 teacher identity, another critical dimen-
sion in cultivating teachers’ professional development.

The development of L2 teacher identity

Research on language teacher cognition within the last decade has argued that
teacher identity is a fundamental component of what teachers know and do in
the language classroom (Duff & Uchida, 1997; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Morgan,
2004; Varghese et al., 2005). For beginning and experienced teachers alike, there
is an “inextricable relationship between teacher identity and classroom practice”
(Kanno & Stuart, 2011, p. 250).Though Vygotsky never used the term ‘identity’ in
his work (Cross & Gearon, 2007; Penuel & Wertsch 1995), others have theorized
about the social origin and formation of identity by highlighting how cultural
tools (re)shape action in goal-oriented activity (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995), so that
identity is “a being in continuous becoming” (Roth, 2003, p. 8) through activity.
Our work as teacher educators and our Vygotskian sociocultural stance align well
with Cross (2006) and Cross and Gearon’s (2007) construct of identity-in-activity as
a way to unify identity as concrete practice and discursively constructed practice.
More specifically, they posit that language teacher identity involves a dialectic
between the microgenetic activity that a teacher realizes as a subject within an activ-
ity system (Engeström, 1987; Leont’ev, 1978), with its associated rules, community
members, tools, and objects, and the larger social, cultural, historic domain from
which that activity emerged and is shaped. The construct of i­dentity-in-activity can
thus be used to analyze the development of teacher identity because it can be
applied initially to characterize a teacher’s identities in different activity systems, or
instructional contexts, and the larger discourses shaping those identities in differ-
ent contexts. If there is a sense that tensions exist, it can then be used to identify
possible contradictions between identity and activity within and between activity
systems. Identity, along with motive, is thus a byproduct of emotion, suggesting
that emotion and motive are central to understanding the formation of identity
(Roth, 2007).
Teachers trying to develop particular identities often face contradictions
because the various activity systems in which they participate have different values,
norms, and expectations for what constitutes ‘good’ language teachers and ‘good’
language teaching. What is imparted in teacher education programs, or in litera-
ture advocating particular approaches to or goals in language teaching, may be at
odds with the larger sociocultural, institutional, and historical discourses shaping a
particular teaching context. In his work, Cross (2006) detailed the contradictions
between activity systems by showing how an in-service Japanese as a foreign lan-
guage teacher’s identity-in-activity did not feature widespread use of the Japanese
 A Sociocultural Perspective 13

language to develop students’ communicative competence in the target language,

what Cross suggests is advocated as ‘good practice’ in L2 teaching. Rather, the
teacher’s activity focused on using English to establish classroom order and using
Japanese as a means to enhance English literacy skills, what he characterizes as the
socioculturally constructed activity of being a ‘good Japanese language teacher’
in this particular context. Thus, as the subject of different activity systems, teachers
experience contradictions between identities, and between identities and activity
within and between those activity systems because those systems have different
objects or goals, communities, norms of behavior, and histories.
Yet, teachers will no doubt experience contradictions differently even within the
same activity system, because of their varied social historical ­circumstances, and
the affordances and constraints these provide (Dang, 2013). Mediating teachers as
they encounter such contradictions in their identities across activity systems should
thus be part of the process of unifying their emotion, cognition, and activity
of teaching within the practices of L2 teacher education. Developing teacher iden-
tity means not only introducing new identities to teachers, but also enabling them
to develop activities that align with that identity in a ‘located’ teaching setting.
One way that teacher educators have attempted to mediate teacher identities,
to encourage them to envision and possibly adopt more empowering teacher
identities, is through reading and reflecting on research and theories that chal-
lenge the dominant discourses of idealized English language teachers. A line
of such research has sought to transform the identities of nonnative speaking
English teachers explicitly by challenging the native speaker myth (Phillipson, 1992)
through various mediational activities such as exploring theories of bilingual-
ism and multicompetence (Cook, 1992) in courses of MA TESOL programs or
teacher supervision courses in PhD programs. By exploring these theories and
more empowering identities, and re-storying their own identities through reflec-
tive activities, typically reflective journals, teachers are able to reimagine them-
selves as multicompetent and multilingual teachers of English, viewing themselves
more positively as part of an imagined community of multicompetent speakers of
English (Golombek & Jordan, 2005; Pavlenko, 2003; Reis, 2011a, 2011b). A fun-
damental weakness of these studies is that although they describe teachers’ adop-
tion of idealized conceptions of an alternative teacher identity, they do not show
the teachers transforming the material activity of their teaching to align with
their incipient identities. Moreover, as Kanno and Stuart (2011) demonstrated,
formation of teacher identity is a sustained process of learning-in-practice (Lave
1996), through which developing basic instructional skills, content expertise, and
an understanding of what is important to teachers in their own teaching is partic-
ularly constructive in identity building. This raises a practical and ethical concern
for teacher educators as to how to maximize opportunities for teachers to design
instructional activities for specific teaching contexts that are congruent with both
identities appropriate for those contexts, and teachers’ conceptions of teaching
and learning, in order to enhance the development of located teacher identities
14 A Sociocultural Perspective

that form part of ‘located’ teacher education (Johnson, 2006). A ­common and
long-standing mechanism for uncovering disempowering teacher identities as
well as reimagining more empowering ones is engagement in narrative activity, to
which we turn next as we complete this overview of our Vygotskian sociocultural
stance on L2 teacher education.

The transformative power of narrative activity

While narrative has long been viewed as the quintessential way through which
teachers’ knowledge is structured and rationalized as a productive vehicle
for teacher inquiry and knowledge building (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009;
Elbaz, 1983), from our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, we have argued that
the transformative power of narrative activity lies in its ability to ignite cogni-
tive processes that can foster L2 teacher professional development (Johnson &
Golombek, 2011b). We thus positioned narrative activity as a mediational tool
arguing that:

The act of narrating, as a cultural activity, influences how one comes to

understand what one is narrating about. The telling or retelling (either oral
or written) of an experience entails a complex combination of description,
explanation, analysis, interpretation, and construal of one’s private reality as
it is brought into the public sphere. (p. 490)

In order to tease apart the complex means by which narrative activity func-
tions as a mediational tool, we proposed three interrelated and often overlapping
functions: narrative as externalization, narrative as verbalization, and narrative as
systematic examination.
When narrative activity functions as externalization, it allows teachers to
express their understandings and feelings by giving voice to their past, present, and
even imagined future experiences. Narrative as externalization fosters introspec-
tion, explanation, and sense-making, while simultaneously opening up teachers’
thoughts and feelings to social influence. In this sense, narrative as externalization
has value not only for teachers themselves but also for teacher educators. When
narrative activity functions as externalization, it concretizes, in teachers’ own
words, how, when, and why new understandings emerge, understandings that can
enable teachers to gain increasing control over their thinking, feelings, and actions.
Once externalized, these same understandings offer teacher educators insights
into teachers’ ways of ‘seeing and being’ in the world. Such insights offer teacher
educators an orienting basis for action from which they can work to support and
enhance the professional development of L2 teachers.
When narrative activity functions as verbalization, it assists teachers as they
attempt to internalize the academic concepts that they are exposed to in their teacher
education programs. Narrative as verbalization allows teachers to deliberately
 A Sociocultural Perspective 15

and systematically use academic concepts to reexamine, rename, and reorient their
everyday experiences, engaging in what Vygotsky (1986) described as ascending
from the abstract to the concrete. If internalized, academic concepts “have the potential to
function as psychological tools, which enable teachers to have greater awareness
and control over their cognitive processes, and in turn, enable them to engage
in more informed ways of teaching in varied instructional contexts and circum-
stances” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011b, p. 493). For narrative activity to function
as verbalization, the academic concepts that teachers are exposed to in teacher edu-
cation programs must be situated within the settings and circumstances of teach-
ers’ professional worlds and realized through the concrete goal-directed activities
of actual teaching. When narrative activity functions as verbalization, it becomes
a powerful mediational tool that supports teachers’ thinking in concepts (Karpov,
2003) as they make sense of their teaching experiences and begin to regulate both
their thinking and teaching practices.
Narrative as systematic examination represents the procedures or parameters
for how teachers engage in narrative activity. Drawing again from our Vygotskian
sociocultural stance, human cognition is understood as originating in and fun-
damentally shaped by engagement in social activity, and consequently, cognition
cannot be removed from activity. Put quite simply, what is learned is fundamentally
shaped by how it is learned. Therefore, different forms of narrative activity will
entail different types of systematic examination, ultimately having different con-
sequences for learning and development. As an example, the parameters associated
with writing a learning-to-teach history might focus the teacher’s attention more
on the (re)construction of self as a teacher, whereas the parameters of an action
research project might focus the teacher’s attention more on the particulars of
classroom activity. Ultimately, the consequences of engagement in narrative activ-
ity will be shaped by the parameters that frame its systematic examination.
From our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, we find transformative power in
teachers engaging in narrative activity. Taken together, when narrative activ-
ity functions as externalization, it enables teachers to make their tacit thoughts,
feelings, and hopes explicit and create cohesion out of their lived experiences.
When narrative activity functions as verbalization, it enables teachers to use the-
oretical constructs to inform and increasingly regulate their thinking and teaching
activities. The parameters of any narrative activity will determine the focus of its
systematic examination, enabling teachers to recognize the intentions and rea-
soning behind their thinking and teaching activities, and perhaps alter the ways
in which they think about and engage in the activities of teaching. For teacher
educators, recognizing the transformative power of narrative activity is critical
to the design, enactment, and assessment of the consequences of what happens
inside the ­practices of L2 teacher education.
In this book we seek to highlight the unique contributions that teacher
­educators and teacher education make to L2 teacher professional development.
Specifically, we focus on how teacher learning and development are assisted by
16 A Sociocultural Perspective

the dialogic interactions that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher education.
The ultimate goal of this book is to empirically document these dialogic interac-
tions and their consequences for teacher development because it is inside these
practices and the responsive mediation that emerges as they unfold that we find the
key to enabling teacher educators to understand, support, and enhance L2 teacher
professional development.

Notes
1 This argument is an expanded version of Johnson, K.E. (2015). Reclaiming the
relevance of L2 teacher education. The Modern Language Journal 99(3), 515–528.
2 Johnson, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2015; Johnson & Golombek, 2003, 2011a, 2011b;
Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Golombek & Doran, 2014; Golombek, 2015.
3 We recognize scientific and academic concepts as interchangeable but have given
preference to academic concepts as this is how Vygotsky (1935/1994) referenced
them in his later writings about formal (schooling) education.

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2
Mediation in L2 Teacher
Professional Development

The word ‘mediation’ in our daily lives has different connotations for different
people in different contexts. Some may automatically comprehend it in the
sense of a third-party arbiter brought in to reconcile differences, whether it be
a professional brought in to settle a legal dispute or a caregiver brought in to
settle a squabble between siblings. Our use of mediation is not as an everyday
concept but rather as an academic concept, which we detail in this chapter as the
foundation for our concept of responsive mediation. From our Vygotskian socio-
cultural stance, mediation is key in the development of higher mental pro-
cesses of all humans. In this chapter, we articulate the pivotal and complicated
role of mediation in the development of higher mental processes, especially
in terms of L2 teacher development. Beginning with Vygotsky, we trace how
mediation is conceptualized within a sociocultural theoretical perspective. We
then follow with how various Vygotskian scholars have interpreted media-
tion and extended it for psychological and educational applications. We offer
responsive mediation as playing a crucial role in exploiting the potential of what
Vygotsky called symbolic tools—social interaction, artifacts, and concepts—to
enable teachers to appropriate them as psychological tools in learning-to-teach
and ultimately in directing their teaching activity.

Mediation: The central concept in Vygotsky’s theory of the mind

To start,Vygotsky argued that the relationship between the world and humans is
indirect, that is, mediated. This relationship is typically represented in Vygotsky’s
(1978) triadic model connecting sign, tool, and mediated activity (adapted from
p. 54) (Figure 2.1).
22 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

Mediated activity

Sign Tool

FIGURE 2.1

Humans do not act directly with or on the world, but use culturally and ­historically
molded physical tools that expand their physical abilities and thus enable them to
change the conditions in which they live. In short, physical tools are externally ori-
ented to shape the material world. For example, using a mortar and pestle in certain
cultures and time periods enabled cooks to transform ingredients and thus transform
cuisine in the process, while food processors in other cultures and time periods have
shortened the time needed to transform ingredients. Whether using a mortar and
pestle or a food processor, something will be gained, perhaps time, while some-
thing may be lost, perhaps texture or taste. Humans also have the unique capacity
to use psychological tools, such as literacy, to mediate their thinking and activities that
likewise expand their mental processes, transforming themselves and their activity
in the process. Psychological tools, or signs, have also been historically and culturally
shaped, passed on, and adapted by successive generations in response to individual
and community needs, but they are internally oriented to shape cognitive develop-
ment. As such, psychological tools represent unique cultural manifestations of artifacts
and activities, concepts and social relations, or mediational means.
Within Vygotskian sociocultural theory, how we learn to use these psycho-
logical tools to develop our higher mental processes—to transform ourselves—is
explained through the role of mediation. Children learn to use these tools in and
through sustained social interaction with adults, first on the social plane (external
or interpsychological) and later on the mental plane (internal or intrapsychological)
plane as the child begins to self-regulate. Adults use verbal tools initially in joint
activity, which has a clear purpose (goal-directed activities), as a way to regulate, or
mediate, the child’s behavior. Children appropriate these tools and begin to use
them in the form of egocentric (private) speech to organize, or plan, direct, and
evaluate, their own behavior. For example, children may initially tell themselves
‘hot’ when near a stove, as their caregivers have done, to deter any impulse to
touch it. Children likewise regulate others’ behavior (social speech), for example
when a child tells a caregiver to ‘get the ball.’ As children master verbal tools,
these tools gradually become internalized, transforming into inner speech through
which children regulate their own mental functioning and activity. This ongoing
process of transformation from the external to the internal, resulting in new forms
of cognition, is what Vygotsky expressed as internalization.
Teacher educators need to engage teachers in appropriate practices of L2 teacher
education, and in the context of engaging in these practices, expose them to the
psychological tools needed for successful performance of these activities, with the
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 23

goal of developing L2 teacher/teaching expertise. Psychological tools grounded in

the sociocultural histories of language teaching/teacher education mediate t­ eachers’
mental processes.Teachers are not born with these psychological tools, nor do they
need to discover or reinvent these tools themselves. Instead, psychological tools
should be presented explicitly to teachers through theoretical learning. This is pre-
cisely what L2 teacher education programs are supposed to do. Teacher educators
who work in these programs have already internalized the psychological tools they
use to enact theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices. To make
these psychological tools available to novice teachers, teacher educators first need
to externalize them.That is, they need to present them to teachers as external signs
through moment-to-moment and at-a-distance dialogic interactions.
The child and adult (or teacher and teacher educator) will inevitably have
different motives as they engage in joint activity. Thought does not exist in itself
but is “engendered by motivation, i.e., by our desires and needs, our interests
and emotions” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 252). Although learners engage in activity
with their own motives, part of what more expert others do is promote the
development of new motives through mediation. The new motive “always ripens
under the umbrella of the person’s current motive, that is, within his or her cur-
rent activity” (Karpov, 2014, p. 28). For example, a teacher’s motive in writing
a reflection journal may be to meet a requirement of a course. Alongside that
teacher’s motive, the teacher educator may mediate that activity through written
comments and questions intended to encourage a new motive—journal writing
as self-inquiry to promote the development of teacher/teaching expertise. Thus,
within the joint activity of L2 teacher education, teacher educators must have a
clear sense of their own motives, try to elicit what teachers’ motives are, and work
to promote new motives in teacher activity when necessary. The process of doing
this is demanding for teacher educators, so we hope the case studies of teachers
engaged in learning-to-teach that follow (Chapters 5–9) provide some insights.

Mediational means: Artifacts and activities, concepts and

social relations
Mediational means have widespread, value-laden social and ideological
­implications. Researchers have shown how literacy, as a psychological tool, is
­multifaceted, with different practices that embody different values and goals for
different social groups (Brice Heath, 1983; Scribner & Cole, 1981). The literacy
of formal schooling, established and valued as normative by certain groups, con-
fers power to those groups while disempowering other groups enacting different
literacy practices (Brice Heath, 1983; Scollon, 2001). Additionally, although these
tools facilitate certain actions, they simultaneously restrict them (Scollon, 2001),
exemplified by the mortar and pestle and food processor comparison. A more
relevant example for L2 teacher education would be that while using a lesson plan
provides affordances for a beginning teacher in terms of sequencing a considerable
24 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

amount of information and activity within a lesson, it may constrain the teacher’s
classroom teaching, so that finishing the lesson as planned becomes the goal itself.
Though Vygotsky discussed these mediational means, within the domain of child
cognitive development, they are implicated in all human cognitive development,
and for our purposes, the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.
Cultural artifacts and activities, as mediational means, appear to be simple con-
cepts but are in fact multifaceted. Language has been singled out as the most pow­
erful cultural artifact that transforms, or mediates, mental functioning, allowing
humans to perform increasingly complex activities. Artifacts can be symbolic, such
as language, as well as concrete, such as the physical object of a videotape of a
teacher teaching. Artifacts have an ideal-material quality in human activity “that
are not only incorporated into the activity, but are constitutive of it” (Lantolf &
Thorne, 2006, p. 62). For example, a lesson plan is ideal in a teacher’s conceptu­
alization of it in the mind and representation on paper, but then becomes material
both as a physical copy of it written out and then enacted in the classroom. For a
teacher, the physicality and sociality of a lesson plan interact, but its sociality, or how
it is used to organize the activities of instruction, shapes how the lesson plays out in
the actual class. Humans are unique in that they can create a mental plan, symbol-
ically through speaking or writing, of their physical activity before they engage in
that activity (Ilyenkov, 1977). The phrase ‘lesson plan’ is ideal and material as well in
that we have a conceptual understanding of its meaning, but it has a material sense
in how it is represented in terms of the alphabetic or phonetic system of English.
Concepts, both everyday and academic, as detailed in Chapter 1, also mediate the
ongoing process of internalization. As we know, Vygotsky envisioned that learn­
ing involved a dialectic between everyday concepts, subconscious, empirical knowl-
edge that may actually be incorrect or misinformed, and academic concepts, more
systematic and generalized knowledge that is the purview of school learning. For
Vygotsky, it is only through explicit and systematic instruction that learners will
transcend their everyday experiences and reach a deeper understanding of and
control over the object of study (true concepts). Conceptual development emerges
over time, depending on the affordances and constraints of the learning envi-
ronment and learner agency. According to Lantolf and Thorne (2006), “human
agency appears once we integrate cultural artifacts and concepts into our mental
and material activity” (p. 63). In L2 teacher education, teacher educators mediate
teacher’s cognition through academic concepts so they become psychological tools
that teachers use to enact their agency and regulate their mental and material
activity of teaching in locally appropriate, theoretically and pedagogically sound
instructional practices for their students and contexts.
Social relations, or human mediation, are also important in terms of how
the adult’s involvement with the child in joint activity promotes internalization.
From the time children are born, they participate in different culturally specified
activities and relations that are part of their historical legacy and are involved
in dialogic interactions with caregivers who use language to regulate the child.
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 25

Though language is important in human mediation,“the construction of ­meaning

is ­regulated (or mediated) by social relationships” (Moll, 2014, p. 33). The social
in relations is not only the dialogic interactions between child and adult, but the
longstanding historical and sociocultural inheritance that shapes the interaction.
In L2 teacher education, we view the social relations between the teacher educa-
tor and teacher as functioning as a powerful and demanding form of mediation.
The specific forms of human mediation used will no doubt differ depending on
the goal-directed activities in which teachers and teacher educators are engaged,
as well as the institutional settings in which that mediation is embedded.

The zone of proximal development: An arena of learner

potentiality
The transformation of mental processes from the external to the internal through
the introduction of verbal tools into activity emphasizes “qualitative rather than
quantitative increments” (Wertsch, 2007, p. 179), and is intimately tied to the
child’s relationship to the environment. Environment does not mean a d­ escription
of the features in the context in which the child is situated but that the child’s
mental–personal is always in relation to the material–social. Vygotsky sought to
explain the basis of qualitative change through the notion of the social situation of
development: “The social situation of development represents the initial moment
for all dynamic changes that occur in development during the given period”
(Vygotsky, 1988, p. 198). Within such a critical period, a contradiction emerges
between what the child can actually do, the child’s emotional–affective needs, and
emerging mental formations.Vygotsky proposed that children go through varied
stages in their development characterized by dialectical interaction of stable and
critical periods initiated by a contradiction.The unity of the contradiction indicates
that the mental–personal has been transformed, as has the material–social, so that
the child has a new relation to the environment. As teacher educators, we believe
L2 teacher education programs represent a similar sort of critical period in teach-
ers’ professional development. Just as Vygotsky proposed critical periods as times
of qualitative transformation in children’s development (i.e., the introduction of
literacy through formal schooling), thus causing a restructuring of social relations
(i.e., being asked reading comprehension questions by the teacher), L2 teacher
education programs are often a period of tremendous emotional/cognitive disso-
nance. Students are repositioned as teachers, everyday concepts about teachers and
teaching (i.e., the apprenticeship of observation) are reconceptualized through
academic concepts (i.e., theoretical learning), new identities, meanings, and ways of
being emerge, and teachers form new perezhivanie about their experiences. It is
a time during which human mediation, as we illustrate in Chapters 5–9, is abso-
lutely critical in cultivating teachers’ professional development.
Given Vygotsky’s notions of the social situation of development, critical peri-
ods, and the development of higher mental processes as mediated, beginning as
26 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

joint activity in which the tool is externalized for a child by a caregiver, it follows
that the child’s independent use of a psychological tool will naturally lag behind
the use of the tool with assistance. Vygotsky’s innovation is that he conceptually
framed this distance between a learner’s level of independent performance and
the level of assisted performance as the zone of proximal development (ZPD):

The zone of proximal development of the child is the distance between

his1 actual development, determined with the help of independently solved
tasks, and the level of the potential development of the child, determined
with the help of tasks solved by the child under the guidance of adults and
in cooperation with his more intelligent partners. (1933/1935, p. 42)

The ZPD offers an alternative conception of instruction and cognitive devel-

opment than the underlying conventional schooling practices where instruction
follows development. In other words, a child is assumed to be at a certain level
of development and then instruction focuses on content considered appropri-
ate for that level. For Vygotsky (1986) however, correctly organized instruction
“marches ahead of development and leads it,” focusing on “ripening” mental pro-
cesses (p. 188). This is possible through Vygotsky’s conception of the ZPD as a
metaphoric space of potentiality. In order to understand the causes, characteristics,
and forces surrounding a child’s social situation of development, Chaiklin (1993)
suggests that Vygotsky intended the ZPD as a diagnostic tool. The ZPD thus has
direct implications for assessing what learners need instructionally at any given
point in time, and consequently, for how a more expert-other can mediate respon-
sively. Rather than instruction focusing on a learner’s independent activity or what
has already been internalized, a learner’s ZPD emerges in and through the activity
of assisted performance. Expert-others, such as teachers, observe that assisted per-
formance and then work with learners at the boundaries of their potential, or their
ZPD—that is, the level at which they begin to perform only with considerable help
from expert-others. Mediation aimed at the upper threshold of a learner’s abilities
means that learner frustration is always a possibility, so expert-others should stay
attuned to learner affect during ZPD activity as well (Mahn & John-Steiner 2002).
Vygotsky (1987) did discuss ways that more expert-others could observe and
mediate learner activity, such as “demonstration, leading questions, and by intro-
ducing elements of the task’s solution” (p. 209). More specifically, he describes
the expert’s role as showing how a problem could be solved and then seeing
if the student could solve the problem through imitation, by beginning to solve
the problem and seeing if the student could finish it, by enabling the student to
solve the problem through interaction with a more capable other, or by explain-
ing the principle underlying the problem (Vygotsky, 1988, p. 202). Yet, he and
many who have taken up sociocultural theory argue that educational applica-
tions should not simply focus on identifying exemplary mediation patterns but
on ensuring that in whatever interactive activity the child and expert-other are
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 27

engaged, the focus of attention should be on whether the child is able to take
part in the activity in ways that could not be done on his/her own and that the
interactive activity results in a specific psychological function becoming appro-
priated by the child (Kozulin, 2003; Mahn, 2003; Wertsch & Stone, 1985). This
issue is core to our argument as well; it is not the practices of L2 teacher educators
themselves, but what happens inside those practices that enable teachers to engage
in activities that are beyond their current capabilities and have significant conse-
quences for how they begin to think about and enact their teaching.
Furthermore, the ZPD is always rooted in cultural and historical values; that
is, people/society have a vision of the end goals of a ZPD, of where development
should go (Newman & Holtzman, 1993). The same holds for us as teacher educa-
tors involved in L2 teacher education programs. We have a vision of our end goals,
of where our teachers’ development should go, although this, of course, will be
shaped by the fact that ‘located L2 teacher education’ (Johnson, 2006) is about con-
structing locally appropriate responses that meet the needs of teachers and teacher
educators in the settings and circumstances where they live, learn, and work.
In addition to the collaboration that occurs in the joint activity during the
ZPD,Vygotsky (1987) viewed imitation as a major component of developmental
activity directed at maturing mental functions. As he noted, it is during collabora-
tion that the child can “move from what he has to what he does not have through
imitation” (p. 210). Imitation is not simply verbatim copying of what someone
does. Rather, imitation is potentially transformative activity in which a child,
having some understanding of the goals and means of the activity, intentionally
and creatively tries to reproduce adult performance (Vygotsky, 1988). In sum,
children imitate what they are in the process of learning, and imitation “is the
chief means by which early childhood human beings are related to as other than
and in advance of who they are” (Newman & Holzman, 1993, p. 151).
Play, as Vygotsky (1933/1966) defined it, is also a rich source of higher mental
development and creates a zone of proximal development:

In play the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual every-
day behavior; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains
in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all develop-
mental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.
The relation of play to development should be compared to the relation
between instruction and development. . . . Play is a source of development
and creates the zone of proximal development. (p. 74)

Vygotsky posited that what children are doing through play, in essence, is
working through their understandings of signs and cultural artifacts in ways that
initially imitate interactions in which they have participated or observed, a kind of
‘practice’ in a ‘safe zone.’ For example, when a caregiver observes a child playing
‘teacher,’ the caregiver may marvel at the cleverness of the child as he or she uses
28 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

grammatically complex and semantically appropriate expressions, for example ‘if

you misbehave like that, I’m going to have to put you in a timeout.’ In fact, the
child is imitating in his or her play activity what has been experienced in activity
with the caregiver. For Vygotsky (1988), both play and imitation are not copying
or acting, but complex and transformative processes, a chief means of being in
advance of oneself, requiring an ability to understand the minds of others.
Teacher educators thus play a vital role in enacting mediation directed at each
teacher’s potentiality during ZPD activity. And it is the quality and character of
the mediation that teacher educators provide that is instrumental in understand-
ing and supporting the development of teacher/teaching expertise. Also critical
to this process are the structured mediational spaces, or ‘safe zones,’ where teachers
are allowed to ‘play’ at being and becoming teachers, where they can, with assis-
tance, function ahead of themselves as they write about, talk about, and enact
teaching activity, advancing their understanding of what it takes to think, talk, and
act like an L2 teacher.
A major challenge for teacher educators is to recognize both the lower and upper
thresholds of this metaphoric space for each teacher, identifying what a teacher can
do in joint activity interacting with peers, and more importantly with e­ xpert-others,
while accomplishing a task that is beyond his/her abilities. This enables teacher
educators to gauge teachers’ potential for development and their capabilities as they
are emerging, so that teacher educators relate to teachers in advance of themselves.
Subsequently, another challenge for teacher educators is to provide activities in
advance of a teacher’s independent functioning but accompanied by supportive
interactions. If all goes as planned, teachers will imitate the use of these tools, that is,
use them in the same way that teacher educators used them, but this imitation marks
only the beginning. Teacher educators need to orchestrate and monitor teachers’
use of these externalized psychological tools until teachers gain increasing con-
trol over them. As teachers begin to internalize these external psychological tools,
teacher educators can be less and less involved in assisting teachers. Ultimately,
teachers move beyond imitation and can independently use these psychological
tools to address the challenges they face and/or the instructional problems at hand.

Vygotskian-informed scholars’ interpretations of mediation

Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991) argue that Vygotsky’s intellectual work was
motivated by a “quest for synthesis” (p. 391), but that quest was thwarted by his-
torical and personal circumstances during his lifetime. The political climate of the
Soviet Union that became increasingly perilous during Vygotsky’s life constrained
what he could share and how he could share his ideas in writing.Vygotsky’s poor
health as a result of suffering from tuberculosis and his early death at 37 meant that
his productive work time was relatively short. The incompleteness of his work, as
well as its originality, has inspired a profusion of research based on his ideas. In par-
ticular, mediation and how it shapes how we come to control our mental worlds
has been widely discussed by a range of scholars working within sociocultural
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 29

theory (Cole, 1996; Daniels, 2002; Karpov & Haywood, 1998; Kozulin, 2003;
Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Lantolf & Poehner, 2014; van der Veer & Valsiner,
1991; Wertsch, 1985, 2007). Several interpretations of mediation are ­ relevant
when ­considering how teacher educators can intentionally integrate theoretical
learning in the cultural practices of teaching and teacher education.

Explicit and implicit mediation

According to Wertsch (2007), Vygotsky expressed two perspectives on media-
tion in his writing—explicit mediation and implicit mediation. Wertsch argues
that the different disciplinary perspectives influencing Vygotsky over the course
of his life influenced his conception of and the very language used to explain
mediation: explicit mediation is attributed to the discipline of Psychology, and
implicit mediation, to poetics/semiotics.
Explicit mediation, what we would associate with formal schooling, has a two-
fold nature according to Wertsch (2007). It is explicit in that someone, a teacher for
example, intentionally and openly introduces a sign (i.e., meanings) into ongoing
activity, and that sign is likewise ongoing and visible (see Chapter 3 for a detailed
discussion of Vygotsky’s maxim ‘sign meaning develops’). This type of mediation
is evident in Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) functional method of dual stimulation, in which
an artificial stimulus, or sign, is overtly inserted into ongoing activity to study the
development of higher mental processes as the object of the activity, as well as
to facilitate the organization of it. We can think of this kind of mediation as that
which we typically enact in L2 teacher education when we try to engage teachers
in appropriate joint practices, and in the process of engaging in these practices,
expose them to the psychological tools needed for successful performance of these
activities. For example, Johnson & Dellagnelo (2013) exposed a team of teachers
to a set of pedagogical tools designed specifically to foster greater student partici-
pation and engagement in L2 instruction.The explicit insertion of these tools into
how they talked about and enacted their teaching activities assisted the teachers in
becoming more fluent users of these tools in their L2 instruction.
Implicit mediation, however, is not “artificially and intentionally introduced
into ongoing action” (Wertsch, 2007, p. 189) because, as it typically involves
signs (i.e., meanings), it is often part of the communication that is connected to
the activity. Wertsch notes that examples of implicit mediation include social and
inner speech, which mediate psychological processes. As part of communication,
they are less obvious and not purposefully deployed to organize g­ oal-directed
activity. Implicit mediation can most certainly be found in teacher/teacher edu-
cator dialogic interactions. For example, the way a teacher educator frames how
language learners might engage in an instructional activity can mediate how
teachers come to understand and enact that activity. As we illustrate in Chapter 7,
the teacher educator’s repeated reference to ‘multiple right answers’ not only
shaped how the teachers came to understand the theoretical concept they were
preparing to teach (parallelism), but also how they eventually taught it.
30 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

Wertsch (1985) also developed the concept of strategic mediation, which

represents cognitive assistance that moves from implicit to explicit, is respon-
sive to immediate need, and is concerned more with cognitive transformation
than behavioral performance. Simply telling a teacher to ‘ask for examples’ might
enable her to get through the interactive lecture part of a lesson, but it may not
transform the way she thinks about her teaching or how she structures and enacts
teaching activity in future lessons. Thus, strategic mediation, for Wertsch, must
be minimally intrusive, allowing learners to exert and exhibit as much control
over the task as possible. Likewise, assistance must be regulated, for example too
much assistance decreases learner agency, while too little increases frustration.
Essential to strategic mediation during the ZPD is the notion of intersubjectivity
(Wertsch, 1985), defined as “when interlocutors share some aspect of their sit­
uation definition” (p. 159). In other words, a learner needs to understand the
objects and events in a learning situation from the expert’s point of view in order
for their interactions on the external plane to move to the internal.

Metacognitive and cognitive mediation

Karpov and Haywood (1998) also argue that Vygotsky expressed two perspec-
tives on mediation in his writing—metacognitive mediation and cognitive medi-
ation. Metacognitive mediation refers to the process through which children
develop the semiotic tools to control, or self-regulate, their thinking. This refers
to Vygotsky’s idea that we described in the earlier section of this chapter—higher
mental processes are mediated by psychological tools, such as language, signs, and
symbols that adults teach to children through joint activity.
Cognitive mediation is connected to formal schooling as it refers to the process
through which humans develop the psychological tools “necessary for solving
subject-domain problems” (Karpov & Haywood, 1998, p. 28). As we wrote in
Chapter 1, learners, such as learners of teaching, enter school, or L2 teacher edu-
cation, with everyday concepts, but can overcome them through the introduction
of academic concepts in systematic formal instruction. As learners master academic
concepts, they can use them to mediate themselves in relevant problem solving
activity. Karpov and Haywood reiterate Vygotsky’s assertion that empty verbalism,
simple parroting of the concept, marks the beginning of the development of aca-
demic concepts, but note that Vygotsky did not explain how to link these concepts
with instructional procedures. However, many of Vygotsky’s followers did just
that (see Davydov, 2004; Gal’perin, 1989, 1992; Karpov & Bransford, 1995).

Mediation as co-regulation during ZPD activity

Vygotsky’s belief in formal educational activity as the leading activity of devel­
opment has inspired many Vygotskian scholars to characterize mediation as
co-regulation during ZPD activity. Co-regulation, according to Fogel (1991),
involves mutual cooperation between mediator and learner so that it is not simply
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 31

the mediator who is shaping the nature and direction of their joint activity but
also involves how learners respond to, and in some ways regulate, the media-
tor’s activities. Co-regulation is very much in line with our conceptualization of
responsive mediation as being emergent, dynamic, and contingent on the interac-
tions between teachers and teacher educators. In this sense, teachers’ professional
development is provoked when they are attempting to accomplish something
that they cannot yet accomplish on their own, but they are in fact quite active, in
both explicit (i.e., asking for help) and implicit (i.e., expression of negative emo-
tions) ways, in shaping the quality and character of the mediation that emerges
during interactions with teacher educators.
In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994)
were the first Vygotskian scholars to conduct an in-depth study of how media-
tion might function as co-regulation during ZPD activity. In their study of an
ESL writing tutor’s meditational moves, they argued that mediation should be
attuned to learner development, and therefore, must be graduated, negotiated,
and contingent on moment-to-moment changes in learner need. Likewise,
mediation should be minimally intrusive, allowing the learner greater opportu-
nities to self-regulate and only becoming more explicit when needed to move
forward with the task at hand. Thus, such mediational moves, from implicit to
explicit, are contingent on learner responsiveness and continuously negotiated
during ZPD activity. In their most recent book, Lantolf and Poehner (2014)
argue that viewing mediation as co-regulation during ZPD activity positions
mediation “not as a treatment that can be administered to individuals to move
them from one level of development to another but rather as interaction that
must remain attuned to learner needs and changes in learner contributions over
time” (p. 159). We concur, emphasizing the tremendous responsibility placed on
mediators, or for us, teacher educators, “in determining how to approach tasks,
set goals, select strategies, to optimally involve learners and reformulate plans
and actions” (p. 159). This reinforces the import of learner reciprocity (van der
Aalsvoort & Lidz, 2002) and agency in teacher/teacher educator interactions as
teachers’ transformation of mental processes is contingent upon teachers taking
up for their own purposes what teacher educators offer through mediation.
Given our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, as well as Lantolf and Poehner’s
influential work on dynamic assessment (DA) in second language learning, we need
to distinguish what we mean by responsive mediation in relation to dynamic assess-
ment, terminology Vygotsky did not use himself. Lantolf and Poehner (2004)
define DA as a procedure

that integrates assessment and instruction into a seamless, unified activity

for simultaneously assessing and promoting learner development through
appropriate forms of mediation that are sensitive to the individual’s (or in
some cases a group’s) current abilities. In essence, DA is a procedure for
simultaneously assessing and promoting development that takes account of
the individual’s (or group’s) zone of proximal development (ZPD). (p. 50)
32 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

DA is a kind of dialogic cooperation between mediator and learner, with

the mediator continually assessing the learner’s understanding in order to
­determine an appropriate mediational response. Because there is no prescribed
script for the mediator to follow, the mediator responds intentionally and sponta-
neously to the emerging needs of the learner. As we mentioned above, Aljaafreh
and Lantolf (1994) propose that the mediator’s assistance in a DA interaction be
graduated, moving from implicit to explicit, contingent on a learner’s needs, and
dialogic. The goal of DA is “to unify assessment and instruction into a single
activity, the goal of which is learner development” (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p.
351). In other words, the mediation enables the learner to go beyond the here
and now of the task, eventually creating internalized psychological tools that can
be used in novel problem solving activities.
Our concept of responsive mediation shares much in common with DA.We believe,
however, that the nature of teacher educator mediation of teachers, especially those
engaged in the act of teaching, makes enacting Aljaafreh and Lantolf ’s (1994) pro-
posal difficult, if not counterproductive, at times. The proposition that mediation
moves ideally from implicit to explicit can be impractical given that more often
than not, responsive mediation is not possible in the actual activity of teaching. Because
we cannot mediate directly during the activity of teaching, mediation often takes
place when teachers are preparing for teaching or while reflecting on a lesson
after the fact. And sometimes such preparation and/or reflection may occur days or
even weeks before or after the actual lesson is taught.The mediation that we provide
may simply not be taken up as a result at times. Moreover, teacher educators have a
limited amount of time to mediate teachers through the array of conceptual, prac-
tical, managerial, and interpersonal topics that need to be addressed in L2 teacher
education programs. Often we have to mediate teachers in the throes of emotional/
cognitive dissonance who still have to wake up the next day and teach a lesson.
Without the luxury of time, we have to bolster teachers through other-regulation to
enable them to fulfill their basic instructional and ethical responsibilities. Sometimes
the most effectual thing we can do for a despairing teacher is to tell her what she
could say to achieve a particular objective, or to tell him which kind of activity would
help achieve an objective. This suggests, therefore, that the quality and character of
responsive mediation in the practices of L2 teacher education will vary depending on
the particular practice in which we are engaged and on our teachers’ constellation of
emotion, cognition, and activity.

Human and symbolic mediation

Kozulin (2003) argues that the agents of mediation in Vygotsky’s writings repre-
sent two dimensions: human and symbolic. In human mediation, the focus is on
how a child’s involvement in joint activity with an expert-other is consequential
for cognitive development; in other words, whether the child is capable of assum-
ing greater responsibility for the activity in the future. In symbolic mediation, the
 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development 33

focus is on how the introduction of symbolic signs, tools, and/or cultural artifacts
might bring about change in a child’s performance and ultimately his/her cogni-
tion. The distinction between the two, however, is somewhat blurred, as human
mediation, or immediate interaction between individuals, typically entails the use
of symbolic tools. Building on the example mentioned earlier, a lesson plan has
both ideal and material qualities; it is the concrete instantiation of an idealized
set of instructional goals and activities. Yet, when a teacher and teacher educator
discuss, or co-construct a lesson plan, the teacher educator’s vision of how that
lesson plan should be enacted may differ considerably from the teacher’s. Human
mediation between the teacher and teacher educator will most likely entail bring-
ing these two visions closer together, or in Vygotskian terms, establishing a sense
of intersubjectivity. Critical to the relationship between human and symbolic
mediation is Kozulin’s (2003) claim that symbols may remain useless unless their
meaning as cognitive tools is properly mediated. He explains this relationship:

Symbolic tools have a rich educational potential, but they remain ineffec-
tive if there is no human mediator to facilitate their appropriation by the
learner. By the same token, human mediation that does not involve sophis-
ticated symbolic tools would not help the learner to master more complex
forms of reasoning and problem solving. (p. 35)

Thus, a lesson plan might assist a teacher in enacting a lesson, but without human
mediation with an expert-other, the mere use of the lesson plan risks denying the
teacher the opportunity to master expert ways of thinking about and enacting teach-
ing activity. In fact, it might also be the case that a lesson plan enacted without expert
mediation could impede a teacher’s development if getting through the lesson plan
becomes the teacher’s object, rather than being responsive to and supportive of
meaningful student learning. Thus, we reiterate the pivotal role that human media-
tion plays in cultivating teachers’ professional development.

Responsive mediation
Before we offer an initial definition of responsive mediation, we feel it is important
to make one final comment about the unique nature of human mediation. As we
mentioned in Chapter 1, a central tenet of Vygotskian sociocultural theory is that
psychological functions appear twice, once in the actual interaction between people
engaged in some sort of goal-directed activity and the other as an inner (internal-
ized) tool for thinking that humans use to direct the material world. On the basis of
this premise, Vygotskian scholars who are interested in delineating the quality and
character of human mediation, most notably the mediator (i.e., ­caretakers, media-
tors, teachers), have deliberately attempted to classify types of human mediation that
support cognitive development. For example, Palinscar and Brown’s (1984) seminal
work on reciprocal teaching included techniques such as questioning, summarizing,
34 Mediation in L2 Teacher Development

predicting, and clarifying strategies in ­supporting ­children’s literacy development.

Rogoff (1995), in her work with cultural communities, argued for three general
forms of human mediation: apprenticeship, wherein community models are provided
to a novice; guided ­participation, which occurs through joint activity by expert and
novice; and appropriation, where the novice uses the tool without social mediation.
However, we align with Kozulin (2003) in his argument that types, techniques, or
scales for determining effective human mediation are too numerous and context-­
dependent to allow for a simple classification system. We wholeheartedly agree, and
thus, in our work we intentionally refrain from classifying types of responsive mediation.
Instead, our analyses of what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education
focus on what responsive mediation looks like as it unfolds, the intentions underlying
it, how responsive mediation assists teachers as they attempt to accomplish tasks and
develop dispositions that they do not yet have the capacity for, and the extent to
which responsive mediation results in specific psychological functions becoming appro-
priated by teachers in their thinking and teaching activity.
This overview of the Vygotskian concept of mediation lays the theoretical
foundation for an initial definition of responsive mediation. As we have argued
thus far, the quality and character of mediation must be negotiated, cannot be
­predicted beforehand, and is dependent on the ability to recognize and target
teachers’ emergent needs as well as utilize their responses to mediation and/or
requests for additional support. This does not mean, however, that teachers will
automatically or willingly internalize the mediational support offered by teacher
educators. Emotions, differing motives, and teacher constructed and/or imagined
identities will shape these interactions and how teachers respond to the media-
tion they experience. The challenges for teacher educators are to recognize the
upper limits of teachers’ potential (ZPD) and be strategic in the sort of assistance
given, while also recognizing and being responsive to teachers’ responses. It is for
these reasons that we intentionally use the term responsive mediation to empha-
size the multidirectional nature of teacher educators’ dialogic interactions with
teachers and the fluidity with which responsive mediation evolves with twists and
starts. Fundamental to our argument is when, where, and how responsive media-
tion emerges matters in L2 teacher education. In Chapters 3 and 4 we offer key
Vygotsky and Vygotskian-inspired theoretical concepts that further articulate our
definition of responsive mediation as the nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education.
Note
1. Throughout this book we have kept Vygotsky’s original use of the pronoun
‘he’ but we intend for it to represent all genders.
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PART II

Vygotsky and Vygotskian-

Inspired Theoretical Concepts
That Inform Responsive
Mediation
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3
OBUCHENIE, PEREZHIVANIE, AND
GROWTH POINTS

In this chapter, we define Vygotsky and Vygotskian-inspired theoretical concepts

that inform how we conceptually articulate and operationally define the concept
of responsive mediation. We begin with an overview of Vygotsky’s ideas on school
teaching/learning or, in Russian, obuchenie, and build a rationale for why we use
obuchenie as a lens through which to explore responsive mediation in the practices of
L2 teacher education. To accomplish this, we turn to Vygotsky’s views on emo-
tion, in particular the notion of emotional experience or, in Russian, perezhivanie,
a construct that enables us to better understand how teachers are experiencing
and responding to the practices of L2 teacher education. We include Vygotsky’s
(1987) claim of the affective and volitional tendency as central to teacher cogni-
tion and explore the role of emotion in the learning-to-teach process, as well as
how teacher educator and teacher emotions and motives shape their interactions.
Finally, we invoke McNeill’s (2000, 2005) construct of growth points as a moment
or series of moments when teachers’ cognitive/emotional dissonance comes into
being and argue that responsive mediation directed at the growth point creates the
potential for the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.

Obuchenie: The dialectical unity of school teaching/learning

In Vygotsky’s (1935/1994) later writings he focused on the problem of teaching/
learning in school and, in particular, the relationship between school teaching/
learning (obuchenie) and cognitive development. He was highly critical of tradi-
tional approaches to formal schooling, claiming that

a straightforward learning of concepts always proves impossible and edu-

cationally fruitless. Usually, any teacher setting out on this road achieves
40 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points

nothing except a meaningless acquisition of words, mere verbalization in

children, which is nothing more than simulation and imitation of corre-
sponding concepts which, in reality, are concealing a vacuum. (p. 356)

Instead, he postulated that the development of academic concepts in the mind

of the child is substantially different from the development of everyday concepts,
which arise spontaneously through concrete experiences in the everyday world.
For Vygotsky, academic concepts in children undergo a fundamental process of
development, that is, “when a child assimilates a concept, he reworks it and in
the course of this reworking, he imprints it with certain specific features of his
own thoughts” (p. 361). Thus, while their developmental processes are different,
­academic concepts and everyday concepts are “tightly bound up with one another
and . . . constantly influence one another” (p. 365). For school aged children,
Vygotsky argued that the key to internalization (from the social to the psycholog-
ical) is the extent to which the processes of school teaching/learning (obuchenie)
interrelate academic and everyday concepts in goal-directed, practical activity that has
relevance in the material world (see also Robbins, 2003).
We find Vygotsky’s (1987) obuchenie, defined as “teaching/learning as collabo-
rative interactions governed by a mutuality of purpose” (p. 212), to be a useful lens
through which to explore the dialogic interactions that emerge in the practices
of L2 teacher education. Obuchenie captures the actions and intentions of teaching
and learning, rather than only a teacher who provides instruction to a child who
learns (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Importantly, obuchenie places greater focus
on the instructional side of expert/novice interactions, suggesting that obuchenie
leads rather than follows cognitive development (Cole, 2009). This distinction is
important because Vygotsky argued against the prevailing notion of his time that
a child’s psychological functions must reach a certain level of maturity before
instruction is beneficial. In fact, he argued that teaching/learning (obuchenie) and
development are distinct processes but that obuchenie enables a series of develop-
mental processes to undergo their own development. Therefore, obuchenie “is only
effective when it points to the road for development” and while Vygotsky argued
that it is the teacher “who creates conditions for certain cognitive processes to
develop, it is the child who has to learn to transform an ability ‘in itself ’ into an
ability ‘for himself ’” (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, p. 331). Obuchenie is, there-
fore, not simply concerned with cognitive functions and/or capabilities that have
already been fully formed, but also with those that are still developing and thus
typically manifest in joint activity with others. It is here,Vygotsky argued, where
instructional intervention will have its greatest significance.
Vygotsky’s (1978) other major break with the field of Psychology at the
time was the basic maxim that the relationship between the word (sign form)
and thought (sign meaning) does not remain constant, but instead is unstable and
undergoes fundamental change. His developmental or genetic method was designed
to understand how this change happens by focusing almost exclusively on how
 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points 41

the inclusion of new tools or signs leads to qualitative transformation in mental

activity (Wertsch, 2007). And from this method, one can observe how the inclu-
sion of particular sign forms, especially those of a symbolic nature (i.e., language)
play a role in converting learning that emerges in social activity into psychological
tools (sign meanings), or tools for thinking.
Much, if not all, of what teacher educators try to do is to intentionally insert
new tools or signs into the activities that constitute teacher education with the
goal of qualitative transformation in how novice teachers think as well as how
they teach. Such explicit mediation, according to Werstch (2007) “involves the
intentional introduction of signs into the ongoing flow of activity . . . designed
and introduced by an external agent, such as a tutor, who can help reorganize
an activity in some way” and it is throughout this process that “sign meaning
develops” (pp. 185–186). Werstch goes on to claim that a sign form, or word,

first appears in social and individual activity without the users’ full under-
standing of its meaning or functional role. What then follows is a process of
coming to understand the meaning and functional significance of the sign
form that one has been using all along. (p. 186)

Thus, the sign form, or word, functions as a sort of material sign vehicle that
allows novices to function at a level that is out ahead of their current mastery.
According to Werstch (2007), “the general goal of instruction [obuchenie] is to
assist students in becoming fluent users of a sign system” (p. 186). Werstch further
stated:

When encountering a new cultural tool, . . . the first stages of acquaintance

typically involve social interaction and negotiation between experts and
novices or among novices. It is precisely by means of participating in this
social interaction that interpretations are first proposed and worked out
and, therefore, become available to be taken over by individuals. (p. 187)

If we consider obuchenie as it unfolds in the practices of L2 teacher education,

we would expect teacher educators to intentionally introduce new sign forms
(e.g., genre) and in some cases entire sign systems (e.g., systemic functional linguis-
tics) in order to reorganize how teachers think about and engage in the activities
of L2 teaching. These new signs and/or sign systems typically represent the latest
theory and research (academic concepts) on how language works, how languages
are learned and used, as well as how languages can be taught in various instruc-
tional settings. The assumption, of course, is that the introduction of these new
sign forms, through course readings, in-class discussions, and reflective activities,
will enable teachers to work out the sign meanings and functional significance and
eventually lead to changes not only in how teachers think about teaching but also
in what they actually do in the classroom. However, this trajectory, from external
42 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points

to internal, does not happen automatically, nor does it occur in a ­straightforward

manner. Instead it requires prolonged and sustained participation in concrete
goal-directed activity (e.g., actual teaching), supported by responsive mediation
offered by an expert (e.g., teacher educator, mentor teacher, and/or peer teacher)
that leads the development of sign meaning (e.g., theoretical and pedagogical tools
or signs) so that sign meanings become more like those of experts, with the ulti-
mate goal of enabling teachers to use sign meanings and sign systems flexibly and
fluently in the activities of L2 instruction.
Bringing Vygotsky’s insights together, obuchenie entails high quality teacher–
learner dialectics, in which learners interact with experts who offer pedagogi-
cally designed psychological tools (sign forms and/or sign systems) and semantic/
pragmatic explanations of those tools (sign meanings) to promote a functional
understanding of academic concepts in ways that facilitate the reorganization of
the child’s mental structures. If we overlay these insights on the practices of
L2 teacher education, it is the teacher educator who must create the condi-
tions for L2 teacher/teaching expertise to develop. Such conditions must be
grounded in clearly articulated professional development goals, provide expo-
sure to theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices (sign forms
and/or sign systems), and make the reasoning behind those practices explicit
(sign meanings). Enacting obuchenie therefore will entail c­ontext-specific,
high-quality, teacher–teacher educator dialogic interactions that support sign
meaning development as teachers engage in a broad range of activities associated
with L2 teaching. In exploring what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher
education, we are interested in both the teaching of teachers and the learn-
ing of teaching and, in particular, the interactional spaces, mediated through
­language, where obuchenie takes place.

Perezhivanie: The subjective significance of teachers’ lived

experiences
We acknowledge that carrying out obuchenie, as Vygotsky envisioned, requires a lot of
teacher educators. First and foremost, it requires that we attend to what our teachers
bring to our interactions: where they are coming from and how they understand
what they are experiencing. And gaining access to such ­pre-understandings is no
easy task. To do so, we invoke another Russian term, perezhivanie, used ­throughout
Vygotsky’s writings to capture the subjective significance of lived experiences that
contribute to the development of one’s personality, especially the emotional and vis-
ceral impact of lived experiences on the prism through which all future e­ xperiences
are refracted (see van der Veer &Valsiner, 1994).Vygotsky stated that,“The e­ motional
experience [perezhivanie] arising from any situation or from any aspect of his envi-
ronment determines what kind of influence this situation or this environment will
have on the child” (as cited in van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994, p. 339). Since individuals
will most certainly experience the same event quite differently, one’s perezhivanie is
 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points 43

not the experience itself, but how that experience is interpreted and understood by
the individual.
We know from the research on teacher cognition that teachers draw heavily on
their lived experiences as learners in classrooms, yet their emotional experiences
(perezhivanie) grounded in their schooling histories may be vastly different. For
example, one teacher may express deep admiration and respect for a ‘strict’ teacher
who held high expectations and presented material thoroughly and systematically
through lecture while another might perceive that same ‘strict’ teacher as author-
itarian and controlling and, thus, choose to establish closer social and personal
relationships with and among students. For teacher educators, establishing a sense
of a teacher’s perezhivanie, both past (e.g., apprenticeship of observation) and present
(e.g., how they are experiencing the practices of teacher education) is essential if
we are to provide mediation that is responsive to how teachers are experiencing
and responding to the practices of L2 teacher education.
Additionally, enacting obuchenie requires that we attend to what we, as teacher
educators ourselves, bring to our interactions with teachers. Our mediation is
shaped by the complex interplay of cognition and emotion, originating in and
reshaped through our own perezhivanie. As teacher educators, our own emotions
can influence the mediation we provide to teachers even though we may seem-
ingly be engaging in consistent practices and feedback (Golombek, 2015). We
should similarly identify the emotions we bring to particular relationships and
how they affect what we mediate and how we articulate that in our interactions
with particular teachers. Thus, enacting obuchenie requires teacher educators to
stay attuned to our own subjectivities in the emergent, relational interactions we
co-construct with teachers.

Affective and volitional tendency: The dialectic unity of

cognition and emotion
Further complicating the process of enacting obuchenie is that in order to offer
mediation that is responsive to teachers’ maturing capabilities, teacher educators
must be able to ascertain what those maturing capabilities are. This poses unique
challenges for teacher educators as, more often than not, teachers’ maturing capa-
bilities are expressed as intensely emotional ‘highs and lows’ that emerge from
being asked to perform as self-directed teachers before they have the necessary
competence to do so. Once again, we know from our years of experience that
teachers’ expressions of emotion run the gamut: from the exhilaration of mean-
ingful student engagement to anxiety and humiliation when lessons go awry.
We also recognize that within most teacher education programs, expressions of
emotion are at best recognized as normal and glossed over, or at worst seen as
a serious character flaw. While teaching has long been considered an emotional
practice (Denzin, 1984), with teachers’ daily practices (lesson planning, managing
instruction, interacting with students, colleagues, and parents, etc.) recognized
44 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points

as being permeated with emotional meanings and influences (Hargreaves, 1998,

2000), as teacher educators we often feel perplexed about how best to respond to
teachers’ expression of emotion. This quandary reminds us, however, that teacher
education is fundamentally about people: people with rich histories, resilient
beliefs, and multilayered identities that emerge from and are shaped by the social,
cultural, political, and economic environment from which they have come and in
which they learn and work (see also Cross, 2010).
Thus, learning to teach, regardless of the instructional context, is about trying
on and taking up new identities. It is a deeply personal matter, and often emotion-
ally charged in ways that are rarely officially recognized in teacher education pro-
grams. So it is from this stance that we ground our own professional development
practices in the sociocultural dialectic unity of cognition, emotion, and activ-
ity and argue that the emotional dimensions of learning-to-teach, when tapped
into as a resource rather than viewed as a distraction, are fundamental to being
and becoming a teacher (Golombek & Doran, 2014; Johnson & Worden, 2014).
Finally, given the emotionally charged nature of learning-to-teach, teachers also
need to develop trust in the teacher educator, much like Karpov (2014) suggests
a child must “accept a caregiver as a mediator who will create the kind of sup-
portive environment necessary for development” (p. 38). Therefore, we recognize
that teachers will experience some sort of cognitive/emotional struggle as they
develop L2 teacher/teaching expertise. As we explore the dialogic interactions
that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher education, it is to this cognitive/
emotional struggle that teacher educators must be attuned.

Cognitive/emotional dissonance as potential growth points

Numerous studies in L2 teacher education support Vygotsky’s (1987) notion that
cognitive/emotional dissonance acts as a catalyst that can, with the right medi-
ation, create conditions that support the development of L2 teacher/teaching
expertise (Childs, 2011; DiPardo & Potter, 2003; Golombek & Johnson, 2004;
Johnson & Worden, 2014; Kubanyiova, 2012; Reis, 2011). However, the challenge
for teacher educators is to stay attuned to instances of cognitive/emotional disso-
nance where responsive mediation may be most productive in terms of supporting
teacher learning and development. Here we draw on elements of McNeill’s (2000,
2005) theoretical construct of the growth point since it not only helps elucidate
Vygotsky’s (1987) dialectic unity of thought and language, but because we have
also found it to be useful for marking critical junctures in teacher learning and
development.
For Vygotsky (1987), speech is not a matter of putting pre-existing thoughts
into words. Instead “thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It
is not expressed but completed in the word” (p. 251). Thus, thoughts undergo
continuous change during the process of speaking, which both shapes and is
shaped by a speaker’s history, social interactive context, and agency. Based on
 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points 45

Slobin’s (1987) original notion of thinking-for-speaking, or how speakers organize

their thinking during acts of speaking, McNeill’s (2005) work on the speech-gesture
synchrony defines the growth point as the “minimal unit of an imagery-language
dialectic” that thus constitutes a particular starting point for a thought as it “comes
into being” (p. 104). Moreover, because it combines the two semiotic opposites of
imagery and linguistic form, the growth point “creates a benign instability that fuels
thought and speech” and represents “a speaker’s efforts to construct meaning”
in a particular context and point in time (p. 104). For McNeill, the growth point
in thinking-for-speaking represents what Vygotsky called the psychological predicate,
providing a window into thinking as it arises in and is shaped by the activity of
speaking (McNeill & Duncan, 2000).
While McNeill’s imagery-language dialectic is manifested through gesture and
speech, our work examines instances of the dialectic of cognition and emotion
as it arises in the context of teachers learning-to-teach while engaged in the
practices of L2 teacher education. Like McNeill, we see growth points as instantia-
tions of a dialectic ‘coming into being’ in specific contexts that can, with respon-
sive mediation, create conditions for teacher learning and development. In our
work, we posit growth points in the learning of teaching as ‘coming into being’
when contradictions emerge between what a teacher envisions and the reality of
what actually occurs while teaching, contradictions that can be inferred through
a teacher’s emotionally indexing language and behavior in such moments. Such
contradictions create a sense of instability, or cognitive/emotional dissonance, that
may be both mystifying and debilitating for teachers. In the face of such instabil-
ity, teachers often turn inward, experience a crisis of confidence, and return to
the sort of traditional monologic teaching that permeated their schooling histo-
ries. Moreover, teachers are typically unable to recognize what triggers moments
of cognitive/emotional dissonance, and instead tend to blame their students or
themselves.
In sum, we operationalize the growth point as a moment or series of moments
when teachers’ cognitive/emotional dissonance comes into being. And we argue
that responsive mediation directed at the growth point creates the potential for pro-
ductive teacher learning and development. Like McNeill, we see the growth point
as emergent and contingent, and thus mediation directed at the growth point can-
not be predicted beforehand. It is dependent on the teacher educator’s ability to
recognize and target teachers’ emergent needs as well as utilize their responses to
that mediation and/or requests for additional support. Critical as well is enabling
teachers to become consciously awareness of the sources of their cognitive/­
emotional dissonance as this too can lead to productive teacher learning and
development. The challenge for teacher educators is to be attuned to critical
instances of teacher cognitive/emotional dissonance, recognize and capitalize on
these as potential growth points, and create the conditions for responsive media-
tion to emerge in support of the development of L2 teacher/teaching exper-
tise. With these concepts in mind, in Chapter 4 we introduce two additional
46 Obuchenie, Perezhivanie, and Growth Points

Vygotskian-inspired theoretical concepts that we believe function as powerful

psychological tools for capturing responsive mediation as it emerges inside the prac-
tices of L2 teacher education.

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4
Interthinking, the Intermental
Development Zone, and
Sociocultural Discourse
Analysis

In this chapter, we present two additional Vygotskian-inspired theoretical

­concepts that we believe function as powerful psychological tools for captur-
ing responsive mediation as it emerges inside the practices of L2 teacher educa-
tion. We draw heavily on the work of Mercer and his colleagues (Littleton &
Mercer, 2013; Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer, Littleton, &
Wegerif, 2004) who, from a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective,
focus their analytic lens on the notion of interthinking, defined as how humans
use language to carry out joint intellectual activity and to make joint sense of
experience. Quite simply, interthinking allows humans to combine their intel-
lectual resources, via language, to achieve more than they would be able to do
on their own. Mercer’s central argument, directed at large-scale public sector
schooling, is that when children experience ways of using language collectively,
such experiences support the development of using language for thinking indi-
vidually. In their words, “thinking collectively provides a template for thinking
alone” (Littleton & Mercer, 2013, p. 112). A central goal of Mercer’s work is to
empower teachers to encourage children to use talk to interthink effectively, as
this not only helps develop children’s capabilities to think and learn individually,
it also increases their capacities to engage in reasoned arguments, to generate
innovative ideas, and to consider alternative solutions to reoccurring problems:
all important life skills that are essential to becoming a productive citizen in
today’s modern society.
Building on the notion of interthinking, Mercer also proposes the construct of
an intermental development zone (IDZ), defined as how teachers and learners stay
attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and understanding over the
course of an educational activity. The IDZ, like Vygotsky’s ZPD, is not a thing
or a place, but an activity where, in our case, teacher educators and teachers seek
 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone 49

to stay attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and understanding

while engaged in the practices of L2 teacher education. And it is our contention
that during an IDZ we can capture the quality and character of responsive mediation
as it emerges, trace teachers’ conceptual development as it unfolds, and acknowl-
edge the key role that teacher educators play in supporting obuchenie, the processes
of school teaching/learning. Finally, in line with Mercer’s dual emphasis on the
processes of education (i.e., what happens in formal schooling) as well as edu-
cational outcomes (i.e., what students learn), we take up sociocultural discourse
analysis as a methodological tool for conducting microgenetic analyses of the
quality and character of teacher/teacher educator dialogic interactions and their
educational significance for the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.

Interthinking: Language as joint intellectual activity

Mercer’s (2000) construct of interthinking is an attempt to explain how humans
use language to carry out joint intellectual activity and to make joint sense of
experience. Interthinking, or more simply thinking together, according to Mercer, is
both an individual and social endeavor. Aligned with a Vygotskyian sociocultural
perspective, language has two main functions: as a communicative or cultural
tool and as a psychological tool. As a cultural tool, language is used for establish-
ing interpersonal relationships and for sharing and jointly developing knowledge.
It also functions as a symbolic tool that allows for collective cultural knowledge
to carry over from generation to generation (i.e., cultural transmission). This
cultural tool can in turn be employed as a psychological tool to shape individual
thinking; that is, through language, collaborators can jointly organize, plan, and
regulate their actions to solve problems. In this way, the individual (psychologi-
cal realm) and society (culture) are connected by language, and this relationship
constitutes a powerful dialectic that can be used to investigate and understand the
dynamic and genetic (historical) nature of human interaction. Mercer goes on
to argue that because language is often ambiguous, thinking together may gener-
ate misunderstandings since it relies on a mutually (often subconsciously) agreed
upon context in which interaction takes place: specifically, a dialogical space
in which there is shared common knowledge of the topics being discussed as
well as socially acceptable conventions of interaction and behavior. These inter-
actional conventions, or what Mercer calls conversational ground rules, are most
often implicit yet they shape and organize the way we interact with one another
based on the roles or positions we assume. For Mercer, effectively thinking together
requires that we establish a collective understanding of the conversational ground
rules that govern our interactions.
Likewise, Mercer (2000) also argues that any interaction has a historic and a
dynamic aspect—historic in that it is located in particular institutional and cul-
tural contexts, dynamic because the shared understanding is constantly being
developed—always in a state of flux. How people construct the contextual
50 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone

foundations of their interactions is critical to understanding the unique qualities

of human communication, a notion also foundational to Vygotskian sociocul-
tural theory. Conversational ground rules are the conventions that language users
employ to carry on particular kinds of conversations (oral/written), in particular
social contexts, and are often implicitly understood rather than explicitly negoti-
ated. Moreover, those who are in control of such conversations often act as if the
people with whom they are dealing are familiar with the relevant ground rules
and do not help novices by making the ground rules explicit or explaining why
they are being followed.
In the practices of L2 teacher education, the conversational ground rules for
teacher/teacher educator dialogic interactions cannot be taken for granted. Since
teacher educators are institutionally positioned as experts, their status, from the
perspective of teachers, is historically and dynamically constructed. When framed
as supervisors or evaluators, teacher educators are expected to assess teachers’
ideas/performance and in many institutional contexts around the world this is
exactly what they do. They operate under normative conversational ground rules
that allow them to do most of the talking/writing, evaluate teachers’ ideas and/or
teaching activities both positively and negatively, and offer substantive commen-
tary about how teachers should be thinking or should be teaching.
Recognizing the expertise that teacher educators bring to the table, we are
also cognizant, from our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, that in order to support
the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise, the conversational ground
rules for teacher educator/teacher dialogic interactions need to be continually
(re)negotiated. As we discussed in Chapter 3, a fundamental element of enacting
obuchenie is to recognize teachers’ pre-understandings as well as their perezhivanie
and to offer mediation that is responsive to teachers’ immediate needs, goals, emo-
tions, and motives. To enact obuchenie, the conversational ground rules must shift
and change depending on the particular practice teachers and teacher educators
are engaged in, the shared and sometimes competing goals they may have for that
practice, and the institutional and sociocultural context in which the practice is
taking place. Recognizing the normative conversational ground rules that exist in
the practices of L2 teacher education and making those ground rules explicit and/
or altering them appropriately is essential if teacher educator/teacher dialogic
interactions are to support the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.

Intermental development zone

In exploring the quality and character of responsive mediation that emerges in the
practices of L2 teacher education, we are most interested in what Mercer describes
as “understanding the quality of obuchenie (teaching-learning) as an ‘intermental’
or ‘interthinking’ process” (2000, p. 141). Mercer proposes the construct of an
intermental development zone (IDZ) to conceptualize how teachers and learners stay
attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and understanding, and we
 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone 51

would add how teachers stay attuned to the learners’ emotions, over the course
of an educational activity. In other words, the concept of an IDZ is useful in
explaining how dialogic interactions support obuchenie, the processes of teaching
and learning. Mercer distinguishes the IDZ from Vygotsky’s ZPD as offering a
more dialogic, negotiated, and emergent view of the dynamics of conceptual
development through collective dialogue and engagement in joint activity. In
Mercer’s own words, he claims:

For a teacher to teach and a learner to learn, they must use talk and joint
activity to create a shared communicative space, an ‘intermental development
zone’ (IDZ) on the contextual foundations of their common knowledge
and aims. In this intermental zone, which is reconstituted constantly as the
dialogue continues, the teacher and learner negotiate their way through the
activity in which they are involved. If the quality of the zone is successfully
maintained, the teacher can enable a learner to become able to operate just
beyond his/her established capabilities, and to consolidate this experience
as new ability and understandings. If the dialogue fails to keep minds mutu-
ally attuned, the IDZ collapses and the scaffolded learning grinds to a halt.
(Mercer, 2000, p. 141)

We agree with Mercer that the IDZ and ZPD are constitutive of the same
Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical foundation, but we are drawn to the idea
that the IDZ is more adaptive to group instructional settings and to its dual focus
on “observing the progress a learner makes with the support of a particular adult
[and] . . . also observ[ing] how the adult uses language and other means of com-
municating to create an IDZ during the activity” (Mercer & Littleton, 2007,
p. 22). Mercer’s attention to what the adult is doing, or for us, what teacher edu-
cators are doing, is very compelling. A major aim of this book is to interrogate
the activities and intentions of teacher educators as we jointly think together with
the teachers with whom we work. This is not to neglect the contribution that
our teachers make to our joint intellectual activity but to focus our attention on
the IDZ as a shared communicative space in which to see how teacher educa-
tors and teachers stay attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and
understanding. We believe the co-construction of the IDZ becomes visible by
examining the rhetorical and linguistic devices teacher educators draw on to cre-
ate frames of reference for sharing their expertise with teachers and for teachers to
express their emerging understandings with teacher educators. In other words, we
are not only interested in how teacher educators and teachers orient to the minds
of one another, but also how teacher educators make explicit their expert think­
ing about teaching and responsively adapt such expert thinking for the teachers
with whom they work, especially in response to how their teachers respond.
While distinguishing between the IDZ and the ZPD may, for some read-
ers, seem like splitting hairs, we are very cognizant of the differential power
52 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone

relationships and levels of expertise between teacher educators and teachers. And
while we are drawn to the dialogic emphasis of the IDZ, we also agree with
Miller (2011) who argues, also from a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, that
mediation and dialogue are not the same thing. In dialogue, according to Miller,
meanings and understanding are exchanged whereas the ZPD “is concerned
with the learning and teaching of new understanding in situations where prior or
pre-understanding is inadequate” (p. 380). In the practices of L2 teacher educa-
tion we are not just engaged in dialogue and activities with our teachers; we are
not simply exchanging or even offering ideas about effective teaching. Given our
expert knowledge and extensive experience, we have specific professional devel-
opment goals in mind and as we interact with our teachers we may be attempt­
ing to accomplish any number of different goals with our teachers who will, no
doubt, have their own goals. For example, we may be attempting to dislodge
long-standing everyday notions about teaching and learning that are inadequate
for how we expect our teachers to think about and carry out the activities of L2
teaching. We may be attempting to connect the academic concepts that we expose
our teachers to in their coursework to their everyday concepts about what ­constitutes
language teaching and learning. We may be attempting to enable our teachers to
gain an expert’s perspective on the subject matter they are expected to teach or
the instructional practices they are attempting to carry out.Yet, our teachers may
have the goal of simply getting through a lesson or being liked by their students.
Accomplishing any one of these goals will be mediated through language within
the metaphoric space where obuchenie takes place. Accomplishing any one of these
goals will likewise be mediated by the emotions that are c­ o-constructed in these
interactions. So while the IDZ is a useful construct for exploring the dialogic
interactions that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher education, we trace
the co-construction and preservation of an IDZ over the course of a professional
development practice in order to highlight the unique contributions that teacher
educators can make to teachers’ conceptual development.

Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analyzing language as a social

mode of thinking
Since our interest in this book lies in uncovering the educational value of
teacher educator/teacher dialogic interaction while engaging in the practices of
L2 teacher education, we are once again drawn to the work of Mercer (2004) and
his colleagues and their use of sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) as a method-
ology for characterizing and exploring the nature of classroom talk and its educa-
tional significance (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer
et al., 2004). Grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural theory, SCDA focuses on
“how language is used as a social mode of thinking—language as a tool for teach-
ing-and-learning, constructing knowledge, creating ideas, sharing understand-
ing and tackling problems collaboratively” (Littleton & Mercer, 2013, p.13).
 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone 53

Littleton and Mercer (2013) distinguish SCDA from linguistic discourse analysis
as being less concerned with the organizational structure of language in use and
more with its content, specifically, “how it functions for the pursuit of joint
intellectual activity and the ways in which shared understanding is developed, in
social context, over time” (p. 13). SCDA can focus on lexical content because
word choice and cohesive patterning represent ways that knowledge is being
jointly constructed. However, SCDA also utilizes knowledge that is not explic-
itly invoked by speakers (unlike conversation analysis, i.e., Drew & Heritage,
1992; Schegloff, 1997), such as the historical, social, cultural, and institutional
contexts in which interaction takes place. Most significant for us is the fact that
Mercer’s use of SCDA focuses on both the processes of education as well as their
educational outcomes. He and his colleagues have spent more than two decades
investigating the relationship between the ways that teachers talk with students
and the learning that students can subsequently demonstrate (http://thinking-
together.educ.cam.ac.uk). Utilizing a wide range of discursive techniques that
teachers use to elicit knowledge from learners, to respond to what learners say,
and to describe significant aspects of shared experiences, SCDA has proven to
be a useful methodological tool for relating the content, quality, and temporal
nature of dialogic interaction during joint activities to learning outcomes, such as
the success or failure of problem solving or specific learning gains.
Moreover, like Lantolf and Poehner’s (2014) pedagogical imperative, in the design
and enactment of our teacher education practices we use the principles and
concepts from Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian sociocultural theory in order to
intentionally promote the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise through
our practices as teacher educators. We are less interested in mere description and
more in intentional, well-organized intervention. SCDA provides us with a meth-
odological tool to trace teacher development, in essence, indicating the conse-
quences of implementing concrete educational practices intentionally derived
from Vygotskian sociocultural theory for teacher learning.
Specifically, in Chapters 5–9, we rely on SCDA as a methodology for con-
ducting microgenetic analyses (Vygotsky, 1981) to uncover the development of new
psychological processes as they unfold over the course of a particular L2 teacher
education practice. Wertsch (1985) describes microgenesis as a “very short-term
longitudinal study,” making explicit the moment-to-moment revolutionary
shifts that lead to the development of independent mental functioning (p. 55).
Additionally, in line with SCDA, our microgenetic analyses operate simultane-
ously at three levels or “depth[s] of focus” (Littleton & Mercer, 2013, p. 21):
(1) linguistic, the quality and character of teacher educator/teacher i­nteraction as
spoken and/or written text; (2) psychological, the analysis of teacher educator/
teacher interaction as joint thinking and action; and (3) cultural, the institutional
contexts, social settings, and shared cultural meanings embedded and valued
within the contexts and settings in which teacher educator/teacher interaction
takes place.
54 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone

In Chapters 5–9 we use SCDA for analysis of the moment-to-moment,

a­synchronous, and at-a-distance teacher educator/teacher dialogic interac-
tions (oral and written) that take place in five different practices that we have
designed, repeatedly implemented, and subsequently collected data on in our
own L2 teacher education programs. For each practice, we outline our educa-
tional goals and pedagogical procedures. We then situate each practice in the
unique institutional and sociocultural context in which it occurred as well as
provide sociohistorical information about the teachers who participated in
these practices.
For each practice our analyses accomplish the following: (a) highlight the lin-
guistic, rhetorical, and pragmatic characteristics of the teacher educator/teacher
dialogic interaction; (b) trace the psychological processes that emerge as teacher
educators and teachers engage in interthinking; (c) identify the emergence of cog-
nitive/emotional dissonance as potential growth points; (d) follow the emergence
and preservation of an IDZ over the course of the practice; (e) describe the
quality and character of the responsive mediation that emerges; and (f) explore the
consequences of responsive mediation on the ways in which teachers begin to think
about and/or attempt to enact their instructional practices.
Finally, we have intentionally selected practices that by design create struc-
tured mediational spaces, tools, and activities that allow for teacher educators and
teachers to engage in dialogic interactions that attend to the learning of teaching
and, in particular, the interactional spaces, mediated through language, where
obuchenie takes place. Our analyses of what happens inside these practices make
the psychological processes of teacher educator mediation and teacher learning
visible. Yet, we have been careful to focus our analytic lens on the unique char-
acteristics of our teachers, our practices, and our teacher education programs, and
thus offer these practices as illustrative rather than definitive. The educational
value of analyzing our own practices, with our own teachers, in our own pro-
grams, we hope, is in enabling others to scrutinize their own practices, to hold
themselves accountable to the teachers with whom they work, and to reclaim the
relevance of L2 teacher education in and for the professional development of their
L2 ­teachers (see Johnson, 2015).

References
Drew, P., & Heritage, P. (Eds.) (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, K. E. (2015). Reclaiming the relevance of L2 teacher education. The
Modern Language Journal, 99(3), 515–528.
Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. E. (2014). Sociocultural theory and the pedagogical imper-
ative in L2 education. New York: Routledge.
Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting talk to work. London:
Routledge.
 Interthinking/Intermental Development Zone 55

Mercer, N. (2000). Words & minds: How we use language to think together. London:
Routledge.
Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analyzing classroom talk as a
social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168.
Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the development of children’s
­thinking: A sociocultural approach. London: Routledge.
Mercer, N., Littleton, K., & Wegerif, R. (2004). Methods for studying the process
of interaction and collaborative activity in computer-based educational activi-
ties. Technology, Pedagogy, and Education, 13(2), 367–384.
Miller, R. (2011). Vygotsky in perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. (1997). Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society, 8(2),
165–187.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. V. Wertsch
(Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 144–188). Armonk, NY:
Sharpe.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
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PART III

Exploring Responsive
Mediation in L2 Teacher
Development
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5
RECONCEPTUALIZING ENGINEERING
STUDENT PARTICIPATION

“But I was too nervous to think of what’s the right thing to do right now”

Video recall has been used as a tool in research on teacher cognition to study
teacher learning, and in the practices of L2 teacher education to promote the
development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. Given the difficulty, if not impos-
sibility, of accessing teacher thinking directly during the act of teaching, video
recall, typically referred to as stimulated recall (Calderhead, 1981; Shavelson &
Stern, 1981), represents a kind of introspective tool that has been exploited to
assist teachers in expressing their thinking retrospectively. In L2 teacher cognition
research, Borg’s (2003) review provides an excellent reference for examples of
research using stimulated recall. When conducting a stimulated recall, researchers
typically instruct teachers to relive their teaching experience, and to stop the tape
when they could recall their thoughts at a particular point in the lesson concern-
ing whatever the research focus is, such as decision making. The teachers being
able to control when they stop the video and talk through a systematic protocol
is intended to control researcher subjectivity in the data collection process. Not
surprisingly, concerns have been expressed about collecting data pertaining to
interactive cognition after the fact via stimulated recall (Gass & Mackey, 2000;
Keith, 1988; Lyle, 2003). Although researchers need to limit their own subjec-
tivity within a stimulated recall procedure, teacher educators can bring something
quite intentional to guide a reflective interaction with a teacher while watching
that teacher’s videotape in ways that make explicit expert teacher thinking.
In fact, over the last 35 years, the use of video recall feedback has evolved as a
tool used in support of varied practices within L2 teacher education programs or
professional development workshops. Beginning teachers enacting a stand-alone
60 Engineering Student Participation

microteaching assignment might be videotaped and observe the video with a

teacher educator who has established a specific agenda and expectations for inter-
action. Beginning teachers participating in the lengthier practicum might be vid-
eotaped and similarly engage in watching the video with a teacher educator one
or more times as a way to gauge and support teacher learning (Schratz, 1992). In
these cases, teacher educators play a pivotal role in the interactions during the
viewing of the videotape, as they determine specific learning objectives and pat-
terns of interaction to achieve those objectives, as well as provide expertise through
their in-process appraisals of and feedback to teachers. Another option, video study
groups (Tochon, 1999), includes a small group of teachers viewing and discussing
together a t­eacher’s instructional actions captured through the video. Because the
goals for using videos for teacher development differ from those of teacher cogni-
tion research, Tochon (2008) has suggested that we abandon the term ‘stimulated
recall’ for teacher learning purposes and proposed in its place “video-based shared
reflection” (p. 425).The focus when using videos for teacher development shifts to
reflection on whether teachers are enacting instructional practices that align with
their beliefs and goals as teachers, and that promote student learning.
When used for teacher development, a video recording of what transpired in a
class provides an objective account of what both teachers and students said or did
during the lesson, and enables multiple replays for analysis (Richards & Lockhart,
1994). Rather than reconstructing a lesson based on memory or on how a teacher
wished the lesson had gone, the instructional interactions materialized on the
videotape open the teacher’s activity to analysis, and thus, from a Vygotskian
­sociocultural perspective, to social influence and restructuring. If the interaction
between the teacher educator and the teacher while watching the videotape is
conceptualized as a teaching/learning (obuchenie) opportunity, the interaction
between the more expert teacher educator and the teacher has the potential to
become an intermental development zone (IDZ) in which the videotape becomes
the object of analysis, the concrete resource through which the teacher educator
and teacher talk through their jointly constructed analysis of the teacher’s imple-
mentation of specific instructional activities in the observed class. This crucial
point—through talk our thinking is made transparent and transformed—is what
has led us to call these interactions surrounding the sense-making of the video-
tape dialogic video protocols (DVPs) (Golombek, 2011).
When the dialogic video protocol is conceptualized as a teaching/learning (obu-
chenie) opportunity within an L2 teacher education program, teacher educators
must be able to articulate the motive behind and object of this practice in order
to engage in responsive mediation with a teacher. The teacher educator needs to be
able to explain motives and goals in using DVPs to the teacher, and the highly
interactive, co-constructed nature of their participation. The teacher educator
needs to assess the teacher throughout the interaction to identify ‘lower’ and
‘upper’ thresholds: to understand how a teacher is perceiving and feeling about
certain interactions, to elicit the teacher’s pedagogical reasoning, to problem-solve
 Engineering Student Participation 61

in the face of quandaries, and to push the teacher’s thinking about alternative
­instructional responses in implicit and explicit ways, depending on the circum-
stances. Simultaneously, teacher educators can make their expert thinking trans-
parent as a way to orient teachers to restructure their thinking about and their
activities of teaching. In essence, if an IDZ is created and maintained throughout
the DVP, the teacher is enabled to experience a kind of ‘do over’ in a ‘safe zone,’
an opportunity to ‘mentally manipulate’ (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) thinking and
doing that has already occurred in a particular place and time and co-construct
new conceptualizations of and activities in teaching.
Creating this joint communicative space for interthinking, co-constructed on
the foundations of shared knowledge, motives, and objectives, is cognitively and
emotionally demanding for both the teacher educator and teacher because inter-
action within a DVP happens in real time. And while the teacher educator and
teacher may work together to identify the teacher’s internal cognitive/emotional
struggles, the teacher educator fundamentally has the greater responsibility within
the IDZ to create the spaces to address immediate needs and/or concerns of indi-
vidual teachers and push them beyond their current capabilities. As in the other
practices of L2 teacher education, we engage our teachers in DVPs to reconstruct
their lived experiences in order to create conditions for the development of L2
teacher/teaching expertise.
In this chapter we examine engagement in the DVP between an ESL teacher
named Abra and a teacher educator during a microteaching experience con-
ducted as part of coursework in an MA TESL program. For this dialogic video
protocol,1 Abra was videotaped teaching an oral communication course for inter-
national teaching assistants (ITAs), and then she and the professor of the course
(teacher educator) viewed the video together. In the transcripts from the DVP,
we are able to identify how Abra and the teacher educator co-construct an IDZ
in response to repeated instances of cognitive/emotional dissonance she experi-
ences in terms of her perezhivanie and her inability to enact the pedagogical tool
of engineering student participation in her teaching. We also identify how the teacher
educator uses rhetorical choices to continually learn more and assess what Abra
knows about this tool and how she perceives and feels about what is happening
in her class, as well as to push her understanding of the analysis and articulation
of it beyond what she can express alone. What the teacher educator and Abra
uncover is that Abra knows more about engineering student participation than her
performance indicates.

The dialogic video protocol within an American English

phonetics course
Abra was enrolled in a core course in the MA TESL program, a course designed
to develop student understanding of American English phonetics in order to inte-
grate pronunciation, listening, and speaking holistically in a discourse-oriented
62 Engineering Student Participation

approach to L2 instruction. As part of the course requirements, the students

designed a lesson on connected speech, for example reductions or allophones of
/t/, which concentrated on developing learners’ listening abilities, and taught the
lesson in a practice teach2 to their classmates. Then, after revising their lesson on
the basis of their practice teach, they were videotaped teaching that lesson in one
session of a course offered by the ESL program overseen by the academic depart-
ment in which the MA TESL program was housed. After they taught the lesson,
the teachers engaged in a DVP with the teacher educator.
Before they began the DVP, the teacher educator explained to Abra that she
could stop the videotape at any point and talk about what she found compelling
for whatever reason. The teacher educator noted that she would do the same.
She explained that the objective was not for her to tell Abra what to do, but to
encourage Abra to articulate her feelings, understandings, reasoning, and eval-
uation of her instruction. The teacher educator explained that she would ask
Abra numerous questions in order to prompt her thinking further, that she hoped
to enable Abra to identify alternative instructional practices, and that she would
guide her whenever necessary. In this way, the teacher educator explicitly set up
the discursive norms, or conversational ground rules, of their interaction to estab-
lish an IDZ in relation to their real-time viewing of and talk about her videotaped
teaching. Moreover, the teacher educator intentionally encouraged Abra to artic-
ulate her thoughts, feelings, understandings, and evaluations about specific events
in her teaching in order to engage in responsive mediation.
Though the pedagogical tool of engineering student participation3 is used to
characterize the analysis presented in this chapter, it was not presented in a
systematically organized formal manner as Vygotsky (1986) suggested, or as is
done in Chapter 7, in the course Abra was taking. How to facilitate student
participation was discussed at different points during the course, and Abra men-
tioned that she wanted to have meaningful student participation as she created
her lesson plan with the teacher educator, which is discussed below. In setting
up the microteaching assignment, the teacher educator focused on developing
the pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) needed to transform teachers’
conceptual understanding of the academic concept of ‘linking’ into the material
activity of teaching (i.e., the lesson plan and actual teaching). As Abra planned
and taught her lesson on linking, it was clear as they watched the videotape
that she had internalized the academic concept of ‘linking’ as a psychological
tool. As a result, she and the teacher educator engaged in responsive mediation
as they watched the video and a growth point emerged through their talking
together. Thus, while we believe this chapter shows how invaluable the dialogic
interactions orchestrated in/through the DVP can be for teacher educator and
teacher engagement in responsive mediation and the development of L2 teacher/
teaching expertise, we also believe it shows the shortcomings of only being
able to enact a stand-alone microteaching assignment, a situation that may
constrain many teacher educators. It also highlights the challenges of dealing
 Engineering Student Participation 63

with the extensive knowledge base needed to teach, especially in an initial

teaching assignment, e.g., basic structuring of a lesson, adequate k­ nowledge of
subject matter, or pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) to name a few.
Given that teacher development requires teachers working through academic
­concepts introduced by the teacher educator, as well as sustained participation in
the activities of teaching, we believe this chapter buttresses our argument that
systematically organized formal instruction is crucial in the ‘critical period’ of
L2 teacher education.

Abra’s pre-understandings
Born in England, Abra moved to the northeast of the United States as a small child
and attended public schools. She was raised in a deeply observant Muslim family,
which was evident in her attire and in her interactions with others. When Abra
entered the MA TESL program, she was technically not a beginning teacher. She
graduated with a BA in education from a large public university in the Northeast,
where she had also done a practicum; she thus had some teaching experience,
though it was not with English language learners.4
Abra was highly motivated in her own learning as a student and sought to
connect instruction to her personal life. The professor of this course, hereafter
referred to as the teacher educator, had worked with Abra in two previous MA
TESL courses, noting that she consistently asked to and adapted course assign-
ments to meet her own needs and interests. For example, in another course
with the teacher educator, Abra created a whole-semester reading curriculum
that extended well beyond the three-week unit required in the course sylla-
bus, so she could enable Muslim women to connect reading of the Koran and
Koranic interpretations with English language learning. Abra consistently and
actively shaped the nature of classroom interactions in the courses she attended
as a student through her incisive questions and comments. She also frequently
asked the teacher educator for explicit mediation, for example, to point out
weaknesses in arguments she was making or explanations for course content.
The teacher educator met with Abra outside class from time to time to discuss
intellectual, professional, and personal issues. Abra often referenced Islam when
discussing these issues, so the teacher educator understood how intercon-
nected and grounded her personal and professional life was in her faith. In fact,
throughout these interactions, Abra made it clear how important it was for her
actions to align with her faith and to improve herself if they did not, as well as
to treat others in a way she expected to be treated. These interactions enabled
the teacher educator to glean the kind of deep personal, historical knowledge
about Abra that is critical to responsive mediation. However, we recognize that
teacher educators are not always able to establish relationships such as this for
a variety of sociocultural (social hierarchies) and/or practical reasons (working
with ­numerous teachers).
64 Engineering Student Participation

Creating the lesson plan

Abra first observed the class she was assigned to teach in order to familiarize
­herself with the nature of the class and the students. The class had 13 students,
who were from the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, and
South Korea. As Abra developed her lesson plan for the lesson on linking, she
repeatedly commented that she wanted to encourage meaningful student partici-
pation, especially as she valued it from her perezhivanie, which could be described
as an emotional lens through which she interpreted new experiences in terms of
how she lived up to her self-expectations (how she treated others) along with
self-improvement (how she might better live up to those expectations). Her eval-
uation of herself and how she treated people was an emotional experience for
her, resulting in her feeling bad if she had not lived up to her expectations and
being quick to make amends (e.g., an email of apology if she felt she had mis-
treated you in any way). Given her pre-understandings and perezhivanie, Abra
worked hard to create a detailed lesson plan and consulted with the teacher edu-
cator in the process, expressing that she wanted the students in the ITA class to
engage with the material and participate actively. As a result, her lesson plan (her
ideal) involved students constructing their understandings of linking through the
prediction, listening, and debriefing activities she designed.
Abra could not only explain the academic concept of ‘linking’ in a student friendly
way in the materials she created for her lesson, but could express the pedagogical
reasoning behind the sequence of activities in her lesson plan. She focused on five
kinds of linking from the course textbook (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin,
1996). In the creation of her lesson plan, she explained that students needed a con-
ceptual understanding of linking and the various kinds of linking, so she began with
an interactive lecture with verbal and visual definitions and examples (for example,
CV linking = joining of last sound in a word when it’s a consonant and first sound
in next word when it’s a vowel so it sounds like one word, stop it → stopit). She
chose a scene from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (McCallum & Lucas,
1999), a movie that was one of her personal favorites, and created a transcript of the
scene. The students were given the script in order to predict where linking would
occur, which they would note on the transcript. In this way, Abra felt she could
assess students’ conceptual understanding of linking. Then, to assess their ability to
perceive linking, she had students watch the scene several times and note on the
transcript if their predictions proved accurate. They would then compare answers
in a whole-class discussion, and discuss reasons why linking may not have occurred,
for meaning-based reasons, in instances they had predicted.

Identifying Abra’s cognitive and emotional dissonance

The data extracts selected for inclusion in this chapter highlight the qual-
ity and character of the collaborative teaching/learning relationships (obuche-
nie) that unfolded throughout the DVP and the role of the teacher educator
 Engineering Student Participation 65

in supporting Abra’s identification of missed opportunities for her to engage

­students in ­m­eaningful participation, and then articulation of alternative instruc-
tional actions she could have taken to engineer student participation. Analyzed
from an emic perspective using sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004),
the data extracts highlight (marked in bold font) the linguistic instantiations of
how the teacher educator, while engaging in the DVP, sought to create the condi-
tions for responsive mediation through which Abra could ‘jump above’ her teaching
activity captured on the video. The data show how the teacher educator enabled
Abra to express (1) some ideal conceptions of teaching concerning student par-
ticipation, (2) her assessment of her instructional activity on the video through
which a growth point emerges, and (3) alternative instructional responses to address
her growth point. The data show how Abra’s perezhivanie influences her assessment
of her activity as well as how the teacher educator tries to be sensitive to Abra’s
emotions. Within the structured mediational space of the DVP, the teacher edu-
cator and Abra co-construct an IDZ in which they stay highly attuned to each
other’s knowledge and motives.
To review briefly, Abra first taught explicitly about linking through
­explanations and examples, had students predict where linking could occur
on excerpts from the movie script, and then had them listen and then explain
whether linking occurred. Then, Abra and the class went over the transcript
together, a debriefing, to compare what they had predicted and heard. As Abra
and the teacher educator watched the videotape, Abra expressed dissatisfaction
several times with her attempts to foster student participation, which she felt
often resulted in her answering her own questions. But it was during the viewing
of the debriefing activity that Abra stopped the video to discuss her inability to
respond to one student making a face and laughing in response to one of the
examples of linking.

Excerpt 1
A: and then one of the girls at that point laughed
TE: hmm
A: like she was understanding and I wanted ta- I wanted to take that
and do something with it but I didn’t know what so I just kept
on going
TE: yeah ( ) hmm
A: but I saw her um respond like “oh my god that’s so strange”
TE: uh-hm
A: but I didn’t know what to do with it
TE: uh-hm
A: I
TE: I saw her kinda go [“wo”]
A: [yeah]
TE: too
66 Engineering Student Participation

A: yeah what-what is there something I could’ve done to like um

(.5) tap into that response? Or should I cause I felt like I just
ignored it I just
TE: uh-hm
A: kept going
TE: uh-hm
A: and I didn’t mean to
TE: uh-hm
A: completely ignore it
TE: yeah
A: I wanted to acknowledge it like “yeah isn’t that weird?” (1.0) and so I
said (.5) so it sounds strange (.5) but that’s how it is
TE: uh-hm
A: I said tha:t
TE: uh-hm
A: in hopes that that would address her (1.0) is that what I said?
((rewinds tape and replays))

Abra hones in on the student’s laughter as suggesting an understanding of

how the linking of words leads to unexpected pronunciation, one of the points
of Abra’s lesson, and, thus, as an opening to involve the student in her learning
more explicitly. She begins to explain how this was a missed opportunity to
respond to a student and engage her in meaningful participation, “I wanted to
take that and do something with it but I didn’t know what so I just kept on going.” It
is interesting to note how Abra’s struggle to take up and use student responses
effectively to advance her instructional goals is such a common problem for
beginning teachers (for example, see Kyla in Chapter 6). This interaction,
between Abra and the student, signals a potential growth point that emerges
during the DVP. In other words, a contradiction emerges between her ideal
conceptualization of how teacher–­student interaction should unfold and the
critical role she believes she should play in it and the reality of what is captured
on the videotape, or what Abra views as a missed opportunity to engage the
student in meaningful participation. This realization is expressed in negative
terms; she “ignored” the student’s response, further indicating Abra’s cognitive/
emotional dissonance as it ‘comes into being.’ This dissatisfaction is not sur-
prising given her perezhivanie of continual ­self-improvement and her valuing of
student engagement. Her sense of cognitive/­emotional dissonance appears to
be powerful enough that she directly asks the teacher educator for mediation,
explaining how she “didn’t mean to ­completely ignore it [the student’s reaction].”
She begins to confuse what she thought, perhaps wished, she had said with
what she actually said. She rewinds the video and finds that what happened was
indeed different from what she hoped had happened.
 Engineering Student Participation 67

Excerpt 2
A: yeah well all I did was I smiled
TE: uh hm
A: that was my response to her (1.0) that was how I acknowledged her
TE:  Well I don’t know. I mean think about it is there something- do
you think there is something you could’ve done? What could you
have done? (3.5)
A: I could have stopped and said yeah it sounds weird right
TE: uh-hm
A: y’know an like to her yeah it sounds wei:rd so that she knows
TE: uh-hm
A: that I- I noticed her response
TE: uh-hm
A: and that she’s ri:ght to make that response
TE: uh-hm (1.0) yeah (1.0) I: no:ticed (1.0) you had a strong reaction
A: yeah
TE: How come?
A: yeah
TE: yeah=
A: =how come
TE: yeah cause=
A: =get her to (2.0) talk about it. Get her to think about it cause
she obviously reacted and then she’ll stop to think why did I
react and whatever it was that went through her mind
TE: uh-hm (.5) because (1.5) you know the first time what you said is
you’re automatically saying what it is that she thought. It is strange,
y’know
A: yeah
TE: and so I’m I guess what I’m saying is, (.5)
A: let her say it
TE: let her say it
A: [yeah]

When the videotape confirms that she had not said anything, Abra expresses
disappointment in herself with the minimizer ‘all,’ as in “all I did was I smiled.”
Given Abra’s emotional reaction to her lack of verbal response to the stu-
dent, signifying a potential growth point, the teacher educator tries to create a
space in which Abra could externalize her thinking about engaging student
­participation without the real-time cognitive demands of teaching: “Well I don’t
know. I mean think about it (.5) is there something- do you think there is something
you could’ve done?” The teacher educator validates the difficulty of this situation
by downplaying her own expertise, “Well I don’t know,” and then reorients Abra
68 Engineering Student Participation

to the situation in order to express her reasoning by saying, “I mean think about
it,” and then models the kinds of questions a teacher could ask herself when
facing a lack of congruence between the ideal of engineering student partici-
pation and the reality of not achieving it to address this growth point with Abra,
“do you think there is something you could’ve done? What could you have done?” The
teacher educator’s rhetorical choice to ask Abra a question rather than telling
her what to do is meant to encourage her to articulate alternative actions that
she could have taken in order to gauge whether Abra has the ability, without
the cognitive demands of real-time teaching, to devise a response that aligns
with her instructional values.
Abra reformulates what she could have done by responding “I could have
stopped and said yeah it sounds weird right” and “I noticed her response.” The teacher
educator builds on this part of Abra’s response, “I: no:ticed (1.0) you had a strong
reaction,” but then explicitly voices what a teacher could say—“how come?” The
expert-novice nature of their exchange is observable in that the teacher edu-
cator has attempted to focus Abra’s thinking away from simply acknowledging
the student’s reaction to modeling a pedagogical strategy to elicit student par-
ticipation. Abra stays attuned to the teacher educator’s concrete suggestion by
echoing “how come?” As the teacher begins to explain the reasoning behind this
response with “yeah cause,” Abra overlaps and provides the answer, “get her to
(2.0) talk about it. Get her to think about it cause she obviously reacted and then she’ll
stop to think why did I react and whatever it was that went through her mind.” We
see the emergence of a sense of intersubjectivity, in Wertsch’s (1985) terms,
attunement to one’s attunement, as Abra begins to understand what an expert
teacher might say and why, in order to engage students in their learning. The
teacher educator reiterates what was problematic about Abra’s initial response,
and why she inserted the more direct “how come” question to the student. She
sets up the gist of her expert reasoning by saying “so I’m I guess what I’m saying
is,” a rhetorical choice that sets up the kind of collaborative completion teach-
ers use to check student comprehension (Hatch, 2002). Abra again exhibits a
sense of intersubjectivity through her collaborative completion, “let her say it.”
As a result of these two collaborative completions, the teacher educator has
not only ascertained that Abra can articulate the pedagogical reasoning behind
the teacher educator’s instructional response in this specific instance of Abra’s
instructional activity, but also enabled her to ‘jump above’ her initial attempts
to respond.
As Abra continued to talk about this interaction, her feelings about the inter-
action and disappointment with herself emerge.

Excerpt 3
TE: oh you had a strong reaction
A: yeah
TE: I do this in class all the time
 Engineering Student Participation 69

A: I know
TE: sure and she did she made a really strong reaction
A: yeah
TE: it really had an impact on her
A: yeah
TE: and so find out why:
A: yeah
TE: why did you respond that way
A: and I feel like it was rude for me to ignore it an’ just go on
TE: hm
A: like it you’know. I don’t know. My my heart was not content with
it but I
TE: uh-hm
A:  but I was too nervous to think of what’s the right thing to do
right now
TE: uh-hm
A: but now I know (.5) hopefully I’ll do the right (3.0) so I’m ­verbalizing
what I think was going on through her mind but it would’ve been nice
if I let her say it
TE: uh-hm
((They go back to watching video.))

The teacher educator appears to be summarizing this interactional ­episode

by recapping the main points she and Abra had discussed. Then, she reaffirms
that the student’s laughter did present an opportunity for Abra to respond
instructionally, “she did she made a really strong reaction.” Abra exhibits a strong
emotional response and further evidences that this interaction served as a
potential growth point for her, as she negatively evaluates her inability to respond
to the student’s laughter, “I feel like it was rude for me to ignore it an’ just go on.”
She has violated her ideal sense of how she should treat people and expresses
her dissatisfaction in a poetic way characteristic of her communication style,
“My my heart was not content with it,” as well as a reason for why she could not
have acted differently, “but I was too nervous to think of what’s the right thing to do
right now.” Abra’s recognition of how cognitively and emotionally demanding
teaching can be suggests the value of engaging in the activity of a DVP. In the
‘safe zone’ of the DVP, teachers are able to think about their conceptions of
teaching, instructional objectives, student needs, abilities, and goals, and propose
different instructional activity, and perhaps grow in confidence. Throughout
this interaction, the teacher educator and Abra maintain their IDZ as Abra
gains a heightened sense of intersubjectivity concerning a more expert notion
of engineering student participation (“but now I know”), and the teacher educator
gains more information about Abra’s emotional/cognitive dissonance to guide
her in their interactions.
70 Engineering Student Participation

Abra’s continued lack of self-regulation in terms of engineering

student participation
Once again, the preservation of the IDZ as attunement to Abra’s enactment of
meaningful student engagement is challenged. She transitioned the classroom
activity from listening for instances of linking to discussing the instances they
identified. On the video of her teaching, Abra asks the class a series of questions.

Excerpt 4
A: So um who can tell (.4) who can tell us where they were able to detect
what was going on with linking. Anywhere? Can you point to like a line,
(.3) and what you thought (.1) was going on between those two words?

No one in the class responded. At this point, Abra stops the video and attempts
to formulate what she could have done to elicit student participation.

Excerpt 5
A: Okay, so when there was silence, then I could’ve said, (8.0)
TE:  So you said who could tell us, (1.0) you know (1.0) sort of
pick a line=
A: =yeah (.1) and then I could’ve said (.5) well do you: (2.0) di- okay (2.0)
did any of the place you circled sound as if they were (.5) pronounced
(1.0) separately? Sort of like
TE: uh-hm
A: physically going at it from the inverse=
TE: =yeah
A: instead of saying ‘well did you hear linking?’
TE: uh-hm
A: Well did you hear it (.5) did you hear each (.5) word pronounced sepa-
rately, (1.0) ‘did you not hear linking’ (1.0) so if they’d say ‘no no no it
wasn’t separate here’
TE: uh-huh=
A: =y’know
TE: that may be going a step ahead of the game=
A: =yeah
TE:  I don’t know (1.0) what if you just simply said “okay let’s look
at line one together (.5) who can give me an example of linking
here?”
A: okay
TE: umm (.5) it would be a way to specify the way that the thing is
rather than like choosing one or (.5) whatever you’re fo:cusing
attention (.5)
 Engineering Student Participation 71

A: yeah=
TE: =“let’s look at line one, (.5) does anybody have an example?” um (1.5) um
A: yeah
TE: that would be, that would be one way (1.0) um to do [that]
A:  [‘Did] anyone pick any- was anyone able to identify how: two
words were being linked together in line one (1.0)
TE: uh-hm
A: something like that
TE: I- I- think to draw their attention to line one ra[ther]
A: [yeah]
TE: than leaving it so: open (1.0)
A: yeah: (1.0)
TE: and when things are so: open,
A: it’s a little (.5) not so easy to figure out what to do
TE: uh-hm (1.0) and so: you wanna help them know what to do.
((undistinguishable talk))
TE: But yeah: I think uh- (1.0) focusing them (.5) on: (1.0) especially you
have these beautifully numbered lines
A: [laughs]
TE: why not why not use them [laughs]
A: yeah line one (2.0) line eight [both laugh]

The fact that Abra stopped the video after viewing Excerpt 4 shows her
agency and understanding concerning student participation, as she is the one
who identified an instance where she could have encouraged student participa-
tion. Abra attempts to rephrase the question she asked, “then I could’ve said,” but
then stops. There is an eight-second silence during which the teacher educator
gives Abra the space to think and create an alternative instructional response to
elicit participation. But after the eight-second pause, the teacher educator makes
a strategic choice to facilitate an explanation from Abra by initiating a possible
response, including part of what Abra did say, “who could tell us.” By “introducing
elements of the task’s solution” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 209), the teacher educator
creates joint mental activity by trying to identify if Abra can articulate an alter-
native instructional response with some help, “sort of pick a line.” Abra picks up
the teacher educator’s assistance and provides an answer, what she calls “physically
going from the inverse,” asking the students to consider where they had not heard
linking. The teacher educator critiques Abra’s response while staying cognitively
and emotionally attuned to her; that is, the teacher educator uses the low certainty
modal of ‘may,’ as in “that may be going a step ahead of the game,” uses hedges like “I
don’t know,” and begins with “what if” to voice what Abra could have said in more
expert terms: “okay let’s look at line one together (.5) who can give me an example of
linking here?”
72 Engineering Student Participation

The teacher educator then explains her reasoning for what Abra could have
said, “it would be a way to specify the way that the thing is rather than like choosing
one or (.5) whatever you’re fo:cusing attention.” Rather than simply mimicking the
teacher educator’s phrasing, Abra overlaps the teacher educator by ventriloquating
(Bakhtin, 1981), or populating her own response with her own intentions, “[Did]
anyone pick any- was anyone able to identify how: two words were being linked together
in line one.” The teacher educator rephrases the reasoning behind her instructional
response as it relates to engaging student participation—it focuses them—while
indirectly noting what was problematic in Abra’s response—it was too open-
ended. Sensing from Abra’s response that she did not completely understand what
was problematic in her suggestion, the teacher educator explicitly mediates Abra
by explaining why open-ended prompts to students are unlikely to result in stu-
dent participation with the dependent clause “and when things are so: open.” But
Abra again collaboratively completes the teacher educator’s utterance, signaling
that she does understand the reasoning. Once again, we see the preservation of an
IDZ that is attuned to how Abra is experiencing this lesson, and her recognition
of missed opportunities to engage meaningful student participation. However, at
the same time, the teacher educator’s mediation is responsive to Abra’s emotional
needs as the teacher educator attempts to expand Abra’s understanding of instruc-
tional responses through modeling expert instructional talk intended to facilitate
student participation. We also see how the teacher educator repeatedly replies
with a few words that could initiate a longer, more explicit mediation and then
stops to see whether and how the teacher can ‘jump above’ herself.

Conclusion
If we consider the dialogic interactions occurring throughout the dialogic video
protocol in terms of obuchenie, the actions and intentions of the teacher ­educator are
predicated on establishing a sense of Abra’s perezhivanie. Abra ­perceived her teach-
ing experience through her experiences as a learner in which s­elf-improvement
and being engaged with the instruction and content was paramount. She was
concerned with how people treat each other in interaction, and she was critical
of both her inability to engage students in meaningful action and her perceived
mistreatment of them as people (being rude, ignoring them). This concern, espe-
cially how she failed to enact it in her interactions with a particular student,
signaled a potential growth point for Abra, one that the teacher educator picked up
on and directly targeted throughout their co-constructing an IDZ. The teacher
educator first sought to elicit how Abra understood what she was viewing on
the videotape. The teacher educator’s mediation was emergent, contingent, and
responsive to Abra’s immediate needs in terms of how she described and evalu-
ated the episodes discussed from the videotape, and then how Abra responded
to her mediation. When Abra identified incidents in which she failed to engage
students in meaningful participation, such as missed opportunities to ask questions
 Engineering Student Participation 73

or questions met with silence, Abra was quick to ask the teacher educator for
explicit mediation. The objective of the DVP was to model expert teacher think-
ing concerning what an appropriate instructional response could be and why that
response was appropriate, so the teacher educator initially mediated by asking
Abra what she could have done differently. How Abra responded signaled to the
teacher educator what kind of assistance she might offer, such as introducing
part of a possible solution to the problem, or voicing what a teacher could say to
engineer participation, resulting in a continuous interaction between the teacher
educator and Abra as they stayed attuned to each other.
The teacher educator acknowledged Abra’s expressions of emotions concern-
ing her inability to engage students in meaningful participation, but the synchro-
nous nature of the interaction during the DVP generates challenges in creating
an IDZ for the teacher and the teacher educator alike. Even though doing the
DVP is intended to model and encourage expert teacher thinking, a teacher,
especially a beginning teacher, cannot help but feel vulnerable when engaging
in even constructive criticism. The face-threatening nature of this interaction is
tangible.This creates further challenges for the teacher educator, who is mediating
in real time while trying to understand the teacher’s thinking, to be mindful of the
teacher’s perezhivanie and the teacher’s cognitive and emotional needs. We see that
enacting mediation within an IDZ in real time requires the teacher educator to,
as previously noted, be mindful of his/her purposeful intentions when interacting
in and throughout the DVP in order to create conditions for mediation that are
emergent, contingent, and responsive.
If we had observed or only watched the video of Abra’s teaching activity in
that particular class, we would have an inadequate understanding of what she
knows about engineering student participation and of the kind of support she needs
to develop her teacher/teaching expertise. Unfortunately, without immediate fol-
low-up teaching activity, we do not have evidence of whether Abra can integrate,
or is gradually internalizing, her emerging conceptions of meaningful partici-
pation in her actual teaching activity. From a sociocultural theoretical perspec-
tive, Abra needs to materialize this pedagogical concept in concrete ­goal-directed
activity repeatedly. The findings in this chapter accentuate a central point of this
book—teacher educators need to create multiple, integrated opportunities for
authentic participation in the activities of language teaching, which open up
multiple, assorted structured mediational spaces for responsive mediation to emerge
throughout the learning-to-teach experience. Also necessary are ongoing oppor-
tunities to materialize academic concepts and pedagogical tools in a­ uthentic teaching
experience so teachers can begin to use them as psychological tools to regulate
their cognition, emotion, and activity of teaching. But before teachers can engage
in such activities, teacher educators need to introduce the kind of systematically
organized instruction that Vygotsky (1986) viewed as fundamental to the devel-
opment of higher mental processes. Providing Abra with a conceptualization of
some fundamental pedagogical tools, such as engineering student participation, would
74 Engineering Student Participation

have, from a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective, provided a way for

her to talk about what she had experienced through the concept to assist her
internalization of it. For teacher educators, integrating academic concepts within the
DVP allows teachers to connect them to their everyday concepts about teaching
and to the concrete activity of what they are experiencing in their classrooms.
Through responsive mediation co-constructed throughout DVP, teacher educators
can identify teacher potentiality, so that the interactions in/through the DVP can
lead teacher development.

Notes
1 Data extracts reprinted with permission from Routledge. Golombek, P. R.
(2011). Dynamic assessment in teacher education: Using dialogic video
protocols to intervene in teacher thinking and activity. In K. E. Johnson &
P. R. Golombek (Eds.), Research on second language teacher education: A sociocul-
tural perspective on professional development (pp. 121–135). New York: Routledge.
2 The teacher educator did not collect data on the practice teach, and thus can-
not link these experiences. For an explanation of how a practice teach can be
integrated more comprehensively into the learning-to-teach experience, see
Chapters 6 and 9.
3 See Chapter 7. Operationally defined as “Don’t assume students will know
how you want them to participate. Arrange your activities so that students
have opportunities to participate in different ways (individually, round-robin,
pairs, small groups, large groups) and be explicit (meta-talk) about how you
want them to participate” (course handout).
4 These details signal the problematic nature of labels used in teacher e­ ducation,
such as pre- and in-service teachers, or novice and experienced teachers,
in which unhelpful binaries are set up according to Cartesian logic. See
Chapter 10 for further explanation.

References
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Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research
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Calderhead, J. (1981). Stimulated recall: A method for research on teaching. British
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Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (1996). Teaching pronun-
ciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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Gass, S. M., & Mackey, A. (2000). Stimulated recall methodology in second language
research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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tural perspective on professional development (pp. 121–135). New York: Routledge.
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development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lyle, J. (2003). Stimulated recall: A report on its use in naturalistic research. British
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One – The Phantom Menace [motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analyzing classroom talk as a
social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168.
Richards, J. C., & Lockhart, C. (1994). Reflective teaching in second language class-
rooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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judgments, decisions, and behavior. Review of Educational Research, 51(4),
455–498.
Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform.
Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22.
Tochon, F. V. (1999). Video study groups for education, professional development, and
change. Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing.
Tochon, F.V. (2008). A brief history of video feedback and its role in foreign lan-
guage education. CALICO, special issue, 25(3), 420–435.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech (N. Minick, Trans.). In R. W. Reiber
(Ed.), The collected works of L. S.Vygotsky,Vol. 3. Problems of the theory and history
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Harvard University Press.
6
RECONCILING ONE’S TEACHING
PERSONA

“I was able to nicely balance my mellow and nice attitude with being the ‘teacher.’”

The quintessential culminating experience in most L2 teacher education

­programs is the teaching practicum. Typified as ‘finally in the field,’ the practi-
cum provides a mentored clinical experience where the doing of teaching and
the learning about teaching are meant to come together in developmentally
significant ways. Conceptualized as a teaching/learning (obuchenie) opportunity
rather than for the evaluation of teaching performance, practicum teachers are
typically eased into the day-to-day workings of classroom life. They may begin
by simply observing or working with small groups of students, but then gradually
take on greater responsibility for instruction, including planning, teaching, and
assessing student learning. Mentor teachers (instructors of record) play a piv-
otal role in modeling, mentoring, and assisting practicum teachers as they take
up and try out new repertoires of instructional strategies, make sense of subject
matter content instructionally, and, in general, acclimate to the realities of class-
room life. University supervisors (teacher educators) also play an important role
in this process, although their involvement may be much more indirect: hold-
ing regular face-to-face meetings outside the practicum placement, conducting
teaching observations, and holding pre- and post-observation conferences. While
on the surface this might seem like a natural and neutral site for the learning of
L2 teaching—a real classroom, a mentor teacher, a teacher educator, and an
eager practicum teacher—the practicum experience is not as straightforward as
it might seem. Practicum teachers typically find themselves navigating a maze of
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 77

institutionally and socially negotiated roles, values, and standards of conduct as

they learn the texture of classroom life, struggle to develop conceptions of them-
selves as teachers, and attempt to function as ‘real’ teachers before they have the
necessary expertise and/or competence to do so (Crookes, 2003; Farrell, 2006;
Flowerdew, 1999; Gebhard, 1990, 2009; Johnson, 1996; Smagorinsky, Cook,
Moore, Jackson, & Fry, 2004).
With its dual focus on the doing of teaching and the learning about teach-
ing, most practicum experiences require some sort of structured reflective com-
ponent, usually in the form of a reflection journal (Bailey, 1990; Gebhard &
Oprandy, 1999). Within L2 teacher education, teacher reflection, or the nar-
rative reconstruction of experience, has long been thought of as a productive
mechanism for teachers to not only make sense of their learning and teaching
experiences but also to make worthwhile changes in their teaching practices
(Borg, 2006; Burns & Richards, 2009; Johnson & Golombek, 2011). As we
mentioned in Chapter 1, we have argued that engagement in narrative activ-
ity influences how teachers come to understand what they are narrating about,
and this involves a complex combination of description, explanation, analysis,
interpretation, and construal of one’s private reality as it is brought into the
public sphere (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). A potentially powerful feature of
written teacher reflection is the concretization of teachers’ thoughts, feelings,
and understandings, an opening up of sorts, of the ‘meaningfulness’ of teachers’
experiences to social influence, giving teacher educators access to teachers’ inter-
nal cognitive/emotional struggles and creating spaces for responsive mediation to
address their immediate needs and/or concerns.
In the early days of our work as teacher educators, that is before the wide-
spread use of Internet-based communication, we asked our practicum teachers to
keep handwritten reflection journals as a means of recounting and reflecting on
the practicum experience. We read and responded to their journals periodically
but the time delay between the doing of teaching and our discussions about their
teaching was difficult to overcome. Today, the immediacy and dialogic nature of
Internet-based communication forums, such as private, asynchronous blogs, cre-
ates the sense that we are ‘right there, in the thick of things’ with our practicum
teachers. And while we recognize that blog entries, like the o ­ ld-fashioned hand-
written journals, represent the reconstruction of experience, how our teachers
constitute themselves in ‘story’ has as much to do with the construction of self
as it does with the purpose for and the specific time and place in which the
story was constructed (Bakhtin, 1981; Holquist, 1990). Like their handwritten
predecessors, practicum dialogic blogs represent ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou,
2006) and reflect the emotional, moral, and relational dimensions of how teach-
ers hold and use their knowledge (Elbaz, 1983). For practicum teachers, the
process of blogging about their practicum experiences imparts significance to
78 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

particular instructional events and concretizes the meanings infused in those

events. As mentioned above, this opens a window into their lived worlds and
such access allows teacher educators to mediate and support their learning and
development.
Of course, we recognize that there have been legitimate critiques of
reflective journals as a means of fostering substantive teacher reflection
and/or professional development (Akbari, 2007; Hobbs, 2007; Mann &
Walsh, 2013; Strand, 2006), particularly when teachers’ motives are sim-
ply to get a good grade or to tell the teacher educator what she thinks she
wants to hear. However, we find educational value in the dialogic nature
of blogging during the practicum experience. The blog creates an ongoing,
­co-constructed, shared communicative space for interthinking that is mutu-
ally built on the foundations of shared knowledge and motives. Each time
a blog entry is entered into that space, the dialogue between the teacher
and teacher educator gets reconstituted as they negotiate their way through
whatever instructional event they are focusing on. In order to maintain an
intermental development zone (IDZ), as Mercer (2000) argues, the teacher edu-
cator must ­provide ­mediation that creates conditions so that teachers can
operate just beyond their current capabilities as well as consolidate their
jointly reconstructed and/or rearticulated experiences into new abilities and
understandings.
Today when we engage in dialogic blogging we are not only interested in
how our practicum teachers are reconstructing their lived experiences, we are
actively seeking to create conditions for learning and development. We do this
in various ways: by providing responsive mediation directed at potential growth
points, by linking lived experience (everyday concepts) with formal knowledge
(academic concepts), by modeling expert teacher thinking, by framing our expert
understanding of the subject matter content to be taught, and by offering a
range of instructional resources to teach it. Furthermore, we want our practi-
cum teachers to become consciously aware of what they are experiencing
while simultaneously developing a future-orientated focus in their thinking,
so they can become more purposeful when planning and enacting future L2
instruction.
In this chapter we examine engagement in private, asynchronous online
exchanges via a blog between a novice ESL teacher and a teacher educa-
tor during a 15-week MA TESL teaching practicum.1 We present the case
of Kyla, who struggles to construct a teaching persona that will enable her
to ­function ­successfully while teaching an oral communication course for
international teaching assistants (ITA). Analyses of her blog entries high-
light how she expresses this struggle through emotive language that shifts
from overconfidence to deep disappointment. The blog exchanges between
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 79

Kyla and the teacher educator function as an important mediational space,

providing Kyla with emotional support, offering her concrete instructional
strategies, and ­modeling expert thinking, all of which work in consort to
assist Kyla as she overcomes the dissonance she is experiencing between
her ­ imagined ­ teaching persona and the instructional experiences she is
­attempting to create for the ITAs in her practicum placement.

The teaching practicum blog

As a requirement of the practicum, Kyla posted weekly online blog entries that
were read and responded to by the practicum supervisor (teacher ­educator)
(45 total posts). Kyla also met weekly with the teacher educator, who observed
her teaching on two separate occasions, held pre- and post-observation meet-
ings, and provided support and feedback throughout the practicum through
both face-to-face meetings and the practicum blog. The blog data, while asyn-
chronous in nature, are presented side-by-side to emphasize their dialogic
nature. Each time Kyla posted an entry, the teacher educator posted a response.
There were several occasions (12 total) when Kyla posted a follow-up entry
to which the teacher educator responded again. In the data extracts presented
below, the bold-faced text and connecting lines utilize the methodological
techniques of sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004) by capturing how
language is being used as a social mode of thinking and illustrates the quality
and character of interthinking on the linguistic, psychological, and cultural levels.
The teacher educator (right column) takes up dimensions of Kyla’s blog entries
(left column), building a contextual foundation for their exchanges, guiding her
thinking as they jointly reconstruct Kyla’s understanding of her experiences, and
assisting Kyla as she works to resolve the cognitive/emotional dissonance she is
experiencing.

The practicum context

Kyla’s practicum placement was a graduate-level English as a second language
(ESL) oral language course for ITAs taught by an experienced ESL instructor
(mentor teacher). All of the ITAs were highly accomplished in their academic
fields of study, mostly from Asian cultures, and required to take this course
because of their performance on a university-mandated oral language pro-
ficiency test. The ITA course was institutionally defined as an opportunity
for ITAs to improve their overall oral language proficiency while coming
to understand the psyche of American undergraduates and learn about the
instructional norms for teaching discipline-specific large-enrollment general
education courses. Kyla was fairly inexperienced in this instructional context,
80 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

whereas the teacher educator held a great deal of knowledge concerning the
goals and curriculum of this specific ITA program and research concerning
ITA issues.

Kyla’s pre-understandings
When Kyla entered the MA TESL program, she was technically not a ­novice
teacher. She held a BA in elementary education and had limited experi-
ence teaching young boys who were labeled ‘special needs’ within an urban
K–12 school setting. Interestingly, many of the boys were also English lan-
guage learners whose learning difficulties were “wrapped up in who they
are, their lack of English, and the impoverished neighborhoods they come
from.” Kyla described her undergraduate teacher education program as heavily
front-loaded with “lots of theories and techniques about working with ­special
needs children but very few opportunities to actually teach.” She described
her teaching philosophy as “connecting with the students, as people who
were largely misunderstood by the institutional systems in which they found
themselves.” This social positioning Kyla related to her own experiences as a
student in which she recalled screaming silently, “You don’t know me! You
­
don’t know who I am!” upon hearing disparaging remarks made about her by
her seventh grade teacher. She berated most of her own teachers for ­“placing
labels on students” instead of attempting to see “the worth each brought into
the classroom.” She described herself as “a teacher that creates a safe environ-
ment where students could say what they want and be heard…. I want to
create a space for each student where everything they believe in, and every-
thing they love could be materialized so that it could be a source of motivation
to their learning.”2

Recognizing Kyla’s pre-understandings

Atypical of the practicum experience, Kyla had an opportunity to teach a solo
lesson quite early in the practicum because her mentor teacher was unex-
pectedly called away due to a family emergency. After the lesson, which Kyla
describes in mostly emotive terms, she differentiates her teaching style from
that of her mentor teacher, who in an earlier blog post she had described as
“intimidating for students” and “as an authority figure rather than a peer.”
This blog post provides insight into Kyla’s perezhivanie, or how she experi-
enced this lesson, positioning herself as successfully facilitating greater stu-
dent ­participation than her mentor teacher as a result of her ‘relaxed and
­comfortable’ teaching persona.
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 81

Excerpt 1
Kyla Teacher Educator

I did some things differently than from Well, if it felt good, it probably was
what my master teacher would have done. good.
I expected a lot of participation from the
students and I did this by having a very
relaxed and comfortable environment How do you engage students with
for the students. the text in ways that highlight its
essential features?
This class was so mellow and fun
that I completely forgot that I was Yes, you need to have a clear
teaching... I don’t know if that was goal in mind, model what you want
bad or good, but this teaching experience them to do, create comfortable
felt really good. spaces for them to do it, and support
them as they carry out the activities.

In this blog exchange, the teacher educator validates Kyla’s reported success,
but then lays the groundwork for interthinking by encouraging her to consider
the pedagogical reasoning behind her instructional activities and reiterating her
instructional responsibilities as a teacher. In particular, her rhetorical choice to
ask the question, “How do you engage students with the text in ways that highlight its
essential features?” is directed at Kyla’s rather underdeveloped reference to “a lot of
participation from the students.” The teacher educator thus reorients Kyla’s attention
instead to the substance of student participation in relation to the content of the
lesson in order to encourage her to express her reasoning through the particulars
of this instructional event.
The teacher educator is responsive to Kyla’s somewhat naïve claim of
“I completely forgot I was teaching” by explicitly framing the way an expert might
think about the responsibilities of a teacher, including a series of directives:
“have a clear goal in mind, model what you want them to do, create comfortable spaces
for them to do it, and support them as they carry out the activities.” The ­expert-novice
nature of their exchange is obvious; Kyla focuses on how she felt about her
first solo teaching experience while the teacher educator, in response, cre-
ates a more expert frame of reference by redirecting Kyla’s attention toward
considering the rationale and reasoning behind her actions, as well as offer-
ing her a more expert conceptualization of a teaching persona. The teacher
educator’s response to Kyla’s blog post is also interesting since from her own
perezhivanie regarding practicum teachers, she is well aware of the naiveté that
novice teachers typically bring to the practicum experience: criticize the old,
imagine yourself as better, assume good teaching is simply a matter of being
friendly, and focus on how the lesson felt rather than on what the students may
have learned. How Kyla takes up/does not take up this mediation is not readily
evident in her subsequent blog entries.
82 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

Recognizing and responding to Kyla’s perezhivanie

The following blog exchange occurred after the teacher educator’s first
­observation. The lesson had not gone well, which Kyla describes once again in
mostly emotive terms, as she struggled to, in her words, “balance my mellow and
nice attitude with being the ‘teacher.’”

Excerpt 2
Kyla Teacher Educator

So, on Monday I was really No one expects you to be ‘the

disappointed in myself for perfect teacher’ right off the
doing such a horrible job. bat – that’s what the internship is for–
I noticed myself get pretty so you can try some things out in a
nervous while teaching... and it semi-real context, reflect on it, learn
also didn’t help when I wasn’t from it, and move forward.
completely prepared. Just
because I was nervous, didn’t mean It is one thing to relate to students as
I should have jumped from a fellow student but you need to establish
one idea to the next. a teaching persona in which you look
In reflecting back, I think I set off and sound like you know what you
this frantic pace for myself in my are doing. Acting ‘sheepish’ or ‘coy’ or ‘silly’
head which made me want to keep may get a laugh out of them, but you need
rushing things. I realized that one to establish a sense of authority in the
of the things that I needed that-day classroom-I’m not talking domination here
was understanding what my or a power trip, but developing a strong
purpose was... sense of self , that you know what you
are doing, you know where you are
To tell you the truth, that was one of the going, you know and care about them
criticisms that my mentor professor as people, as future ITAs, and as L2 learners,
had given me in the past. She noticed and together you are working toward
how when I teach in the classroom. a common goal.
I have a tendency to appear unsure
of myself. But by the end of that year, All lessons have some sort of organization –
she said I was able to nicely balance my depending on what you are going to teach,
mellow and nice attitude with being where, to whom, why, and when... so
the ‘teacher’. I guess again I was a bit consider these issues as you plan out your
disappointed in myself because in the next lesson. Today’s could have been as
process of thinking of my simple as ‘Today we are going to focus on
students, I, in my rusty state of teaching, language that is used to get people to do
reverted back to my old ways. things --- this sort of language is used all the
time, in lots of different contexts, but it is
especially important in teaching, because in
teaching, ITAs and/or teachers are always
trying to get students to do things--- so first
we are going to do X, and then Y, and then
I’m going to put you in groups and ask you
to do Z, and then your groups will share
ZZ with us ---’
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 83

Kyla’s emotional appraisal of her teaching activity is a critical move in her and the
teacher educator’s co-construction of the intermental development zone (IDZ). Kyla’s
highly negative emotions most likely point to an area of her cognition as a learner of
teaching that needs to be developed. By being attuned to Kyla’s emotional state, the
teacher educator validates the normalcy of what she is experiencing by reminding
her that she need not be “perfect,” that her learning to teach is part of the develop-
mental purpose of the practicum itself. Moreover, by attuning to Kyla’s emotional
appraisals, the teacher educator can begin to ascertain the kind of mediation that is
needed at this point. Kyla’s highly negative self-appraisals are accompanied by com-
ments that suggest a need for other-regulation in the IDZ: her nervousness was
exacerbated by her lack of preparation and lack of understanding of her instructional
purpose.The teacher educator’s mediation is responsive to Kyla’s very practically ori-
ented emerging concerns, that is, struggling to enact her imagined teaching persona
of being a mellow teacher while carrying out a ­well-organized and focused lesson.
From the teacher educator’s point of view, she is trying to initiate “new understand-
ing in situations where [Kyla’s] prior or pre-understanding is inadequate” (Miller,
2011, p. 380). Kyla’s struggle with being a mellow and well-organized teacher is not
surprising, as from her pre-understanding, mellow and organized may seem to be
contradictions—organization being synonymous with rigidity. However, the teacher
educator uses this contradiction as a potential growth point by offering an expert
characterization of a teaching persona in which mellow and organized are analogues.
She also responds to Kyla’s realization that what was missing from her lesson was an
“understanding what my purpose was.” The teacher educator emphasizes the need for
“a sense of authority” and “a strong sense of self” as being linked to characteristics of an
expert teaching persona: “know where you are going.” In addition, the teacher educator
continues to stay attuned to Kyla’s concern about jumping “from one idea to the next,”
setting off at a “frantic pace,” and “rushing things” by emphasizing organization as a
fundamental concept of good instruction and then modeling expert instructional
talk that enacts how her lessons could have been organized. The teacher educator’s
voicing of how Kyla could have introduced the lesson frames a way to make her
purpose and the organization of the lesson explicit for the ITAs. Once again, we see
the teacher educator attuned to Kyla’s perezhivanie and her recognition of a seemingly
shattered idealized teaching persona and lack of self-regulation by responding with
explicit mediation.
The teacher educator knows, from her own perezhivanie regarding practicum
teachers, that Kyla has to bounce back emotionally and teach sufficiently well in
the next class for the students’ sake as well as for Kyla’s emotional and professional
well-being. Being too implicit in her mediation for Kyla, at this point in time, may
simply be too frustrating for her.The teacher educator thus attempts to support Kyla
as she works through the emotion connected to the contradiction existing between
her idealized teaching persona and instructional behaviors/activities that align with
enacting that persona.The teacher educator thus has a specific developmental goal in
mind: to provide Kyla with a concretization of what a more expert teaching persona
looks and sounds like. She does this by explicitly reiterating the characteristics of a
84 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

more expert teaching persona while also modeling expert instructional talk for car-
rying out a more organized lesson with explicit instructional objectives.

Seeking assistance
Prior to her next solo lesson, Kyla and the teacher educator had collaboratively
designed a lesson plan on ITA office hour interactions that they both believed would
enable her to enact a more organized lesson and her imagined teaching persona.
Unfortunately, as is often the case in real teaching, the ITAs had not completed the
assigned homework, which left them unprepared for several of the activities Kyla
had planned. In this blog exchange, Kyla expresses frustration and anxiety over their
failure to participate in the lesson. She describes herself as “slowly doing more of a mono-
logic lecture,” a teaching style that is contrary to her imagined teaching persona and
which, in terms of her perezhivanie, she perceives in a highly negative light. In essence,
her response to this lesson signals a loss of self-regulation. However, this time she
makes a choice to ask a series of questions, and in doing so her motive is to explicitly
seek assistance from the teacher educator.
Excerpt 3
Kyla Teacher Educator

I guess I’m really bummed and disappointed Well, believe it or not, this happens all the
with today, only because I tried really hard time...... so, you could have listed the
to make the lesson meaningful for the different purposes of office hours on the
students, and I felt I didn’t fully do that... blackboard (to ask a content question, to get
But what do you do when your students help with a problem, to explain why something
are not prepared for the material? What wasn’t handed in, to contest a grade, etc) and
happens then?... What does a good teacher then asked them to talk about what role the TA
do with the lesson plan, when the students would have to play as the purpose changes...
are unprepared?
You could have shared an experience you
had in office hours (real or made up) and asked
them how they would have handled it
differently...

Kyla You could have asked them to speculate on

what sort of small talk might be appropriate in
When things aren’t going exactly as planned, office hours...
I end up freezing up, being unable to think
of other things I could do. And in the attempt You could have had them make up a problem
to come up with something, and having multiple /issue that might be resolved in an office hours
thoughts racing through my mind, I end up setting, present it to the class, and have the rest
fumbling over my words even more and I start of the class come up with different ways to
jumping from one thing to another... resolve the problem/issue...

Once again, the teacher educator begins by being responsive to Kyla’s emotive
response, offering emotional support that normalizes what she just experienced.
However, the teacher educator then becomes highly explicit, as she recognizes Kyla’s
need for other-regulation. She answers Kyla’s abstract question of what a ‘good’ teacher
does when students are unprepared with concrete examples of what Kyla could have
done in the lesson she just experienced, thus grounding her mediation in the partic-
ulars of Kyla’s lived experience. Kyla responds in a follow-up blog post, by continu-
ing to express frustration with her inability to “think on my feet.” She repeats some
self-characterizations presented in Excerpt 2 about “jumping from one thing to another,”
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 85

but whereas in the previous excerpt the jumping around occurred because she was
unprepared, in this excerpt she was prepared but the students were not. Kyla begins
to offer an explanation for why she is struggling to gain a sense of self-regulation over
her teaching—when faced with the unexpected, she does not know how to respond
instructionally. In a sense, Kyla has now come to realize what she does not know and
explicitly seeks help. As the teacher educator and Kyla reconstruct their contextual-
ized joint mental activity, or interthinking, in more expert terms, Kyla’s exploration and
realization of what she does not know and needs to know marks an important step in
regaining a sense of self-regulation over her teaching.

Supporting the development of new understandings

In her final solo lesson, observed by the teacher educator, Kyla describes herself as
consciously slowing down and feeling more comfortable with not completing the
lesson as planned. She describes how the teacher educator’s instructional strategies
actually enabled her to regulate her own thinking while she was teaching. She
evaluates her instructional activities and is able to say what she should have done,
as well as what she did.
Excerpt 4
Kyla Teacher Educator

Even while I was teaching on What a pleasure to watch you teach

Wednesday, and I wasn’t able to start today!
on the activity as I had first intended,
I kept telling myself to slow You provided a nice overview of
down, and be okay with continuing the lesson, you situated it nicely
on Friday. While I was doing the first in what had come before, why it is
half of the lesson, I started getting important, and you provided
flustered at one point because things concrete and detailed directions
I thought weren’t going as I so that the students knew exactly what
planned in my head, but I purposely they would be asked to do.
tried my best to remain calm and still
slow down. I kept reminding myself At the end of the session it was clear
that it was OKAY to not have finished the to me that they not only got what
class as I had initially planned it. you were trying to teach them,
they were able to do it. You also
Today in class, we reviewed closings presented yourself as a confident,
and most of the students appeared genuine, interested teacher who is
to have grasped the essential competent to teach them but also
elements of closings. However, I did willing to work and learn with them.
realize that I should have been
more concrete with the students.

For Friday’s class, I’m very proud of

myself for sticking with my objectives.
I think before, I let the content rule
over the objectives, when the content
should have illustrated or
supplemented my objectives. This time
around I purposefully memorized my
objectives so that it would be
running through my mind as I taught.
86 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

Throughout this blog post, Kyla recounts the kind of private speech (Vygotsky,
1987) that she used to mediate herself and her tendencies to rush and jump
around in her activity of teaching. She recalls, “I kept telling myself…,” “I purposely
tried my best…,” “I kept reminding myself….” Compared to earlier posts in which
her emotion reflected her lack of self-regulation, in this post she demonstrates her
self-regulation through more expert pedagogical reasoning: “it was OKAY to not
have finished the class as I had initially planned,” “the students appeared to have grasped
the essential elements,” “before I let the content rule over the objectives, when the content
should have illustrated or supplemented the objectives.” Kyla still expresses emotions,
but they are positive ones of satisfaction, and they index cognitive/emotional
congruence between her internal conception of teaching and her activity of
teaching. The teacher educator positively evaluates what Kyla did and commends
her for establishing a more expert teaching persona, “confident, genuine, interested
teacher,” one that is more in line with what the teacher educator has all along been
attempting to assist her in developing.

Obuchenie, responsive mediation, and Kyla’s emerging

development
If we consider these asynchronous exchanges in terms of obuchenie, the actions
and intentions of the teacher educator are predicated on recognizing Kyla’s pere-
zhivanie. She does, in fact, acknowledge Kyla’s expressions of cognitive/­emotional
dissonance and emphasizes the ‘normalness’ of what she was experiencing/­feeling.
However, she also provides expert characterizations of the contradictions Kyla
is facing and offers concrete suggestions for how she might rethink and reenact
her teaching practices. She pushes Kyla to restructure how she thinks about her
imagined teaching persona. In maintaining an IDZ, the teacher educator’s medi-
ation is emergent, contingent, and responsive to Kyla’s immediate needs, but she
clearly takes on the role of expert-other, consistently soothing Kyla’s emotional
responses while gently pushing her to consider alternatives and then repeatedly
reframing Kyla’s novice characterizations of her teaching in more expert terms
on both a practical level (i.e., what to do) and a conceptual level (i.e., why she is
doing what she is doing).
For Kyla, she is able to bring into conscious awareness her understandings of
and struggles with her imagined teaching persona. When her lessons do not go as
planned, the resulting emotional turmoil leads to expressions of disappointment
and a crisis of self-confidence. However, the co-constructed IDZ that emerged
throughout their blog exchanges functions as a structured mediational space
where she is able to make her tacit thoughts and beliefs explicit, create a sense of
coherence out of the tension she is experiencing, and seek and receive responsive
mediation from the teacher educator.
It is significant to note that in spite of the mediation that the teacher edu-
cator offered through the collaborative preparation of a lesson plan, Kyla, like
 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona 87

many new teachers, struggled with the unanticipated aspects inherent in ­teaching.
This reinforces the idea of how responsive mediation as part of the complex pro-
cess of learning to teach is dependent on the particular practice in which we are
engaged. The teacher educator’s mediation of the lesson plan may have enabled
Kyla to begin to understand what she was teaching as content and how to teach
that content with instructional foci and activities in mind. Creating a lesson plan
(the ideal) is one activity, but enacting that lesson plan (the material) is another,
especially as the circumstances in which a teacher enacts a lesson plan can differ
from what is anticipated when planning (e.g., students will read assigned readings)
or be unanticipated. Because the realities of teaching are messy and unexpected,
it is this dynamic enactment of teaching that teacher educators cannot mediate
directly, and that makes the when, where, and how responsive mediation occurs matter
in L2 teacher education.
In this chapter we have highlighted how dialogic engagement in a private, asyn-
chronous practicum blog exposes the emergent nature of responsive mediation. Kyla’s
cognitive/emotional dissonance emerged out of the lived experience of teaching
two lessons during the early stages of her practicum placement: the first, which, as
she retells it, matched her imagined teaching persona, and the second, which did
not. Yet blogging about the incongruence between these two lessons enabled the
teacher educator to recognize this as a potential growth point for Kyla and target her
mediation accordingly. It is also obvious that while assisting Kyla in understanding
and developing a more expert teaching persona, other issues of quality instruction
emerged: lesson organization, unanticipated (lack of) student engagement, articulat-
ing appropriate instructional objectives, and so on. This reminds us, as teacher edu-
cators, of the inherent complexities of teaching as well as the inherent complexities
of learning-to-teach. Our mediation in this process must be emergent, contingent,
and responsive to the immediate needs of our teachers, but it must also be directed
at the upper limits during the ZPD, placing our teachers ahead of themselves while
providing emotional, cognitive, and material support and expertise as our teachers
work towards being and becoming more competent L2 teachers.
While an insider look into the practicum blog makes visible what teacher
learning looks like as it is unfolding, and the role of responsive mediation in support-
ing teacher learning and development, we recognize that it remains very much
a limited view. While we isolated our analysis to the practice of using practicum
blogs, these blog exchanges were going on against a rich mediational backdrop,
including but not limited to face-to-face meetings between Kyla and the teacher
educator, Kyla’s interactions with her mentor teacher, and obviously her daily
interactions with the ITAs in her practicum placement. What is quite obvious in
the practicum blog is the concretization of Kyla’s lived instructional experiences,
the meanings she associated with these experiences, the emotional/cognitive dis-
sonance she experienced and the quality and character of the responsive mediation
that emerges as Kyla and the teacher educator create and sustain an IDZ over the
course of this particular practice of L2 teacher education.
88 Reconciling One’s Teaching Persona

Notes
1 Some data extracts reprinted with permission from Cambridge University
Press. Johnson, K. E. & Golombek, P. R. (2013). A tale of two mediations:
Tracing the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activity in teachers’ practi-
cum blogs. In G. Barkhuizen (Ed.), Narrative Research in Applied Linguistics
(pp. 85–104). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2 All single-quote extracts were taken, with permission, from Kyla’s learning-
to-teach history and portfolio, requirements of her first-semester MA TESL
methods course. The supervisor of her practicum was the same teacher
­
­educator who taught the methods course.

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7
DEVELOPING PEDAGOGICAL
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

“How do I teach something I myself don’t fully grasp?”

One of the most persistent challenges facing teacher education programs is

overcoming the traditional theory/practice dichotomy. As longtime teacher
­
­educators, we are sensitive to claims that while teachers may value what they
read, wrote, and talked about in their teacher education programs, they recall few
opportunities to engage in the activities of actual teaching, sometimes not until
the culminating internship/practicum near the end of their degree programs. In
designing the practices in our teacher education programs we continually seek
to address this challenge. And while we recognize the value of early field expe-
riences (Anderson & Graebell, 1990; Maxie, 2001; Whipp, 2003), given our
sociocultural theoretical stance, we are adamant that initial learning-to-teach
experiences must be mediated by experts. Simply placing new teachers in class-
rooms as observers, tutors, or even instructors may do little to support the devel-
opment of teacher/teaching expertise. As we have stated throughout this book,
we believe that learning-to-teach is not, and should not be, a process of ‘discov-
ery learning’ or ‘learning by doing,’ but rather learning that is intentional, delib-
erate, and goal-directed by experts who are skilled at moving teachers toward
more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices and greater
levels of professional expertise. Therefore, by design our practices present rele-
vant academic concepts to teachers in ways that bring these concepts to bear on their
everyday experiences as learners, teachers, and learners of teaching. This involves
making meaningful connections between academic concepts, everyday concepts, and
their imagined enactments and identities as future language teachers as they
participate in a range of authentic activities associated with language teaching.
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 91

It is our belief that the goal of any teacher education practice is to replace the
­traditional theory/practice dichotomy with the more fluid construct of praxis
(Freire, 1970; Johnson, 2006) or “the integration of conceptual knowledge and
practical activity with the goal of stimulating change or [concept] development”
(Lantolf, 2009, p. 272). Ultimately, we believe it is this transformative process
of making sense of everyday experiences through the theoretical constructs of
the broader professional discourse community and vice versa that will radically
change how teachers come to think about and carry out their work.
The practice that we highlight in this chapter, the extended team teaching
­project, began as an attempt to reconceptualize the traditional microteaching sim-
ulation in which teacher candidates plan and teach ‘mini-lessons’ in front of their
peers as a component of a methodology course. Originating in the 1960s, micro-
teaching emerged out of a technicist view of teaching with the promise of greater
efficiency in the training of teachers. The Stanford Model (Politzer, 1969) ran
novice teachers through a cycle of plan, teach, observe, and critique short micro
­lessons (5–10 ­minutes) followed by a new cycle of replan, reteach, reobserve, and
­re-critique. The content of each cycle consisted of a specific set of teaching behav-
iors that were first modeled, then practiced, critiqued, and then practiced again. At
that time, teaching was conceptualized as consisting of a discreet set of behaviors that
could be broken down into its smallest parts, studied, practiced, and mastered largely
through imitation and repetition. In addition, microteaching was deemed to be a
more efficient way of acclimating novices to the ‘real world’ of teaching, as opposed
to the lengthy apprenticeship model of ‘sink or swim’ once they entered schools.
Even after a rejection of this technicist view of teaching and the emergence
of the reflective teaching movement in the 1980s (Zeichner & Liston, 1996),
the microteaching simulation remains a staple of most methodology courses. Its
newer permutations include opportunities for systematic reflection that enable
teacher candidates to move beyond instructional practices based on intuition
or routine toward those that are guided by careful self-examination and critical
reflection on the broader social and institutional contexts in which teaching takes
place (Farrell, 2008; Richards & Farrell, 2005: Roberts, 1998; Wallace, 1996).
And while these more progressive forms of the microteaching simulation are
generally perceived positively by teacher candidates, both in the general educa-
tion (MacLeod, 1987) and L2 teacher education literature (Burns & Richards,
2009; Farrell, 2008), the fact remains that the learners aren’t real, the subject
matter isn’t real, and the context in which the microteaching is carried out isn’t
real. In this sense, microteaching does not simulate ‘real’ teaching, largely because
the social, institutional, and historical factors that are endemic to ‘real’ teach-
ing are simply not present. Void of the many factors that shape the complex
nature of ‘real’ teaching, we believe the microteaching simulation, as a prac-
tice in L2 teacher education, is inherently flawed, though we recognize that for
some teacher educators, it may be the only teaching opportunity that their local
­circumstances allow.
92 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Within the context of a TESL methodology course, the extended team

t­eaching project requires a team of three or four teachers to engage in a series of
activities designed to prepare them to teach a 50- to 75-minute lesson in an actual
English as a second language (ESL) class. Completed over a 15-week semester and
counting for 40 percent of the overall grade, the project creates varied and multiple
structured mediational spaces for the team to develop a sense of the instructional set-
ting in which they will teach, to conceptualize and materialize the subject matter
content to be taught, to enact an initial lesson in, for, and with their classmates and
the teacher educator, to teach a revised lesson in the actual ESL class, and finally,
through critical reflection and dialogic interaction, to become consciously aware of
the theoretical and pedagogical reasoning for their instructional practices.
Before moving on to a detailed description of the project itself, it is important
to revisit what we mean by structured mediational spaces. Mediation, as we discussed
in Chapter 2, is central to our understanding of and support for the development
of teacher/teaching expertise. Some have argued that simply by being in the world,
one is mediated by it—a notion closer to the constructs of acculturation or social-
ization from social learning theory (Chaiklin & Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Wenger, 1998). However, from our Vygotskian sociocultural stance, the quality
and character of that mediation is critical. We do not want our teachers to sim-
ply experience teaching—we want to mediate their learning-to-teach experiences,
support their attempts at enacting teaching by creating new circumstances, or the
social situation of development, where the development of teacher/teaching exper-
tise can occur. We seek to push them past their everyday notions of teachers and
teaching and to accomplish instructional goals that are beyond their current level of
development. Structured mediational spaces, in one sense, reflect the Vygotskian con-
struct of prolepsis, or paraphrased nicely by van Lier (2004), “to create invita­
tional structures and spaces for learners to step into and grow into” (p. 162). By
design, the extended team teaching project assumes that our teachers know more
than they actually know, and can do more than they actually can do. In fact, in
end-of-semester ratings of teaching effectiveness, our teachers often comment that
at the start of the semester they felt both terrified and excited by the prospects
of teaching an actual ESL class, many claiming they had few clear ideas about
how to prepare for or teach an actual ESL lesson. The structured mediational spaces
embedded in the project and the teacher/teacher educator dialogic interactions that
emerge in these spaces create opportunities for the team and the teacher educators
to think together, and to stay attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge,
emotions, and understanding in an intermental development zone (IDZ). During the
IDZ, the teacher educator is able to provide the necessary assistance so that the team
can ‘step into’ being L2 teachers while simultaneously consolidating their expe-
riences throughout the project as new abilities and understandings. The IDZs
that emerge in these structured mediational spaces create opportunities for the teacher
­educator to make explicit her expert thinking, and to responsively adapt to the
team’s ­immediate understandings, needs, and/or concerns.
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 93

As we mentioned in Chapter 2, these structured mediational spaces create ‘safe

zones’ where teachers are able to ‘play’ with being and becoming L2 teachers.
Therefore, by design, the extended team teaching project creates various and
multiple structured mediational spaces in which teachers, with assistance, are asked
to ‘jump above’ themselves as they ‘play’ in ‘safe zones’ and ultimately create rich
experiences that can be reinterpreted for future teaching activity.

The extended team teaching project

The teachers who typically enroll in the TESL methodology course are
­first-semester MA TESL students, undergraduate TESL minors, or undergradu-
ate College of Education majors seeking a state-endorsed TESL certificate. Over
the past eight years, we have received permission from almost all of the teachers
who have enrolled in this course to access the ‘data’ that was produced (described
below) as a result of the project. For several teams, teaching different content,
under different instructional circumstances, we have examined their data by trac-
ing teacher learning and development as it unfolds throughout the various stages
of the project. Additionally, we have been able to capture the quality and charac-
ter of the teacher educator/teacher dialogic interactions that emerge at key stages
of the project (see Johnson, 2015; Johnson & Arshavskaya, 2011; Johnson &
Dellagnelo, 2013; Johnson & Worden, 2014). Below, we provide a brief descrip-
tion of each stage of the project followed by a description of the particular team
we selected to analyze in this chapter.
Initially, the team observes one session of the ESL class they will eventually
teach in order to develop an understanding of the instructional setting, includ-
ing required assignments and assessments, as well as the students’ L2 proficiency,
goals, and motivation. For many of our teachers, this is their first entrée into the
world of teaching ESL and their reactions often become rich fodder for discussion
and consideration as they begin to prepare the initial lesson plan. Many expect
instruction to focus on the more traditional approaches that focus on the language
itself (i.e., grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary) rather than language as consti-
tuted in subject matter content (content-based) or as social practice (Gee, 1999;
Halliday, 1985; Johnson, 2009). Some are intrigued, while others are intimidated
by the vast array of languages and cultures represented in an ESL versus an English
as a foreign language (EFL) or foreign language (FL) instructional context.
Early in the semester, each team member participates in six one-hour tutoring
sessions with an ESL student who is enrolled in the assigned ESL class.This activ-
ity creates an opportunity for extensive informal tutor/tutee interaction in which
they provide assistance on relevant course assignments and/or other L2 learning
priorities identified by the ESL student.The tutoring experience has proven to be
critical in both planning and teaching the eventual lesson because team members
gained invaluable information about the ESL course from their interactions with
their tutees and they are assured of at least one familiar face in the ESL class that
94 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

they will eventually teach. A three- to four-page final reflection paper is required
in which they reflect on what they learned about L2 learners, L2 learning, and L2
tutoring at the conclusion of the tutoring experience. The teacher educator reads
and responds substantively to the tutoring reflection papers.
During the lesson planning stage, the team has both face-to-face and v­ irtual
meetings with each other, the instructor of the ESL class, and the teacher edu-
cator as they co-construct an initial lesson plan. The content of the lesson plan
reflects what is listed on the course syllabus for the day they are scheduled to
teach. This often creates tension, as the team typically needs to negotiate their
collective understanding of the subject matter content they are expected to teach
and then materialize it in the form of a lesson plan. Typically, the initial les-
son plan is comprised of a set of procedures and/or activities, but often lacks a
coherent conceptual understanding of the subject matter content to be taught or
appropriate instructional strategies to teach it. These issues typically become the
focus of much of the teacher/teacher educator dialogic interaction during the
­co-construction of the initial lesson plan.
The team then participates in a one-hour video-recorded practice teach in
which they teach their lesson in the TESL methodology course. The practice
teach allows the team to not only enact the lesson but also to externalize their
conceptualization of the lesson and thus lay it open for social mediation. This
occurs as the teacher educator and fellow classmates regularly halt instruction
in order to ask questions, provide feedback, and/or make suggestions. Moreover,
since evaluative comments invariably creep into this activity, their classmates are
prompted to focus on how they experienced the lesson as students, rather than
what the team could or should have done. The dialogic interaction that emerges
in this activity is instrumental in assisting the team as they reconceptualize their
lesson plan to better meet the instructional goals they had envisioned and to align
their instructional activities with how their classmates experienced their lesson.
A week later the team teaches the revised lesson plan in the actual ESL class.
During the actual teach the team typically makes many in-flight decisions as they
realize that in the activity of actual teaching they need to alter and/or adjust their
plans according to how the ESL students respond to and engage in their instruc-
tional activities. The teacher educator attends and video records the lesson but
does not intervene.
Within 48 hours, the team participates in an audio-recorded stimulated recall
session in which they watch and discuss the video-recorded actual teach with the
teacher educator.1 Team members are encouraged to stop the recording when-
ever they want to comment on the lesson. The teacher educator also stops the
recording to ask questions, to allow the team to reflect on critical moments in
the lesson, and to offer suggestions. Once again, this activity allows for extensive
externalization of the team’s thinking, and often of their emotional struggles
and triumphs as well. More often than not, the team engages in a collective
‘in-hindsight’ reconstruction of the lesson or articulates new insights about
­
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 95

themselves as teachers and the activity of actually teaching. The stimulated recall
session also creates opportunities for the teacher educator to provide mediation
that is intentional and deliberate, with the goal of enabling the team to gain an
expert’s perspective on the subject matter content they taught and/or the instruc-
tional practices they were attempting to carry out in the lesson.
Finally, after receiving digital copies of the practice teach, the actual teach, and the
stimulated recall session, each team member is required to write a five- to ­seven-page
reflection paper about the project, paying particular attention to what they have
learned about themselves as teachers, about the activity of L2 ­teaching, and about
this series of initial learning-to-teach experiences.The teacher e­ ducator reads and
responds substantively to the final reflection papers.

Teaching parallelism in an ESL freshman composition course

In this chapter, we chronicle the experiences of four novice teachers as they
­experienced the extended team teaching project. The team—all American under-
graduate students enrolled in a TESL minor: Deb (elementary education), Annie
(international studies), Josh (Italian literature), and Ryan (English)—was taking the
TESL methodology course as a requirement of their program of study. The team
was assigned to teach a 75-minute lesson in a freshman ESL composition course
that focused on the literary concept of parallelism and its uses in academic writing.
Data from the team’s extended team teaching project included broad transcriptions
of (1) the video-recorded practice teach, (2) the video-recorded actual teach, (3) the
audio-recorded stimulated recall session, and (4) the final reflection papers.2
The data extracts selected for inclusion in this chapter highlight the quality
and character of the collaborative teaching/learning relationships (obuchenie) that
unfolded throughout the project and the role of the teacher educator in providing
responsive mediation that supported the teachers’ emerging conceptualizations of
and initial attempts at enacting L2 teaching. Analyzed from an emic perspective
using sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004), the data extracts highlight
(marked in bold font) the linguistic instantiations of how engagement in the
project exposed what these teachers brought to this learning-to-teach experience
(pre-understandings) as well as how they were experiencing what they were learn-
ing (perezhivanie). The data also signal a potential growth point, where a contradic-
tion or a sense of instability emerges, and capture the emergent, contingent, and
responsive nature of the teacher educator’s mediation. Within the structured medi-
ational spaces, IDZs emerge as the team and the teacher educator co-construct new
understandings in situations where their pre-understandings were inadequate.
IDZs are maintained as the teacher educator assists the team in gaining an expert’s
understanding of the subject matter content being taught and appropriate peda-
gogical resources to teach it. In other instances, mediational means are offered but
not taken up by the team, or taken up in unique ways as the team makes in-flight
decisions in response to immediate instructional needs. Finally, through dialogic
96 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

interaction and critical reflection, the team becomes consciously aware of the
theoretical and pedagogical reasoning for their instructional practices.

Enacting obuchenie: Structured mediational spaces and

responsive mediation
The team’s pre-understandings of parallelism
All four teachers admitted in their reflection papers that initially they did not
know what parallelism was or how to teach it. Their reflections expose their
perezhivanie about having to teach unfamiliar content that, as native speakers of
English, they had an intuitive (everyday) understanding of but lacked any sort of
academic (scientific) knowledge about or pedagogical expertise to teach it. This
quandary is captured nicely in the opening paragraph of Annie’s reflection paper.

Excerpt 1
When I first got the email saying we’d be teaching parallelisms, half of me groaned
and the other half breathed a sigh of relief. On one hand, I was happy to be teach-
ing something with substance and something that mattered and would be new
to the students, but on the other hand, teaching parallelism was new to me.
When I looked up parallelisms, I realized it was something I’d grown up using,
and although I was never formally taught about them, I use them all the time
just naturally. This brought up the challenge of “how do I teach something I
myself don’t fully grasp?” Until we sat down to plan our lessons, parallelisms
were one of those “I’ll know it if I see it” type of things.

Josh also expressed negative emotions about teaching an academic concept that
he initially perceived as unfamiliar to him, although his perezhivanie is expressed
in terms of the images he holds about formal schooling and teachers as holders
of all knowledge. His ‘panic’ is eased after seeking out an online resource that
enabled him to both recognize and name the concept of parallelism as something
with which he was actually quite familiar.

Excerpt 2
When we found out what our topic was going to be, I started to panic a bit
again. Our topic was parallelism and I had no clue what it was. I thought,
how did I get through school this long without knowing what parallel-
ism was? And what kind of indication was this about the teacher I was
going to be in that one ESL lesson? If there were questions would I even
be able to answer them? After reading about parallelism on the Purdue OWL
website, I learned that it was a simple concept and that I had actually known
about it all along, but never really thought about it or knew of a name for it.
From that point on I felt pretty good about the project.
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 97

The practice teach: Reconceptualizing parallelism

As they planned the lesson, the team admitted they relied heavily on open access
websites, such as the Purdue Online Writing Lab, for formal definitions and exam-
ples of sentences with parallel structure. In fact, at the start of the practice teach, Josh
essentially read a definition of parallelism taken directly from the Purdue OWL.

Excerpt 3
Josh: Great. So, what is parallelism? U:m basically parallel structure is
using the same pattern or words or similar grammatical struc-
tures to show that two or more ideas ha:ve the same level
of importance and this could happen in three ways, it could
happen at u:m with words, phrases or clauses. U:m the easiest
and most frequent way to join parallel structures is with the use of
coordinating conjunctions such as and (.) or or. (.) That’s from
Purdue OWL our savior. So, (.) just kidding ((laughs))

Josh’s characterization of parallelism as “grammatical structures” as defined

by the Purdue OWL website served as the conceptual frame through which the
team proceeded to teach the concept of parallelism. In fact, the introductory
portion of their practice teach lesson entailed presenting examples of sentences with
parallel structure and highlighting the different grammatical forms they may take
(e.g., use of gerunds, infinitives, prepositional phrases). In the following excerpt,
Annie, Josh, and Deb each present an example sentence by foregrounding its
grammatical structure and offering rather vague (everyday) explanations for its
parallel structure (e.g., “it flows,” “consistency”).

Excerpt 4
Annie: So you can see here we’ve used prepositional phrases to create
(.) a syncopated rhythm that you know adds to the flow of the
sentence and (.) it it just makes it a more balanced sentence and
you know i-it just it flows a lot better. (.)
Josh: Right. (.) U(h)m a:nd you can also use it in a clause “The GPS told
us that we should make a right, that we should get on to I-84, and
that we should drive for a 199 miles.” Um, an incorrect form would
be “The GPS told us that we should make a right, that we should get
onto I-84, and to drive for 199 miles.” So once again it just doesn’t
flow as well.
Deb: Basically consistency is key and like you were mentioning earlier
like going from –ing to like the infinitive like driving to drive
you have to make sure it’s consistent throughout the entire
sentence.
98 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

In preparation for the team’s first application activity, which Deb jokingly
refers to as ‘parallelisms gone wrong,’ she provides an additional example of faulty
parallel structure, once again noting its grammatical structure (infinitive vs. ger-
und) and stressing the importance of being consistent. Interestingly, this is the
first occasion where the team indicates that there may be more than one way
that these ‘faulty’ sentences might be corrected. It also reflects a focus on lan-
guage as form rather than social practice, which as we noted earlier, is the typical
­pre-understanding of language of these teachers.

Excerpt 5
Deb: So, a faulty parallelism would be “My uncle likes to eat in expensive
restaurants and visiting museums.” So as we can see here, in the very
beginning “to eat” is the infinitive but then it switches the next
verb to the –ing form which is not consistent as we said earlier.
So there are two ways that you cou:ld go about fixing this. Uh,
you could keep it in the infinitive and say “My uncle likes to eat in
expensive restaurants and to visit museums.” Uh, or you could go the
-ing route and say “My uncle likes eating in expensive restaurants and
visiting museums.” Uh, a second example- Yes?

Immediately following Deb’s explanation, the teacher educator picks up on

the notion of multiple correct answers and praises the team for building this into their
application activity. She links their decision to encourage multiple correct answers
to her own expert insights about the mindset of ESL students, explaining how
ESL students tend to conceptualize language learning as having ‘right or wrong’
answers. She also uses this opportunity to emphasize the educational value of
thinking about language as having multiple correct answers.

Excerpt 6
TE: I was just gonna say I really like the fact that you gave multiple
(.) correct answers. Because I think ESL students are often (.)
treated as “Here’s the right answer, here’s the wrong answer.”
But there’s often multiple ways stuff can be written. So I really like
that you have “It can be done this way, or it can be done this way.”
And I think that’s a- that’s a really good way for students to think
about these kind of grammatical structures, there isn’t one
right way that it can be done. (.) So, kudos.

Despite the teacher educator’s explicit mediation regarding the p­ edagogical

value of encouraging multiple correct answers, neither the team’s intuitive
pre-understandings of parallelism nor information gleaned from the Purdue
­
OWL website prove to be adequate during the application activity in which
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 99

they asked small groups of their classmates (CM) to correct a series of sentences
that contained inappropriate and/or missing parallel structure. In the following
exchange, the teacher educator prompts the team to discuss the corrected sen-
tences, indicating that there might be multiple correct answers.

Excerpt 7
Annie: Okay. I mean do you guys want to actually go over them?
TE:  Maybe one or two because I think there are (.) more than
one right answer?
Annie: [Sure. And you can direct your answers to our error master,
Mr. Ryan. (.)
Josh: Yeah.
TE: What did you guys think of (.) number one, your group?
CM1: Uh, ( ) says that, “The runner says that his new shoes are lighter,
faster, and more comfortable.”
Ryan: Y:es.
TE: [((laughter))
Annie: [Good
TE: Y:es.
Ryan: [Good [job. (.) It flows beautifully.
Annie: [Sounds g[ood.
Deb: [That’s one way-
TE: [(h)(.) And will you ask- will you ask them (.) wh:y?
Ryan: Yeah, why? Why d- Why do you think-
Class: ((laughter))
Ryan: I could do that. Why do you think it sounds best?

In this exchange, Ryan’s emphatic single word response (“Y:es”) to his

­classmate garners a good deal of laughter but it is challenged by the teacher
educator, who prompts him to explore the reasoning behind his classmate’s
choice. Interestingly, Deb attempts to interject the notion of multiple correct
answers (‘[That’s one way-’) but is overlapped by the teacher educator who con-
tinues to press Ryan to ask his classmates why they corrected this sentence as
they did.
Before CM1 is able to respond to Ryan’s question, another classmate, CM3,
offers an alternative answer, to which Ryan struggles to articulate any sort of aca-
demic explanation of what parallelism is or why writers might use it.

Excerpt 8
CM3: I also thought, maybe it “feels better.” (.)
TE: Ah, whatdya think Ryan?
Ryan: What’s that?
CM3: What if the last one ( ) “feels better” rather than “more comfortable”?
100 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Ryan: “Feels better?” I mean I guess that- that works with it.
CM3: I’m trying to keep- trying to keep the -er rhythm.
Ryan: Yeah [it’s like- it’s
TE: [Oh, bette:r. Mmm?
Ryan: 
I mean, it- it keeps the ending going (.) all the way through-
out, (.) that’s- that’s a parallelism.

We highlight Excerpts 7 and 8 as signaling a potential growth point, at least

for Ryan, who, given his emphatic single word response “Y:es,” was clearly not
expecting to be asked to explain why CM1’s contribution was or was not an
appropriate use of parallel structure. The shared laughter and Ryan’s sarcastic
mimicking of the teacher educator’s prompt, “Yeah, why?” signal the emergence
of a contradiction, or a sense of instability at being asked to assess CM1’s con-
tribution without having the necessary competence to do so. This contradiction
continues in Excerpt 8 where, once again, Ryan uses very tentative language,
(“I mean I guess that- that works with it”) and vague explanations (“it keep the end-
ing going (.) all the way throughout”) as he attempts to assess the appropriateness of
CM3’s offer of “feels better.”
Sensing that the team may be struggling to assess unanticipated answers from
their classmates, the teacher educator provides responsive mediation that builds on
Annie’s earlier reference to syncopated rhythm and CM3’s reference to trying to
keep the rhythm by modeling a pedagogical strategy that assists the team in deter-
mining if the corrected sentence has an appropriate parallel structure.

Excerpt 9
TE:  Well let’s- lets try it. (.) “The runner says that his new shoes
are lighter, faster, and feel better.” How’s the rhythm?
CM4: Or just “better.” ((short laugh)) Cause I-
TE: Better? (.)
Josh: Yeah, cause I (think)-
TE: Oh, how about that, “lighter, faster, and better.” (.)

Then Annie, addressing the class as if they were actual ESL students, connects
the teacher educator’s references to multiple correct answers to the notion of convey-
ing one’s message. The teacher educator builds on this connection, emphasizing
again that the team is likely to get multiple correct answers, and then reframes par-
allelism as a rhetorical strategy for conveying a writer’s message (effect on the reader).
The teacher educator mediates responsively in three ways: by revoicing how a
teacher might ask questions to get at the rhetorical effect of parallel structure,
by providing a rationale for why writers choose to use parallel structure, and
by inserting the academic definition that parallel structures in academic writing
function as a rhetorical strategy.
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 101

Excerpt 10
Annie: So we see, there’s lots of different ways to answer this. That’s
one of the beauties with this, is that there is no exact right way, it
can really come down to, what message you most strongly want
to convey.
TE: So that’s another suggestion. (.) Cause I suspect you’ll get different
answers, so: you could ask the class, “So, when I say it this way,
what’s the impression you get? When I say it another way,
what’s the impression you get?” Because all:: of this has to do
with the effect this has on the reader. Right? What- as a writer,
what effect do I want this to have on my reader? And that’s when
you’re trying to figure out (.) how to use this as a rhetorical strat-
egy, that’s what you want your writers to focus on. So that you can
ask, if they give you different answers, “Well, so, how did, what’s
the effect of that on the reader?” (.)

Through this series of interactions an IDZ emerges and a more robust under-
standing of parallelism begins to take shape. This is accomplished as the team
build this understanding by thinking together, simultaneously engaging in the activ-
ity of teaching in this mediational space where they are expected to play the part
of being a teacher, try out their instructional ideas, and receive supportive feed-
back, all the while consciously and collectively analyzing their own thinking and
activities. The emergent nature of their understanding of parallelism is striking.
They pick up on each other’s incidental references to critical notions that begin
to reframe the concept of parallelism as much more than grammatical structures.
This is led by the teacher educator who mediates responsively with repeated
emphasis on asking why, multiple correct answers, and effect on the reader.

The practice teach: Engineering student participation

In addition to working to reorient the team’s understanding of the concept of
parallelism, there were several instances during the practice teach when the teacher
educator focused the team’s attention on instructional strategies that garner greater
levels of student participation. Clearly not preplanned, these moments of respon-
sive mediation emerged at different points throughout the practice teach as the team
attempted to enact the various components of their lesson plan. For example,
during the second application activity the team asked their classmates to listen to
American president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address and use a transcript
to identify instances of parallelism. After listening to the speech and following
along on the transcript, Annie’s open-ended question, “All righty, who heard some
parallelisms in there?” was met with three seconds of silence and scattered laughter
from the class. Deb’s follow up attempt, “Would anybody like to point out one that
102 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

they found?” was also met with silence. At this moment, the teacher educator
interrupts the flow of the activity and asks the team about the level of student
participation in the ESL class they observed. (Readers are reminded of Abra’s
similar types of questions to encourage participation in Chapter 5.)

Excerpt 11
TE: Um, does this group tend to participate quickly and easily or do you
have to engineer it a little bit? (.)
Ryan: She like- when I-
TE: Like when you guys observed.
Ryan: Whenever I observed they were kinda (.) they were kinda like mel-
lowed out [they really weren’t- they really weren’t saying to much
Class: [((scattered laughter))
TE: Okay well the reason I ask is that you can ask that open-ended ques-
tion “Can anybody find a parallelism?” but you often get (.) silence
so one way is to say “Can you find one in the first paragraph?
Can you find one in the second paragraph? Can you find one
in the third paragraph?” and then ((snaps three times)) they’ll
go like that. So then it’s again it’s just (.) you may not need to do
that, not all groups need that, but if they do, think about that.
Ryan:  That’s what happened. She she like asked the question and
after ten seconds of silence she called on someone.
TE: Yeah. So you can engineer it that way if you want or (.) but
often times when you ask that open-ended question (.) It’s
not that people don’t want to answer it’s like “Okay I need
to think, I need to look” it takes a little time, you know. (.)
And it also allows you- your your students to say “Okay I’m
not looking at the whole thing but I’m looking at (.) a piece
of it.” So cognitively it’s less complex to do.
Annie: And we could also mix it up by saying you know (.) “Morgan
there’s a parallelism in the second paragraph, can you tell us
why?” [And so we might do some questions like that if we’re
getting some blank silence. (.)
TE: There you go.

During this interaction, Ryan confirms that the ESL instructor also struggles
with getting the ESL students to participate. Addressing this concern, the teacher
educator revoices how to ask a question that can lessen the cognitive load by focus-
ing ESL students’ attention on a single paragraph from the speech. She also provides
the team with insight into how ESL students might struggle when faced with broad,
open-ended questions. Twice in Excerpt 11, the teacher educator uses the term
‘engineer’ when talking about student participation. Their shared understanding
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 103

of this term and its contextualized meaning originates from a handout the teacher
educator had previously distributed in the class that contains a series of pedagogical
tools that teachers can use to foster greater levels of student e­ ngagement and partic-
ipation. On the handout, Engineering Participation is defined as:

Don’t assume students will know how you want them to participate.
Arrange your activities so that students have opportunities to participate in
different ways (individually, round-robin, pairs, small groups, large groups)
and be explicit (meta-talk) about how you want them to participate.

Thus, a pedagogical tool from the course handout, which began as a material
tool, reemerges during the practice teach as a mediational means for how to think
about formulating more targeted and less open-ended questions. The teacher
educator references this pedagogical tool and reiterates its pedagogical value in
garnering greater levels of student participation. Interestingly, Annie projects this
pedagogical tool into the future by revoicing how she might reorient her ques-
tions if, in fact, the ESL students are reluctant to participate during the actual teach.
Overall, the responsive mediation that emerged throughout the practice teach
included various mediational means. The teacher educator sometimes revoiced
how a teacher might talk to accomplish a particular instructional goal. There
were multiple instances when the teacher educator provided an explicit rationale
for enacting a particular pedagogical strategy or emphasized a more sophisticated,
more nuanced definition of the subject matter the team was expected to teach.
Other times, she modeled particular pedagogical strategies and in doing so pro-
vided insight into the mindset of the ESL students that the team would eventually
teach. Ultimately, the quality of her mediation was emergent, dynamic, and con-
tingent on the moment-to-moment dialogic interactions that occurred through-
out the practice teach. As we will see in the next section, the consequences of this
responsive mediation plays out in interesting ways during the actual teach.

The actual teach: Mediational means enacted

as pedagogical strategies
While the content and structure of the team’s initial lesson plan did not change sig-
nificantly from the practice teach to the actual teach, how they carried out each segment
of the lesson and how they talked about the concept of parallelism did. And while all
four teachers continued to make references to ‘grammatical structures’ throughout
the actual teach, these were supplemented with instances where the team took up the
mediational means of multiple correct answers and asking why as pedagogical strategies.
In the following excerpt, Deb, Annie, and Ryan all ask if other groups had
alternative answers, in essence, signaling to the ESL students that more than one
right answer is desirable.
104 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Excerpt 12
Deb: Could you read the whole sentence please? (h)sorry.
S2:  “The runner says that his shoes are lighter, faster, and more
comfortable.”
Deb: Great. Now, that is one way you could do it. Is there another
way that you think- I mean, most of these, you can do in a mul-
titude of ways, so does any other group have something other
than that? (4.0) Anyone?
S7: They use- (.) Or, they like what-
Ryan: They said “lighter, faster, and more comfortable.”
S7: Ah, okay.
Annie: Which, they got it right, but we were [just curious if there’s any
other ( )
Ryan: [Yeah, it’s like I told you guys, there’s a couple different ways
you can write these.
S7: We- we said, “The runner says the- that his shoes are light, fast, and
feel more comfortable.” Or just “comfortable.”
Ryan: Comfortable, yeah.

This pedagogical strategy of asking for multiple correct answers repeatedly opened
up spaces for the ESL students to participate, by both contributing alternative
answers and asking questions about the appropriateness of their choices. This
happened most often when the team used the pedagogical strategy of asking why,
as is evidenced below where the ESL students elaborate on their choices and
demonstrate their understanding of parallelism.

Excerpt 13
Deb: U:h, ((pointing to S7 and S8)) boys in the back, could you do the
next one?
S8: Yeah. (.) U:h “So we ran to my car, sat in our seats, and drove away?”
Deb: Okay, why did you choose “sat”?
S8: Uh, it sounded like (.) the proper thing.
S7: The proper tense.
S8: Yeah.
S7: Cause it’s past.
Deb: Past? “Ran” and “drove,” exactly. (.) A:nd ((pointing to S9 and S10)).
S9:  “We were just riding along at a safe, responsible, and con-
trolled speed.” Uh, this word describes the speed and they are
adjectives.
Deb: Perfect.

Thus, an important instructional consequence of the shift in the team’s

­conceptual understanding of parallelism from ‘grammatical structure’ to allowing
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 105

for multiple correct answers is greater levels of ESL student participation and engage-
ment in the lesson.
Interestingly, the mediational means that emerged in the practice teach did not
simply operate as isolated pedagogical strategies in the actual teach, but instead were
sometimes combined and expressed uniquely by individual teachers. In the fol-
lowing excerpt, the ESL students had just listened to Kennedy’s inaugural address
and were asked to use the transcript to identify instances of parallelism. Annie’s
framing of parallelism contains hints of rhythm (“natural pauses”) that she links to
effect on the reader (“let the message sink in”) as a rationale for why parallelism is
used as a rhetorical strategy (“another reason why we use parallelism”).

Excerpt 14
Annie: All right so that one was chock full of parallelisms and another thing
you’ll notice you’re looking at a written version of it but you can even
hear them as he speaks there’s natural pauses in his (.) in his speaking
and that’s another (.) really big clue and that’s another reason
why we use parallelisms because by using them it gives you a
place to naturally pause and let the message sink in.

Ryan also demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of parallelism during

a segment of the actual teach in which he uses the example of résumé writing
as a real-life context in which appropriate use of parallelism can affect how an
employer might perceive an applicant.While he continues to rely on rather vague
language to describe parallelism, he is, for the first time during the project, linking
the concept of parallelism to the effect it may have on a reader (employer).

Excerpt 15
Ryan: And uh a practical way to use this where you’re actually uh gonna
need it in real life one day down the road is a résumé . . . So
uh a wrong way to make a list of your accomplishments would say
“Responsible for editing copy, supervised layout, three years experi-
ence as a news writer” (.) Uh, that’s switching tenses back and forth (.)
it doesn’t look good (.) it doesn’t sound right. The correct way to say
it would be uh “edited copy one year, supervised layout for two years,
wrote news for three years.” (.) They’re all in the same tense, it
looks good, and you (.) you’ve shortened it up enough that
they can read it briefly and give them a good idea of what
you know how to do. (2.0) Parallelisms.

Additionally, there were multiple instances during the actual teach when the
team appeared to make in-flight decisions regarding ways to engineer student
participation. During the team’s final application activity they asked the ESL
students to complete a Mad Lib: a comical story-like structure in which each of
106 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

the five sentences had a parallel structure where either the first, second, or third
word was left blank. During the practice teach, the team had asked their classmates
to complete the entire Mad Lib. However, during the actual teach, Deb assigned
one sentence to each pair, stating explicitly to “just focus on one sentence,” which
would “make sure that you’re looking at the structure and the form that we’ve been talking
about all day.”

Excerpt 16
Deb: . . . you’re gonna work in your same pairs you’ve been working on a:nd
if you could just focus on one sentence so if you ((pointing at S1
and S2)) could just work on the first blank, if you ((pointing at S9 and
S10)) could do the second blank sentence, if you ((pointing at S5 and
S6)) could do the third, ((pointing at S7 and S8)) fourth, and ((pointing
at S3 and S4)) fifth blank. U:m so we just want you to do one sen-
tence u:m so you want to make sure that you’re looking at the
structure and the form that we’ve been talking about all day
a:nd then we’re going to come together and we’re going to read them
aloud a:nd uh if we have time talk about uh (.) why they’re awesome.
Okay.

While lessening the cognitive load of the activity, assigning a single sentence
to each pair allowed the follow-up discussion activity to flow smoothly because
the ESL students could anticipate the order in which they would be expected to
participate.
However, there were other instances where the mediational means offered
by the teacher educator during the practice teach were not taken up by the team
during the actual teach. For example, as she did during the practice teach, after the
Kennedy inaugural address listening activity, Annie proceeded to ask the same
open-ended question, which was met with silence. However, instead of giving
the ESL students an opportunity to answer or reorienting her question, Ryan
quickly jumps in, asks for volunteers, and then almost immediately calls on S8.
This interactional pattern continues throughout this activity as Annie takes up this
same strategy, directly calling on other pairs to participate.

Excerpt 17
Annie:  So can we just quickly get some people to (.) you know put
forth some of the parallelisms that they found? (2.0)
Ryan: Any volunteers? (1.0) ((pointing at S8)) You sir.
S7: U:m second paragraph (.) or no the first one “As well as a beginning”
and then it goes on “as well as change.” (.) Could that be a parallelism?
Annie: Yep, that definitely is.
Ryan: Yes it is. (.)
Annie: So “as” is your clue thing.
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 107

S7: Yeah.
Annie: We’re using as to set up both of them and then we follow with
something different. (.) Alright how about another. ((pointing to
S3 and S4)) Can we get you guys in the corner to give us one?
S9: Uh the third (.) the third paragraph, start from “let the word go forth”
and (.) “born in this century, tempered by war” and uh to: (.) yeah.

Interestingly, even though Annie failed to take up the teacher educator’s sug-
gestion to ask less open-ended questions, during the stimulated recall session she not
only becomes consciously aware of her inability to self-regulate the form of her
solicitations, she also recognizes how one of her teammates was able to do so and
thus successfully engineered student participation.

The stimulated recall session: Conscious awareness develops

The stimulated recall session functioned as an additional structured mediational space
for the team to become consciously aware of their emerging understanding of
parallelism as well as various pedagogical strategies to teach it. In the excerpt
below, the teacher educator prompts the team to reflect, once again, on the notion
of multiple correct answers.

Excerpt 18
TE: One of the questions I wanted to ask you- This could have been done
in multiple ways, right? I mean, they could have corrected it differently.
Josh: Oh sure. I mean, there wasn’t (.) just one right answer.
TE: But did they pretty much all do them the same?
Deb: I’m trying to remember.
Josh: Um, well I know a couple people had different ones because I
think- (.) I think we said, “Does anyone else have anything-” I
mean, we might’ve [said “Does anyone else have anything-”
Deb: [Um, (.) like we went arou:nd. Um, Annie said the back group had
some- I think it was ( ). They had something different. So what um
what we did is we called on someone else, but when we asked “Does
anyone else have anything?” they were a little timid but we kn:ew
that they had something different, and that it wasn’t wrong,
so we felt okay to like- I think- I think we called on them or they felt
confident enough to do that, but um I think walking around we kind
of saw where everyone was at and kind of saw differences and then
we wanted to make sure we highlighted that it could all be
different.
Josh: Yeah, cause people in the back had- cause we had our own answer
sheet with just one answer on it and I think that’s why Annie
wanted to call on them because they had something different
than our answer. (.) And it was pretty unique.
108 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

[BREAK]
TE: Do you remember what they- what they were struggling with?
Ryan: Uh, they uh- it was the one about the shoes that were “lighter, faster,
and felt (.) felt comfortable.” They said “Would more comfortable
work here?” or “felt better.” [Yeah. It was- it was (.) interesting
cause it was one that, like, I didn’t have written down on like
the answer sheet, like one of the possible ones but it worked.
TE: Yeah, yeah. Which is good. I mean that shows them that- And I
think (.) either Deb or Annie or maybe both of them said, “There’s
multiple ways you can do this. There’s not a right answer,
but there is a right pattern.” And that, I think- I think they got
that. I think that was pretty clear.

For Deb, the notion of multiple correct answers becomes a motivating factor
for choosing to call on other groups, opening up the floor for greater levels of
student participation. Thus, in the activity of the actual teach, the mediational
means offered by the teacher educator during the practice teach become linked
up and emerge in the rationale that Deb uses to justify her instructional deci-
sions. For both Josh and Ryan, an unexpected answer (not on their answer
sheet) is portrayed as desirable. Throughout this interaction the teacher educa-
tor repeatedly focuses the team’s attention on multiple correct answers, allowing
them to externalize not only how they asked questions during the lesson but
also why they chose to encourage multiple correct answers. The teacher educator’s
targeted yet open-ended questions create mediational spaces for conscious
awareness to develop.
In another instance, Annie praises her teammate’s consistent use of asking why,
which allows the teacher educator to make explicit the pedagogical reasoning
behind this particular strategy.

Excerpt 19
Annie: And she did a good job of (.) pulling apart each of them and asking
why they got it. I think (.) if I had been leading this I would have just
been so caught up in getting through the activity that I would have
forgotten to ask why but she did a good job of remembering
for everyone.
TE: Because the more you ask them to explain why they made the
choice the more conscious they get of the concept. So.

And finally, despite the fact that during the actual teach Annie failed to take up
the teacher educator’s suggestion to ask less open-ended questions, she is con-
sciously aware that she did not do this, but was able to see how her teammate,
Deb, had accomplished this during the final application activity. Such conscious
awareness, Vygotsky (1987) argues, is necessary for designing and carrying out
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 109

future actions. Additionally, Annie’s recognition of this pedagogical strategy gave

the teacher educator an opportunity to reinforce its pedagogical value and revoice
not only how a teacher might accomplish this but also what ESL students might
be thinking as a result. Interestingly, both Annie and the teacher educator engage
in revoicing, a mediational means that appears to be emerging as a psychological
tool for Annie to reimagine her teaching in the future.

Excerpt 20
Annie: One thing we could have done, and Deb definitely did it with her
Mad Libs, and (.) I knew we should have done it but I got so
caught up in teaching and it just slipped my mind is warn
them ahead of time, you know, “Okay, we’re gonna do this
and you guys are going to find the first, the first uh parallel-
ism” um you know to reduce the cognitive load and also just
give them a heads up, “We are going to call on you in a minute
or two.”
TE: Exactly. And that’s that whole thing I was talking about making
your instruction predictable by engineering participation. So
it’s all that meta-talk about ((in sing-song voice)) “what we’re gonna
do and why I’m asking you to do it, and when you’re done,
by the way, you’re gonna do this” and you are much more
likely to get participation if you do that because then they know
((less pronounced sing-sing)) “Okay, I’m gonna get number two,
and I’m gonna have to answer it, so I’m gonna be ready”
and they may still be a little (.) reluctant, but it, but it does help, so
absolutely (.) absolutely.

Overall, the team’s conscious awareness of the academic concept of parallel-

ism and how to teach it emerges as the teacher educator probes the team’s new
understandings by grounding it in the activity of teaching they just experienced
and then emphasizing its pedagogical appropriateness.

Reflection papers: New realizations about teaching ESL

The team’s reflection papers provide rich evidence that they had begun to make
broader connections between teaching the lesson on parallelism and the teaching
of ESL in general. Each acknowledged a gap between their intuitive knowledge
of English and inadequate knowledge of how to teach it. They also expressed an
emerging view that teaching is contingent on understanding content, students,
context, and purpose. More importantly, each attributed the process of collec-
tively planning, practicing, enacting, and reflecting on the lesson as enabling them
to reach these new realizations. As just one example, Ryan sums up this new real-
ization in his final reflection paper.
110 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Excerpt 21
One of the main factors I learned about ESL teaching through this assignment
was that we as native English speakers use these language techniques on a daily
basis and do not realize the difficulty level that nonnative speakers are
faced with when we go to teach them something. As I mentioned in the
recall I was not really sure what the function of parallel structure was, but
after a brief review of it, I realized that I use it on a daily basis. And although the
concept and the use of the literary element seemed simple and logical to me, it
was not until we as a group were deciding how to explain it to the stu-
dents that [we realized] the students might have trouble understanding
what it is and why they should use it.

Obuchenie, responsive mediation, and the team’s emerging

development
Considering the dialogic interactions that emerged throughout the various
structured mediational spaces of the project in terms of obuchenie, the actions
and intentions of the teacher educator were predicated on recognizing the
team’s pre-understandings of the concept of parallelism and how they were
attempting to teach it, which were evident in both the reflection papers and
the practice teach. As the teacher educator became attuned to this she worked
dialogically to insert specific mediational means that pushed the team to con-
sider a broader understanding of the concept. Yet her mediation was contin-
gent and dynamic—it built off of the team’s attempts to enact the lesson while
simultaneously pushing them to broaden their understanding of the concept,
with an emphasis on its pedagogical value and explicit modeling of how this
could be accomplished instructionally. When the team enacted the actual teach
these mediational means became some of the very pedagogical strategies that
the team used to talk about and teach the concept of parallelism. And through
guided reflection on the activity of teaching, the team became consciously
aware of these new understandings and to some extent was able to articulate a
more nuanced understanding of the unique nature of teaching ESL. Over the
long term, of course, such new understandings would need to be repeatedly
materialized in the activities of being and becoming a teacher in order for these
externalized dialogic interactions with this teacher educator to become inter-
nalized psychological tools that support these teachers’ ­developing teacher/
teaching expertise.
In this chapter we have highlighted how engagement in the extended team
teaching project created opportunities for authentic participation in the activities
of language teaching, opening up varied and multiple structured mediational spaces
for responsive mediation to emerge throughout this initial learning-to-teach experi-
ence. As is often the case with beginning teachers, the team, perhaps some mem-
bers more than others, lacked sufficient knowledge of what they were expected to
 Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge 111

teach or how to teach it. Providing mediation that is responsive to the immediate
needs of each individual teacher within the team can be quite challenging, and
perhaps only through micro-level retrospective analysis, as we have done here,
can teacher educators recognize signals of teachers’ pre-understandings, their past
and present perezhivanie, or potential growth points, and then calibrate their media-
tion so it is maximally beneficial to both the individual and the team.
For the extended team teaching project showcased in this chapter, it was the
structured mediational spaces and the responsive mediation that emerged in those spaces
that created opportunities for the teacher educator and team members to build
a fuller, more conceptual understanding of the content they were teaching and
to teach it in ways that fostered greater student engagement and participation. It
is our contention that it was the simultaneous attention to content (parallelism)
and pedagogy (e.g., multiple answers, asking why), the teacher educator’s respon-
sive mediation, and multiple opportunities to verbalize, materialize, and enact the
teachers’ emerging understandings of both content and pedagogy, which worked
in concert to foster the development of greater levels of teacher/teaching exper-
tise. By tracing teacher development as it is in the process of formation, we are
able to see the interdependence between content and pedagogy; in essence, the
what and how of teaching are united, develop in relation to one another, and lay
the foundation for the development of conceptual thinking, the basis of teacher/
teaching expertise.

Notes
1 We recognize the stimulated recall session as the same activity as the digital
video protocol detailed in Chapter 5; however, in this particular project this
phrasing was used throughout.
2 Some data sets reprinted with permission from Wiley. Johnson, K. E. (2015).
Reclaiming the relevance of L2 teacher education, The Modern Language
Journal, 99(3), 515-528.

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8
REIMAGINING TEACHER
IDENTITY-IN-ACTIVITY

“I wanted to create a synergism between Genre Analysis and the institution’s

­teach-for-test grammar.”

In most L2 teacher education programs, coursework is the most visible and

­recurring professional development activity through which teachers are exposed
to and construct their understandings of the knowledge base of L2 teacher educa-
tion. The universality of coursework in an L2 teacher education program, how-
ever, conceals how diverse the experience of taking a course can be for teachers.
The nature of courses differs depending on numerous factors, such as competing
conceptions of language and language learning shaping a program and/or indi-
vidual professors, and the academic home of the program (e.g., college of edu-
cation or liberal arts). This array of factors converges in some fashion, resulting
in core courses intended to provide foundational knowledge that the program
deems essential to being able to teach a second language, and electives reflecting
the vision of the program or the academic strengths of its professors. Courses dif-
fer in terms of academic content undoubtedly, but also in terms of how they are
taught, providing both opportunities and constraints for teacher learning. In our
experience, teacher candidates can unhesitatingly identify courses and professors
they found invaluable in their development, and those they did not.
What constitutes the knowledge base of language teaching has been subject to
vigorous debate since Freeman and Johnson put forward their reconceptualization
in 1998 (Bartels, 2004; Freeman & Johnson, 2004, 2005; Tarone & Allwright, 2005;
Yates & Muchisky, 2003). Research on language teacher cognition has heightened
these discussions as the field has come to understand L2 teachers as actively con-
structing and enacting their understandings of teaching and learning, based on their
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 115

sociohistorical experiences/activities as learners, learners of ­teaching, and teachers

in diverse instructional contexts. Moreover, research on language teacher cog-
nition has deepened our understanding of teacher learning as emerging in and
through social practices and interaction, especially the cultural practices of lan-
guage learning and teaching. In spite of this ‘sociocultural turn’ in language teacher
education (Johnson, 2006), Freeman’s (1989) critique of the normative practices
of L2 teacher education still remains pertinent: more than a few programs equate
knowledge of research in second language acquisition and applied linguistics with
knowledge—and abilities—to teach language and to develop as teachers. We can
critique such programs from a sociocultural perspective as detaching the academic
concepts (Vygotsky, 1935/1994) to which teachers are exposed from the meaningful
goal-oriented activities of actual teaching. Teachers may exhibit empty verbalism
(Vygotsky, 1935/1994), meaning they are able to mechanically reproduce academic
concepts, yet those concepts have not become internalized as psychological tools for
thinking, which then can be used to (re)shape what they do in classrooms. Because
teacher cognition cannot be removed from the activity of teaching, indeed “what
is learned is fundamentally shaped by how it is learned, and vice versa” (Johnson &
Golombek, 2011, p. 3, emphasis in original). What we teach in coursework, and
how we teach it, and how we mediate our teachers in the process, are at the core of
what we do as teacher educators. And this applies to all professors involved in the
coursework that makes up L2 teacher education programs, regardless of whether or
not they have conceptualized themselves and their work as being about supporting
the learning of teaching and the development of teacher/teaching expertise.
Activities/assignments in L2 teacher education courses, when conceptualized as
a teaching/learning (obuchenie) opportunity rather than as an evaluation of teachers’
specific academic or content knowledge, can provide the kind of systematically orga-
nized formal education that Vygotsky (1986) envisioned as being the leading activity
for introducing academic concepts and then engaging in what he described as ascending
from the abstract to the concrete (see Chapter 1). Activities/assignments in L2 teacher
education programs, by providing interaction of everyday and academic concepts in
goal-oriented activities that a teacher might undertake in a ‘located’ teaching context,
can help bridge the theory/practice divide and thus promote praxis (Freire, 1970).
This notion is crucial because even teachers who are conceptually committed to a
certain instructional approach may still struggle with implementing activities in their
classrooms that align with that approach for various reasons, eventually reproducing
the very practices that they had hoped to change. The dominant cultural practices
of a particular institution and culture can override how a teacher has learned to
conceptualize teaching in a teacher education program (Smagorinsky, Cook, Moore,
Jackson, & Fry, 2004). For example, a teacher in a Japanese language classroom used
English to establish classroom order and Japanese as a means to enhance English liter-
acy skills in the face of institutional and political demands rather than using teaching
practices theorized in the field of language teaching and learning, such as communi-
cative language teaching (Cross, 2006; Cross & Gearon, 2007).
116 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

When thinking about coursework as supporting teacher learning in L2 teacher

education programs, we need to consider several interrelated dimensions: the
professors who teach them (their views on second language acquisition, lan-
guage, and how they position themselves), the subject matter content (what they
teach), the activities they create to teach that content (how they teach), and what
teachers take from participating in those activities (teacher learning). From our
Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective, we see classroom activities and/or
course assignments (how professors teach) as cultural practices and artifacts that
create mediational spaces for teacher candidates to engage with that content and
manipulate relevant linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, and interactional resources so
that teachers may ultimately support student language learning. In other words,
the activities/assignments (materials tools) are not a kind of responsive mediation in
and of themselves, but how teachers interact with those tools can most certainly
mediate their thinking and teaching activity.Teacher educators have to think pur-
posefully about what their activities/assignments are designed to accomplish, how
they will connect theory and practice, what kinds of mediational spaces they
create, and the role that they will play as these activities/assignments are carried
out. Professors, as teacher educators, thus play a pivotal role in both designing and
implementing classroom activities and course assignments that create the condi-
tions for responsive mediation to emerge.
Such activities/assignments, moreover, are not intended to simply transfer
knowledge. Rather, the teacher educator engages teachers in developing their
teacherly thinking (Golombek, 2011) as they situate these activities/assignments in
terms of their local context, including learners’ abilities, needs, and goals, and the
student learning objectives of the institution. Classroom activities/assignments as
cultural practices and artifacts similarly function as material tools that are used to
direct teacher thinking through social interaction with peers, the professor, the
teacher him/herself, and the teacher’s students (if teaching while taking course-
work). The object of these activities within coursework then is to provide that ini-
tial ‘safe zone’ for teachers to grapple, or play, with their understanding of academic
concepts through social activities, engaging in the kind of sustained participation
with these concepts that they can internalize gradually while addressing their own
students’ abilities, needs, and goals through curriculum and instruction. Readers
are reminded that Chapter 7 provides another example of a course assignment,
the extended team teaching project, which offers multiple structured mediational
spaces that provide opportunities for responsive mediation to emerge.

Engagement in narrative activity

To create a ‘safe zone,’ teacher educators have progressively exploited the value of
teachers engaging in narrative activity, oral and written, as a form of professional
development as their learning-to-teach “experience is literally talked into mean-
ingfulness” (Shore, 1996, p. 58). As we mentioned in Chapter 1, we have explored
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 117

how narrative functions as a mediational tool, both distinctively and interactively,

to support teacher learning by opening up teacher thinking, feeling, and doing
to expert guidance (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). When teachers articulate their
perceptions and experiences concerning their learning-to-teach experience, nar-
rative as externalization may unearth what is often tacit—understandings, beliefs,
emotions, values, and assessments. Narrative as verbalization functions as a way to
regulate the thinking process through the intentional insertion of academic concepts
(Vygotsky, 1986), whether the teacher articulates such concepts her/himself and/
or the teacher educator mediates through concepts as psychological tools to sup-
port understanding. Narrative as systematic examination functions to make explicit
the interface between the how and what: how teachers work through narrative
activity will fundamentally shape what they learn. Engaging in narrative activity
and inquiry within L2 teacher education provides a conduit for teacher intro-
spection and sense-making, as well as teachers’ explanation in their own words for
“how, when, and why new understandings emerge, understandings that can lead
to transformed conceptualizations of oneself as a teacher and transformed modes
of engagement in the activities of teaching” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011, p. 490).
Engagement in narrative activity often exposes teachers’ emotional and cognitive
dissonance, a critical issue that we discussed in Chapter 3, which may lead to the
emergence of growth points, through which responsive mediation could then emerge.
When we discuss classroom activity/assignments in coursework from a socio-
cultural perspective, thus, we are arguing for a radically different understanding
of how teacher educators approach their classroom teaching: one that integrates
authentic cultural practices of teachers in ‘real’ teaching within a ‘located’ instruc-
tional context; one that promotes praxis; and one that encourages verbalization of
cognition, emotion, and activity. This understanding requires teacher educators to
create learning opportunities that are intentional, deliberate, and goal-directed; to
be able to ‘see’ teachers’ thinking and development unfold as they engage in these
activities (Johnson & Golombek, 2003); and to be able to calibrate their medi-
ation in and through these activities/assignments to support the expression and
development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise.We suspect that many teacher edu-
cators, ourselves included, will automatically say, “I already do that in my teacher
education practices.” It is thus, we reiterate, not the practices themselves that
inherently lead to responsive mediation but what we intend and do in our practices
and in or relationship with teachers that enable us to ‘see’ a teacher’s thinking; to
identify the constellation of a teacher’s emotion, cognition, and activity; and to
facilitate teacher reciprocity, so we can work with teachers at the ‘ceilings’ of their
potential (ZPDs).
We admit from our own experiences as teacher educators that we have not
always fulfilled this ideal in our own practices (e.g., Golombek, 2015). True
to what we advocate with the teachers with whom we work, we have, in the
writing of this book in particular, systematically investigated our practices and
our mediation on the social plane to support our own development as teacher
118 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

educators. Our engaging in dialogic interaction about the motives and objects of
our ­activities, how we mediate individuals within those activities, and the conse-
quences of our mediation has enabled us to become more transparent about our
own motives, objects, and pedagogical reasoning, as well as more coherent in what
we do and why we do it. It has pushed our thinking and doing outside the ‘sim-
ulating teaching’ box to imagine ways, undoubtedly with challenges, to create
authentic teacher development practices for particular students with particular
objectives in particular classrooms in particular institutions. It has also pushed us
to bring a heightened level of mindfulness to the challenges of dynamic, emer-
gent responsive mediation.
In this chapter we examine the concept and enactment of responsive mediation
in a distinct manner from the other chapters.We have so far primarily detailed the
moment-to-moment and asynchronous oral and written interactions between
teacher educators and teachers within the cultural practices in which they occur,
where teacher educators gauge where teachers are and calibrate their mediation
responsively in order to enhance the professional development of L2 teachers. In
this chapter, we consider how activities and assignments in a ­g raduate-level course
can function holistically as material tools mediating a beginning teacher through
a trio of dynamics: (1) the teacher educator’s mediational intent behind the
activities/assignments in this particular course, which include the material tools
designed for the course, or teacher educator mediation ‘at-a-­distance’; (2) the
teacher’s taking up of the tools, that is, how the teacher enacts the activities and
assignments in a graduate-level course on genre; and (3) students’ influence, how
the teacher’s new understanding of his students’ motives, as well as the affordances
and constraints embedded within his teaching context, reshaped his understand-
ing of teaching grammar, and his identity-in-activity (Cross, 2006). To explain how
this trio interacts, we first describe three instructional activities/assignments
embedded in a graduate-level course on genre that function as material tools, and
then the teacher educator’s mediational intent behind them. Next, we present
the case of Patrick,1 an ESL teacher facing a contradiction, a growth point, in his
teaching of grammar, and how he enacted these activities/assignments in that
graduate course, connecting them as material tools to his current, past, and future
(imagined) teaching context. Though the material tools and how Patrick enacted
them no doubt created opportunities for moment-to-moment and asynchronous
responsive mediation, our focus in this chapter is on how the activities and assign-
ments functioned as structured mediational spaces and how Patrick took them up
at-a-distance, and thus illustrates the evolution of his professional development.

The graduate course context

The course syllabus described in this chapter was a graduate-level course that
examined “different theoretical approaches to the concept of genre and how it has informed
approaches to second language teaching,” focusing on both written and spoken genres.
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 119

The teachers were introduced to the history and conceptions of genre and genre
analysis, especially in terms of three major schools of genre (Hyon, 1996), includ-
ing English for Specific Purposes, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and New
Rhetoric; other relevant constructs; and common instructional practices of each
approach. Greater emphasis was placed on the first two schools of genre given
their explicit focus on genre as an organizing principle in instruction. Teachers
read seminal pieces from each of the perspectives; conducted genre analyses from
the first two approaches, such as move analysis (Swales, 1990) and relational
perspectives, that is semantic relationships between structural elements in texts
(Paltridge, 1995, 2001) on genre analysis; conducted discourse analyses of different
spoken genres (e.g., McCarthy, 1998); designed and critiqued genre-based activi-
ties; and designed a genre-based curriculum unit as a final project.
The class met one day per week for three hours. This time frame facilitated
teacher candidates undertaking of genre/discourse analysis of short excerpts in
class, as well as sufficient time for discussion of their analyses and implications
for instruction. Attending the course were eight graduate students (five from a
Department of Linguistics and three from a College of Education), one under-
graduate majoring in Linguistics, and one visiting scholar, an English professor
from China. Five of these teacher candidates were in a position to design a cur-
riculum unit in the genre course that they could implement in their teaching
context during the next semester.

Teacher educator mediation ‘at-a-distance’: Sample class activity

and course assignments
In this section, we describe a typical classroom activity and several of the major
assignments for the graduate course. First, we provide the guidelines and descrip-
tion of a classroom activity, the genre analysis assignment, the genre-based instruc-
tional activity and curriculum unit, and the narrative inquiry assignment. We then
describe the teacher educator’s mediational intent behind these course activities/
assignments, functioning as material tools, as a way to capture teacher education
mediation ‘at-a-distance.’

Tense/aspect discourse analysis activity

The teacher educator designed numerous activities done in the regular ­day-to-day
unfolding of this course in order to interweave the subject matter knowledge
(genre and genre analysis), general pedagogical knowledge of classroom prac-
tices (how to teach from a genre stance), and the pedagogical content knowledge
(Shulman, 1987) of teaching specific subject matter in genre- and discourse-based
ways (see Chapter 1 for discussion of kinds of teacher knowledge). One exemplar
of a classroom activity intended to interweave these kinds of knowledge was the
‘tense/aspect activity 1’ (TAA1). The handout for TAA1 (see Appendix A at end
120 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

of the chapter) includes a set of guiding questions and four selected data excerpts,
each with a different tense/aspect focus that realizes a specific communicative
function in a different genre: functions of ‘used to’ and ‘would’ in reminiscing
narratives, differences between ‘will’ and ‘be going to’ in different spoken and
written contexts, a use of past perfect in conversation, and a use of present perfect
and simple present in newspaper articles. The teacher educator asked teachers to
name the tense and aspect focus, as well as the genre, and how that tense and
aspect combination helped the speaker/writer to achieve a specific communica-
tive function or intention. Teachers were allowed to work on their own and/
or with a partner. The teacher educator checked in with individuals and pairs to
mediate their answering of the questions responsively. After approximately 10 to
15 minutes, the teachers participated in a whole class discussion to share answers,
which allowed for multiple expressions of similar ideas and clarifying of under-
standings. Each of the four sections was done separately in this manner so that the
teachers could build on what they experienced in each section.
This first set of data excerpts illustrating ‘used to’ and ‘would’ in reminisc-
ing narratives is a variation of an activity suggested by both McCarthy (1998,
pp. 96–100) and Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000, pp. 66–67). The teacher
educator, however, added a fifth prompt to this activity—identify a context in
which this excerpt might be spoken (the written ones are more obvious)—so
teachers could imagine a context in which each reminiscing narrative might be
told and why a speaker might tell such a narrative. If only the first four questions
of this activity are discussed, the activity risks addressing reminiscing narratives as
form only, rather than achieving a speaker’s intention, or illocutionary force (Austin,
1962). For example, the teachers examined Excerpt 1 from the handout.

Excerpt 1
The bad thing was they used to laugh at us, the Anglo kids. They would laugh
because we’d bring tortillas and frijoles to lunch. They would have their nice
little compact lunch boxes with cold milk in their thermos and they’d laugh at us
because all we had was dried tortillas. Not only would they laugh at us, but the
kids would pick fights. (Suh, 1992, as cited in Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman,
1999, p. 169)

The teachers identified the speaker in the first narrative as trying to build
solidarity with an interlocutor who may have just described discrimination
s/he experienced. By adding the fifth prompt, the teacher educator wanted to
highlight how discourse activities can unwittingly reduce a genre example to
form, and thus, to push teachers to imagine how instructional activities could be
contextualized to integrate speaker intention in the language learning classroom.
In setting up this activity as individual/pair problem-solving and then whole
class discussion, the teacher educator sought to create a structured mediational space
for dialogic interactions to emerge so that the teachers and teacher educator
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 121

could think together about the meaning and function of the grammar in the genre.
The teacher educator’s intention behind creating this activity was to enable the
teachers to connect their intuitive understanding of the grammar focus of ‘used
to’ and ‘would,’ their everyday concepts, with a more systematic understanding, aca-
demic concepts, about the genre and relevant grammatical features. Simultaneously,
this activity was designed to position the teachers to think as teachers from a
student perspective in order to perceive the challenges and benefits ESL students
might experience when analyzing a piece of discourse. From a Vygotskian socio-
cultural perspective, this is meant to push the development of their teacherly think-
ing by simultaneously mastering the subject matter and connecting it to student
needs, abilities, and emotions, what some models of teacher development, such as
Fuller and Brown (1975) and Katz (1972), associate with later stages of teaching
expertise.
Throughout the activity, the teacher educator needed to stay attuned to the
teachers’ changing states of knowledge of the grammatical focus as they answered
the questions and participated in the whole-class discussion, resulting in their
emerging understanding in an intermental development zone (IDZ) (Mercer, 2000).
Whereas Celce-Murcia and Olshtain’s (2000) instructions to ESL students asked
“Which form establishes a frame or topic?” (p. 67), the instructions given to
the teachers were less directive in that they were expected to try to identify the
function of the verbs themselves. The teachers varied greatly in their ability to
analyze discourse because of their sociocultural histories, so the teacher educator
needed to mediate responsively throughout this activity. For example, if a teacher
could answer this question, the teacher educator would then move on to the next
question. If this question proved difficult to answer, the teacher educator might
mediate responsively by asking a leading question such as “Look at where ‘used
to’ appears in the excerpt. What role might ‘used to’ play in that position?” or
“How does the information in the first sentence differ from those that follow?”
In this way, the teacher educator could gain a sense of each teacher’s abilities
to analyze discourse within a genre, and thus mediate responsively while also
modeling the kinds of questions that the teacher might ask him/herself when
encountering new genres or facilitating such a discussion. Disclosing these lat-
ter two objectives explicitly is important, as teachers do not necessarily discern
teacher educators’ objectives intuitively. Furthermore, because teachers may feel
insecure when explaining grammar because they may only have or lack an intu-
itive understanding of the grammar focus, the teacher educator also needs to stay
attuned to their emotional states, for example by reiterating how normal it is to
experience barriers to articulating tacit knowledge or how doing the activity in
this manner may help to build that intuitive sense.
By focusing on content (specific tense/aspect in specific genres) and pedagogy
(through a guided discourse analytic activity), teachers have an opportunity to
verbalize and hear others’ verbalizations of which tense/aspect was being used and
for what purpose, a kind of “talk through the concept and not about the concept”
122 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

(Negueruela, 2008, p. 211). From a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, however,

we know that doing such an activity in class does not mean that teachers have
internalized their understandings so they can use them as psychological tools and
integrate them into their instructional activity (see Chapter 9 for an example). At
a minimum, this activity provides an initial concrete example of how a teacher
can enact a genre- and discourse-based approach to language teaching. However,
teacher educators still need to build on this experience by creating new circum-
stances, or the social situation of development, where the development of L2 teacher/
teaching expertise can be supported and evolve.

Linking of assignments: Genre analysis, genre-based instructional

activity, and genre-based curriculum unit
The teachers then undertook a series of purposefully sequenced assignments
having distinctive yet interconnected goals. They first selected a genre that they
might/would teach for a ‘located’ teaching context and then conducted a genre
analysis (adapted from Hood, Solomon, & Burns, 1996, as presented in Paltridge,
2001) that included individual analysis of at least three exemplars of the selected
genre and then a cross-case analysis to identify key linguistic, grammatical, struc-
tural, and rhetorical features across examples, which could become instructional
foci concerning the selected genre. After conducting their genre analysis, to which
the teacher educator responded in writing to the results of the analysis, the teach-
ers played in a ‘safe zone’ with, or connected, their understandings of their genre
analysis with academic concepts of genre-based instruction that had been introduced
in the course by instantiating their understandings in a one-hour instructional
activity assignment (see Appendix B for assignment).
The teachers informally presented what they had constructed to the class, and
received feedback from both the teacher educator and classmates. This one-hour
instructional activity, and the feedback received in class, was then followed by
teachers extending their understanding through the creation of a genre-based
curriculum unit, the final project in the course (see Appendix C for assignment).
The instructions, required elements, and format were fundamentally the same as
for the one-hour instructional activity, though the time frame was expanded to six
hours of sequenced, coherent instruction. In addition, the teacher educator pro-
vided several examples of genre-based curriculum units online, so teachers would
have a template for how to format the unit, a practical concern of many, while also
having an exemplar for how to integrate linguistic, grammatical, and pragmatic
elements of a genre in goal-oriented activity.Teachers handed in drafts of the final
project, and received written feedback, as well as face-to-face feedback if desired.
They presented their projects on the last day of class, receiving feedback from
classmates and the teacher educator, and handed in final projects two weeks later.
In essence, the teacher educator intended this sequence of assignments as pro-
lepsis (van Lier, 2004), “invitational structures and space for learners to step into
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 123

and grow into” (p. 162). The teacher educator’s mediational intent for each of
these assignments overlapped at times yet also differed. The teachers, by identi-
fying a ‘located’ teaching context and an appropriate genre for instruction, had
the concrete experience of identifying an appropriate genre for instruction for
a ‘located’ teaching context, and then doing a genre analysis of the data sam-
ples—activities that they might do to create instruction in their current or future
classes. The intention behind these activities, beyond the day-to-day coursework,
was to provide that initial ‘safe zone’ for teachers to play with their emerging
understanding of academic concept of ‘genre’ through authentic teaching activities,
engaging in the kind of sustained participation with concepts that they can begin
to internalize gradually in order to better support their own students’ abilities
and needs, and achieve their goals in their classrooms. The one-hour instruc-
tional activity allowed candidates to play with/through their understanding of the
academic concept of ‘genre’ by first materializing the subject matter content to be
taught to enact a lesson, and then receiving oral feedback from classmates and the
teacher educator. For example, classmates or the teacher educator might question
the pedagogical reasoning behind an activity, or suggest a particular pedagogical
strategy to achieve a certain objective. Within the structured mediational space of
designing the one-hour activity, IDZs could emerge as the teachers, along with
their classmates and the teacher educator, co-constructed new understandings
when everyday concepts concerning genre-based instruction were inadequate. For
example, if teachers focused only on the form of a genre, they might receive feed-
back on tying the form to speaker intention.Teachers then had another ‘safe zone’
in terms of the curriculum unit in that they could play with their understandings
in and through the more complex, extensive final project, the genre-based cur-
riculum unit. The teacher educator intended for the teachers to implement this
curriculum unit in their actual, ‘located’ teaching context. These multiple spaces
created opportunities for the teacher educator and teachers to build a fuller con-
ceptual understanding of the genre they were teaching, as well as how to con-
struct ­genre-based instruction, through responsive mediation.

Narrative inquiry assignment

Two of the students in the class also did a narrative inquiry as a way to connect
requirements from the Linguistics major with what they were learning in the
course on genre (see Appendix D for assignment). In other work, we have defined
narrative inquiry as “systematic exploration that is conducted by teachers and for
teachers through their own stories and language” (Johnson & Golombek, 2002,
p. 6, emphasis in original). The teacher educator’s mediational intent behind
assigning the narrative inquiry was connected to this definition and the functions
of narrative detailed earlier in this chapter. By making the teachers’ tacit thoughts,
beliefs, knowledge, fears, and hopes explicit as they expressed their day-to-day
understandings of their instructional contexts, the teacher educator anticipated
124 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

that contradictions might emerge.The teacher educator intended that the teachers
would work through the academic concept of ‘genre’ as a way to address any cogni-
tive and emotional dissonance in their teaching in order to support any particular
growth point that might emerge. By providing some parameters for self-inquiry, the
teacher educator intended that the activity of inquiry would shape what and how
teachers learned as a way to push their professional development. The teacher
educator, with access to the teachers’ internal cognitive and emotional struggles,
as well as their activity of teaching, could thus attempt to mediate responsively.

A case study: Patrick’s enactment of the activities/assignments

In this section, we recount the experiences of Patrick, who took the genre-based
graduate course during the final semester of his MA program in Linguistics. After
graduating with a BA in Linguistics and BS in Business, Patrick taught English
as a foreign language (EFL) to junior high school students in Shenzhen, China,
where he received four weeks of intensive training in teaching EFL. After teach-
ing in China for two years, he returned to his undergraduate university to pursue
his Masters in Linguistics, through which he hoped he would obtain substantive
teacher professional development (Klager, personal communication, March 28,
2015).2 Because he was independently teaching a low-advanced grammar class at
the English Language Institute (ELI) five days/week simultaneously with attend-
ing the genre course, Patrick was able to design a genre-based curriculum unit for
an authentic teaching context, and in fact, implemented it later in the semester as
a review unit.3
We focus on how Patrick identified and developed his identity-in-activity
through the activities/assignments of his formal learning context. The construct
of identity-in-activity (Cross, 2006; Cross & Gearon, 2007) has been proposed
as a way to unify identity as concrete practice in the classroom (what a teacher
does) and discursively constructed practice by larger sociocultural, institutional,
economic, and political forces (what macrostructures say a teacher should do).
The data for this chapter include Patrick’s narrative inquiry and his genre-based
curriculum unit. Analyzed from an emic perspective using sociocultural discourse
analysis (Mercer, 2004), the data from the narrative inquiry extracts highlight
(marked in bold font) the linguistic instantiations of how Patrick expressed and
played with his identity-in-activity, the contradiction between his idealized con-
ception of his language teacher identity, his identity-in-activity originating in his
activity/experiences as a language assistant, and the identity-in-activity he feels is
being constructed for him as a grammar teacher with these particular students in
this particular instructional setting. The contradiction represents a growth point,
which Patrick addresses within the structured mediational spaces of the narrative
inquiry and the final project for the genre class, the genre-based curriculum unit.
The data from the genre-based curriculum unit show linguistic instantiations of
Patrick’s transformation of his identity-in-activity both conceptually and materially,
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 125

tracing his development as a teacher through his engagement in these cultural

practices of L2 teacher education.

Patrick’s pre-understandings
Prior to the genre-based course, Patrick had taken two graduate courses with
the teacher educator: Applied English Grammar, a pedagogical grammar course
focusing on discourse-based approaches to grammar and grammar teaching, and
TESL Materials and Methods, a praxis-driven course focusing on multiliteracies
(The New London Group, 1996) and discourse analysis as a tool for understand-
ing language in use in order to design curriculum for language teachers, and as a
way to engage students in their language learning, especially when they leave the
classroom. Because both of these courses shared the conceptualization of language
as choice/resource for making meaning across a variety of interactional contexts,
they provided a foundation for the conceptualization of genre in the graduate
course.
Patrick held a strong pre-understanding of language learning as communica-
tion from his experience as a language assistant (LA). During his undergraduate
studies, Patrick worked at an English Language Institute (ELI) in a paid position
as an LA. Though language assistants meet with a teaching supervisor, make les-
son plans, and are observed once per semester, they are expected to act as ‘friends’
rather than teachers by creating games or entertaining communicative activities
for the students. They typically meet outside around picnic tables, adding to the
informal language learning environment. In his narrative inquiry, Patrick recol-
lected the joy he experienced working with English language learners as an LA.

Excerpt 2
When I taught my first IEP English class 4 years ago, I was instantly entranced
with teaching English (much different than present-me). I was hooked because
it is a truly amazing experience to watch non-native English speakers, from
different parts of the world, communicating in English. The only way that these
non-native English speakers could communicate with each other was by using
English, and it feels good as a teacher to help facilitate this communica-
tion. From my first classroom interaction, I was convinced that learning
and teaching English served the purpose of communicating. (Klager,
2013, p. 2)

Patrick’s identity-in-activity as an LA was as a teacher who facilitates communi-

cation, and this identity reveals his pre-understandings “that learning and teaching
English served the purpose of communicating.” He describes his feelings about what
he was doing as an LA facilitating communication (“feels good”) through play-
ful, somewhat magical images that suggest being bewitched: “instantly entranced,”
“hooked,” and the “amazing experience.”
126 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

However, Patrick’s pre-understandings stood in stark contrast to what he

was experiencing in his teaching of the advanced grammar class. In the graduate
course on genre, he regularly expressed frustration to the teacher educator and
his classmates that his students only wanted to know the rules of grammar and
do de-contextualized fill-in-the-blank exercises. He wondered out loud in class
whether and how he could integrate anything he was learning in the genre class
in his teaching. Because the teacher educator was also Patrick’s MA advisor,
she recommended that he conduct a narrative inquiry for his final MA project in
order to investigate the dissonance, a potential growth point, he was experiencing.
Through his narrative inquiry, Patrick discovered that his pre-understandings were
a part of the dissonance he was experiencing in his teaching of grammar; yet, his
pre-understandings shaped his response to his dissonance as well, as we will see as
we delve further into his narrative inquiry.

Playing in and through narrative inquiry: Patrick’s

identity-in-activity as ‘the grammar inquisitor’
Patrick worked through his frustration about his own and students’ activity in
the grammar class he was teaching through the writing of his narrative inquiry.
As he described his students’ and his classroom activity in the introduction to
his narrative, Patrick played with his conception of himself as the teacher, his
­identity-in-activity, through the image of “the grammar inquisitor”:

Excerpt 3
The clock turns to 11:45 am, the students begrudgingly file into their seats, still
tired and exhausted from the day before. They take out their homework and
look to the board, silently beginning the grammar warm-up, which con-
sists of five sentences where either will or be going to is omitted. Once
they have finished, the students know and fear what awaits them next: the future
perfect and progressive tenses. The students silently and meticulously take
notes as the grammar inquisitor writes decontextualized rule after rule . . .

1. Use will or be going to in the independent clause and the simple present in
the dependent clause when talking about two separate actions in the future.
2. Future perfect progressive = S + will have been + V(-ing) + O
a. EX: I will have been torturing myself with English grammar for 8 months
by the time I take the TOEFL.

. . . on the board, seemingly with no end. After thirty minutes, tortured by their
boredom and lack of comprehension, the students let out a collective sigh of
relief as the final rule of the future perfect tense used in conjunction with by the
time-phrases is written on the board—which is now completely obscured by rules
they have yet to comprehend. (Klager, 2013, p. 1)
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 127

Patrick describes his teacher identity-in-activity through the exaggerated and

monstrous image of “the grammar inquisitor,” who writes “decontextualized rule after
rule” until the board is full, while students copy the rules and complete form-
based, sentence-level exercises. He interprets how students feel about their activity
by expressing negative, even harmful, emotions: resistance as they “begrudgingly file
into their seats,” and “fear” as they anticipate what follows the opening warm-up
activity. They are “tortured by their boredom and lack of comprehension.” Patrick’s
expression of his tacit thoughts, fears, and frustration as he playfully storied his
and his students’ day-to-day activity functioned as narrative as externalization as
suggested in an email he sent to the teacher educator.

Excerpt 4
. . . the ‘grammar inquisitor image’ basically made me realize that my approach to
teaching was wrong, even if the students did claim to want it. It basically led me to
the conclusion that I needed to ‘give them what they want’ but do it through
my own means. I was able to use the analogy of the grammar inquisitor (a
torturer of sorts) to help me realize that I was unhappy, as well as the students.
(Klager, personal communication, April 11, 2015)

Patrick’s conception of himself and his teaching as “the grammar inquisitor,” an

emotionally painful representation of “a torturer of sorts,” pointed to emotional
and cognitive dissonance in his activity of teaching. Patrick’s use of this grotesque
image coincides with Vygotsky’s (2004) suggestion that fairy tales act like a psy-
chological tool for children, enabling them to self-regulate and act with increasing
control over their worlds. Playing with this image and its associated activity in
his narrative inquiry (see Chapter 2 on play and imagination) helped Patrick to
recognize both his unhappiness and what he perceived as student unhappiness.
Recognizing and naming this unhappiness motivated Patrick to explore what his
students’ object for learning grammar in his class was. In response, Patrick designed
a short questionnaire to determine what his students thought about grammar
and why they were studying English. This marks a move to Patrick asserting his
agency, as he hopes to find a way to address their object (“give them what they want”)
but “through my own means.”

Patrick’s reconceptualization of his students’ reasons for studying

grammar
The questionnaire had six questions, including asking whether students liked to
study grammar, what the purpose for learning grammar was, and what their purpose
for studying English was. Patrick’s findings are not unexpected for many ESL/EFL
teachers. Students overwhelmingly characterized “the purpose of grammar class is to
learn English grammar to do well on a test, like the IELTS or TOEFL, or to write
a paper for class” and learning grammar as “through rules and memorizing” (Klager,
128 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

2013, p. 4).The top two reasons for studying English—“to get a degree then return
to my country” and “to do well on IELTS/TOEFL” (p. 4)—contradicted Patrick’s
pre-understandings of learning language for communication. The findings from
the questionnaire provided Patrick with a kind of reality check for students’ goals
in his grammar class and their preferred method for learning grammar. That is,
what Patrick learned about his students’ conceptions of grammar and their objects for
studying grammar from the questionnaire mediated his understandings of the gram-
mar curriculum he was teaching at the ELI through the genre-based approaches he
was learning about in the graduate course. Patrick’s undertaking of classroom-based
research, inspired by his narrative inquiry, mediated his understandings of what his
­students wanted from the grammar class, their objects from a Vygotskian sociocul-
tural perspective, and deepened his understanding of his students.

Creating a new identity-in-activity: Synergy

Patrick’s students thus mediated his understandings of their object for learning
grammar and his object for teaching it, and moved him towards a new conceptu-
alization of curriculum. However, he still needed to grapple with his understand-
ing of the academic concept of ‘genre’ and genre-based instruction, by engaging
in sustained participation with them through the cultural activities of teaching.
He began internalizing these concepts, using them as psychological tools, when he
played through the design of his genre-based grammar unit. Patrick’s narrative
inquiry demonstrates how he used his imagination to recreate his past experi-
ences of teaching grammar as ‘the grammar inquisitor’ and his experiences as an
LA when he focused on teaching language for communication in the design of
his ­seven-hour curriculum unit. As a result of the curriculum unit assignment,
Patrick had a ‘safe zone’ to play with these concepts for his particular instructional
context. He identified the grammatical features that form the student learning
objectives required by the ELI that students must pass to move on to the next
level. Then he imagined, that is, recreated his past experiences as an LA and a
grammar teacher in his narrative inquiry, by creating a plan of action, what Ilyenkov
(1977) has identified as a uniquely human ability.

Excerpt 5
What I plan to do is develop a curriculum that follows the following sequence
of events:

1. Use the textbook for the teach-for-test grammar objectives that are required
by the IEP.
This needs to be done first because you are still trying to meet the
motivations and needs of your students and institution. Not meet-
ing these needs might make the students disengage from your class and
teaching.
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 129

2. Find spoken and written texts for analysis that cover specifically the ­objectives
required by the IEP.
Use these spoken and written texts for your students to analyze to reinforce
the teach-for-test grammar as well as address the communicative
purposes of the grammar. (Klager, 2013, p. 6)

Patrick’s ‘plan,’ identified by imperative voice, is to design a curriculum u ­ niting

students’ and his objects for the grammar class. In bullet point number 1, he
­concisely states how he will use the textbook to fulfill student expectations, and
then provides his pedagogical reasoning (“This needs to be done first because you are
still trying to meet the motivations and needs of your students and institution”). If he does
not do this first, he believes students will “disengage from your class and teaching.”
In number 2, he directs himself to find texts containing the specific grammatical
features required by the program. His pedagogical reasoning demonstrates how
he can further address point 1 while also attending to “the communicative purposes
of grammar.” Point 2 and his reasoning represents one way that Patrick is working
through the academic concept of ‘genre,’ finding authentic examples of discourse
that includes the grammatical items that are part of the student learning objec-
tives at the ELI, but that can be used for communicative purposes. In articulating
his pedagogical reasoning, he is assuming greater agency by asserting increasing
control over his activity, and assigning “significance” (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006,
p. 143) to his activity.
Patrick’s writing in his narrative inquiry as he describes what he is doing in his
genre-based grammar unit and why functions as narrative as verbalization.

Excerpt 6
For my approach to synergizing a teach-for-test grammar system
with a communicative and contextualized grammar approach, Genre
Analysis will need to be implemented into the classroom. It will need
to be implemented in a way that it reinforces and further elaborates the gram-
mar in the current teach-for-test system. Genre Analysis is appealing for a
number of reasons, but most importantly because it is highly adaptive. Being
able to learn the skills for analyzing genres will provide students with
skills that can be transferred to other components of their learning.
You aren’t teaching specific grammar rules and abstractions, but rather are
teaching a process for learning and analyzing authentic discourse;
teachers can select texts that represent the specific grammar rules they are
required to convey by the institution in a contextualized and spoken man-
ner. This is critical for reinforcing the notion that grammar can be used for
communication purposes and not only teach-for-test purposes. It is critical
because Genre Analysis can convey the communicative benefits of the gram-
mar in a way that the textbook cannot. Rather than teaching abstract rules
with abstract exceptions from a textbook, genre analysis will contextualize
130 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

these grammatical abstractions in a meaningful and communicative

way. (Klager, 2013, p. 5)

Patrick’s instructional unit represents his new identity-in-activity, “synergizing a

teach-for-test grammar system with a communicative and contextualized grammar approach,”
in which genre analysis will play a major role (“Genre Analysis will need to be imple-
mented into the classroom”). He notes that he will revisit the previously taught gram-
matical features that he presented as rules from the student textbook by comparing
those rules with student findings from their genre analysis activities in class. Patrick’s
reasoning for students doing genre analysis mirrors that of the teacher educator and
her instantiation of the academic concept of ‘genre.’ He uses genre analysis as a kind of
psychological tool for his students (“Being able to learn the skills for analyzing genres will
provide students with skills that can be transferred to other components of their learning”). He
moves away from teaching rules, “teaching a process for learning and analyzing authen-
tic discourse.” By having students unite the student learning objectives they learned
through the rules of the textbook with a contextualized way of ‘synergy,’ he hopes
students will understand grammar in “a meaningful and communicative way.”
The first two days of lesson plans from Patrick’s genre-based curriculum unit
further evidence how the activities and assignments in the graduate class mediated
his understanding of curriculum, leading to his transformed identity-in-activity as ‘syn-
ergism.’ Patrick appropriated some of the texts and instructions from TAA1, mod-
ifying them for his students’ proficiency levels, as a means to implement his object
in the grammar classroom. Patrick gave his students some authentic examples of
reminiscing narratives, different from those in the graduate class, in which ‘used
to’ and ‘would’ were used for the discourse-level functions discussed in the gradu-
ate class. He provided more explicit directions to guide students’ genre analysis of
these texts. For example, he had them circle all instances of ‘would’ and ‘used to’
in blue marker, and identify the location in the text where they occurred (‘used to’
functioning as a discourse frame would typically occur in the first sentence). This
suggests that he has internalized the concept of ‘genre’ because he was able to take
what he experienced in the graduate class and alter it so that it is appropriate in his
instructional context while still enacting his conceptualization of language learning
as communication. For a homework assignment, he asked them to use their analysis
from class to answer the questions in the following excerpt.

Excerpt 7
1. What tenses are used in these excerpts?
a. When does the author use these tenses?
b. What purpose does the tense serve?
2. Look at all the instances of Would and Used to (blue circles). What is the author
trying to do with Would and Used to?
a. Is there a pattern?
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 131

3. Think back to our text-based rules we learned for Would and Used to earlier
this semester. Are the authors in these excerpts using Would and Used to the
same way as our text-based rules?
a. How are they being used the same way?
b. How are they being used differently?

After having students focus on form by identifying the tense, Patrick asks the
students to think about the function of the tense with two related questions
(“What purpose does the tense serve?” and “What is the author trying to do . . . ?”).
For question 3, Patrick has students distinguish and compare the rules they were
exposed to in the textbook (“Think back to our text-based rules we learned”) to the
contextualized discourse excerpts he presented (“Are the authors in these excerpts
using Would and Used to the same way as our text-based rules?”). Moreover, Patrick
created a material framework in the form of a chart for students to write the rules
from the book, and then to externalize their discourse-based understandings of
the grammar form appearing within a particular genre (see Appendix E).
The chart that Patrick created is a concrete representation of his imagination,
or re-creation of his past experiences as a grammar teacher and LA, and a kind
of resolution of the dissonance he was experiencing. In fact, the chart is material
evidence of Patrick’s development as a teacher. The chart embodies his ‘teach-for-
test grammar and Genre Analysis synergism,’ with the left column representing the
former and the right, the latter. As a result of materializing the image of ‘synergy’
through his genre-based curriculum unit, Patrick supports the development of
his growth point, changes both what he and students do in the classroom, and
transforms his identity-in-activity and his conception of curriculum. He engages
students in different kinds of activities, such as doing discourse/genre analysis,
and then thinking together and articulating the ‘why’ behind their findings about
grammar in use in relation to the textbook rules. Patrick likewise engages in dif-
ferent activities in the classroom, such as mediating students’ understandings while
they do the discourse/grammar analyses. By playing with the academic concept of
‘genre’ through the creation of his genre-based grammar unit and writing his nar-
rative inquiry, we find evidence that Patrick uses ‘genre’ as a psychological tool to
transform his understanding of curriculum, of grammar teaching in his ‘located’
instructional setting, as well as his identity-in-activity when he implemented the
curriculum.

Conclusion
Patrick’s narrative inquiry functioned as narrative as externalization, in which he explic-
itly articulated thoughts and feelings about teaching, enabling him to express, and
play with, his frustration as ‘the grammar inquisitor’ and detail his ‘rich experiences’
(Vygotsky, 2004) as a teacher and LA. Patrick’s playing with the image of ‘the
grammar inquisitor’ exposed a growth point that he was able to address. Patrick’s
132 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

undertaking of narrative inquiry required inquiry into his students’ objects, so that
his new understanding of students mediated his ‘play’ with the academic concept of
‘genre,’ in a ‘safe zone’ in which he could ‘jump above’ himself as he designed his
genre-based grammar unit. This linked activity of narrative inquiry and curriculum
design for his specific teaching context fostered narrative as verbalization, espe-
cially as he described the pedagogical reasoning behind the instructional activities
he designed for the unit and as he appropriated activities from the graduate class
for his own class. In the process of linking activities and assignments from the
graduate class with and through his narrative inquiry, Patrick elicited narrative as
systematic examination, through which his engagement in narrative activity funda-
mentally shaped what he learned. Within the structured mediational spaces provided
by the activities and assignments of the graduate course, Patrick (re)­imagined his
experiences and transformed his understanding of curriculum through the image
of ‘synergy’ and materially through his development of the genre-based grammar
unit. Patrick’s new identity-in-activity as ‘synergy’ would next need to be imple-
mented in his grammar class at the ELI.
This chapter has highlighted the value of obuchenie as portraying the actions
and intentions of teaching and learning, the interconnection between the teacher
educator and the teacher (as teacher and learner). Obuchenie, because of its focus
on the instructional side of expert/novice interactions, requires teacher educa-
tors to think critically and deliberately about what they do in coursework in
L2 teacher education. We saw in this chapter how the teacher educator medi-
ated ‘at-a-distance’ by deliberately creating a sequence of activities/assignments
that required teacher candidates to engage consistently with their understand-
ing of academic concepts through increasingly demanding goal-directed activities,
especially those focused on a ‘located’ instructional setting in which they would
teach. In fact, the focal teacher in this chapter appropriated the teacher educator’s
activities for his own class. We are reminded that what we teacher educators do
in coursework matters, to the detriment and/or benefit of teachers. We need
to create multiple opportunities for authentic participation in the activities of
language teaching, because our classes, not just the teaching practicum, are the
exemplary ‘safe zones’ that can offer varied and multiple structured mediational spaces
for responsive mediation to emerge within L2 teacher education. By focusing on a
‘located’ teaching context, this sequence of assignments also provided a ‘safe zone’
for the teacher candidates to deal with the kind of cognitive and emotional dis-
sonance that often occurs when teacher candidates try to implement the academic
concepts they have learned within teacher education in a real-world setting. By
sequencing a number of purposefully created activities/assignments, we provide
the kind of sustained participation in the activities of teaching that can support
teacher development and allow us to trace that development as it is in the process
of formation. Moreover, this chapter has demonstrated how students’ motives in
a real teaching context can mediate teacher conceptualizations to better meet
learner expectations.
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 133

Appendix A: Tense/aspect activity

Directions:
Each section focuses on a certain tense/aspect combination that occurs within
certain genres to help convey specific communicative intentions. We will go
through each section and work through a series of questions in order to identify
the focal tense/aspect and genre, but even more importantly, how the particular
focal tense/aspect function in the genre to enable the speaker/writer to convey
intentions beyond the descriptive rules of the grammar.

1. Identify the verb/tense aspect that is bolded. There may be more than one,
which we’ll contrast.
2. Identify the genre.
3. Recall our understandings of the grammatical explanation of the focal tense/
aspect combination.
4. Explain how the tense/aspect is functioning in the genre. What meaning/
intention do you think the speaker/writer is trying to convey through this
combo? Or, how does the grammar function within this contextualized dis-
course to achieve particular communicative aims?
5. Identify a context in which this excerpt might be spoken (the written ones
are more obvious).

Excerpt 1
The bad thing was they used to laugh at us, the Anglo kids. They would laugh
because we’d bring tortillas and frijoles to lunch. They would have their nice
little compact lunch boxes with cold milk in their thermos and they’d laugh at us
because all we had was dried tortillas. Not only would they laugh at us, but the
kids would pick fights. (Suh, 1992, as cited in Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman,
1999, p. 169)

Excerpt 2
I used to phone my wife three, four times every trip. In Calcutta I’d wait five hours
to get a phone call through. If I didn’t get it through one night, I’d call again and
wait three, four hours the next morning. Finally, just hearing her voice, I’d stand
and actually choke up on the phone. (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p. 66)

Appendix B: Genre-based instructional activity

The purpose of this assignment is for you to take the results from your genre anal-
ysis and create a lesson plan based on your own analysis of that genre. You will
determine appropriate instructional goals and objectives, and create a lesson for
a 60-minute class. In addition to the lesson plan, you should include directions,
activities, materials, assessment measures, activities, handouts, and/or homework.
134 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

Whatever is highlighted in bold must be included in the lesson plan. SEE ME

if you have questions.
Instructional Context: Write a ½ to 1 page description of who your
students are, their proficiency level, their goals and needs, the setting,
and any other pertinent information. Explain whether your unit is for ESL
or EFL.
Goals and Objectives: Your genre unit must include appropriate goals
and objectives. They MUST be written as SWBATs—Students Will Be Able To
XXXX. AND you MUST use the Bloom’s taxonomy of verbs found on Sakai.
Goals are general statements of the overall, long-term purposes of the course.
Objectives express the specific ways in which the goals will be achieved.Thus, the
goals represent the destination of the unit, while the objectives represent various
points that chart your unit toward that destination (Graves, 1996).Your goals and
objectives must address the questions: What are the purposes and intended out-
comes of the unit (GOALS)? What will my students need to do or earn to achieve
these goals (OBJECTIVES)?
Organization of Content and Activities: Your lesson plan must embody
a coherent organization and sequence of activities. In your mind, you should
address the questions: How will I organize the content and activities? Does the
sequence of activities make sense? Do the activities build on each other and
lead students towards the instructional objectives and goals? BE SURE TO
INCLUDE ALL HANDOUTS THAT YOU WOULD GIVE STUDENTS
OR MATERIALS USED IN CLASS (E.G., POWERPOINTS, IN-CLASS
TASKS).
Evaluation: Your lesson plan must explain how you will assess student
learning.Your lesson plan must address the following question: How will I know
that students have learned what I wanted them to learn about genre? Your evalu-
ation does not have to be in the form of a test. It could be, for example, through
something students hand in as a result of a classroom activity.

Appendix C: TSL 6172 genre analysis instructional unit

The purpose of this project is for you to learn how to create an instructional
unit focusing on a particular genre, based on your own analysis of that genre.
If you have changed your mind since doing your genre analysis, you may need
to do a new genre analysis. You will determine appropriate instructional goals
and will sequence a number of activities that create a cohesive 6-day unit.
Your instructional unit should have overriding goals and specific instructional
objectives for each day of instruction. Each class should last 50–60 minutes.Your
instructional unit should reflect a series of activities that include directions,
activities, materials, assessment measures, activities, handouts, and/or homework.
Whatever is ­highlighted in bold must be included in the unit. SEE ME if you
have questions.
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 135

Instructional Context: Write a ½ to 1 page description of who your

students are, their proficiency level, their goals and needs, the setting, and
any other pertinent information. Explain whether your unit is for ESL or EFL.
Goals and Objectives: Your genre unit must include appropriate goals
and objectives. They MUST be written as SWBATs—Students Will Be Able
To XXXX. AND you MUST use the Bloom’s taxonomy of verbs found on Sakai.
Goals are general statements of the overall, long-term purposes of the course.
Objectives express the specific ways in which the goals will be achieved. Thus,
the goals represent the destination of the unit, while the objectives represent var-
ious points that chart your unit toward that destination (Graves, 1996).Your goals
and objectives must address the questions: What are the purposes and intended
outcomes of the unit (GOALS)? What will my students need to do or learn to
achieve these goals (OBJECTIVES)?
Selecting/Adapting Materials and Activities: Your genre unit must
articulate how you will select/adapt materials and the nature of the
activities that will make up the learning experiences of your unit. These
can be represented by core materials and activities and/or a sequence of course
assignments.Your course project must address the questions: How and with what
will I teach the course? Explain in about one paragraph why these materi-
als/activities are relevant for your target class.
Organization of Content and Activities:
LESSON PLANS: This is the major part of your project. Your genre
unit must exemplify a coherent organization and sequence of activities. In your
mind, you should address the questions as you create your lesson plans: How will
I organize the content and activities? Does the sequence of activities make sense?
Do the activities build on each other and lead students towards the instructional
objectives and goals? BE SURE TO INCLUDE ALL HANDOUTS THAT
YOU WOULD GIVE STUDENTS OR MATERIALS USED IN CLASS
(E.G., OVERHEADS).
For your lesson plans, use the following format:
General Goal(s): Can be stated once in your project
Specific Objectives: SWBATs should be enumerated with each daily lesson plan.
Required Materials:
Anticipatory Set (Lead-In): (How will you introduce your topic?)
Step-By-Step Procedures: AGAIN, INCLUDE ALL MATERIALS
INCLUDING POWERPOINTS, ACTIVITES AND DIRECTIONS, ROLE
PLAYS, ETC.
Closure (Reflect Anticipatory Set): (How will you end your lesson?)
Assessment Based on Objectives: (How will you as the teacher know if the
student learned anything?) Your lesson plan must address the following question:
How will I know that students have learned what I wanted them to learn about
genre? Your evaluation does not have to be in the form of a test. It could be, for
example, through something students hand in as a result of a classroom activity.
136 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity

Appendix D: Narrative inquiry instructions

One of the goals of narrative inquiry in language teacher education is to enable
teachers, or narrators, to bring together the disparate elements of their learn-
ing-to-teach experience (emotional, conceptual, social, practical, technical,
etc.) through a systematic, reflective process of narrative writing and the
product, the narrative. As such, in drafting your narrative, you may wish
to review the variety of teaching-related artifacts you’ve been engaged in,
including your journal, your dialogic video protocol, records of classroom
observations, your teaching philosophy, as well as our email exchanges, and
any reflections or documentation related to our individual or group meetings.
There are no page minimums or limits—you should write your story as you
see fit and in your voice. Your narrative inquiry can take the form that makes
the most sense to you as you sort out and reflect upon your learning experi-
ence, and you may want to:
Identify aspects of your teaching experience that you experienced as surprising,
challenging, or unsatisfying, and that you want/ed to better understand: What
dissonance did you want to understand?
Explain the characteristics and context of those aspects of your teaching, and
how they affected you (emotionally, personally, conceptually, instructionally, inter-
actionally): What was the nature of this dissonance? Who was involved?
Explain any “research” or steps you took to understand and address the disso-
nance: What did you do to address this dissonance?
Connect and Story how thinking about those aspects of your teaching have led
to new understandings of yourself as a teacher, of your teaching philosophy, of
your teaching practice, etc. How do you understand these different experiences as being
connected to dealing with this dissonance create a growth point for you?
Detail any new conceptual understandings, and/or instructional practices that
embody these new understandings of who you are as a teacher: What specifically do
you think and/or do that represents how you’ve dealt with this dissonance? How have you
taken your new understandings into your practice?

Appendix E: Patrick’s chart from his curriculum unit

With a partner, the students need to write down the text-based rules of Would
and Used to. After students have done this with a partner, come back together as
a class. On the board, the teacher should make a chart and divide it in two sec-
tions. On the left, the teacher should write all the text-based rules; on the right,
the teacher will write the results of the class’ contextualized analysis (to be done
later). The board should look something like this once the class is finished giving
you all the text-based rules:
This chart will be used again after the students have performed their contex-
tualized analysis.
 Reimagining Teacher Identity-in-Activity 137

TABLE 8.1

Text-Based Rules Contextualized Analysis

• Show habitual actions that happened in

the past but are no longer true.

• Used to and would are similar in meaning

when they express past actions.

• Only used to can show past location, state

of being, or possession.
EX: I used to live in Florida. (Location)
EX: She used to be a doctor. (State)
EX: Tom used to have a dog. (Poss)

Notes
1 Some data sets reprinted with permission from Ilha do Desterro.
Golombek, P. R., & Klager, P. (2015). Play and imagination in developing lan-
guage teacher identity-in-activity. Ilha do Desterro, 68(1), 17–32.
2 Patrick’s situation in which he taught for two years (not a true beginning teacher)
with ostensibly no formal education (one month of ‘training’) points to an inher-
ent problem in labeling teachers (novice, pre-service, etc.), as well as makes our
case for the systematic formal education that L2 teacher education can offer.
3 Detailing the consequences of his implementation of the curriculum unit
would undoubtedly be informative but is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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in learning to teach: Accommodation and the development of teaching iden-
tity. Journal of Teacher Education, 55(1), 8–24.
Suh, K. H. (1992). Past habituality in English discourse: used to and would. Language
Research, 24, 857–882.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
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guage learning: Shaping the knowledge-base. In D. J. Tedick (Ed.), Language
teacher education: International perspectives on research and practice (pp. 5–23).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
The New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social
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spective. Boston: Kluwer Academic.
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(pp. 355–370). Oxford: Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge,
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Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian
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TESOL Quarterly, 37(1), 135–147.
9
CONCEPTUALIZING TEACHING
IN/THROUGH REFLECTING ON
TEACHING

“I was perpetuating the teacher-centric classroom model that I was trying to break
away from.”

In this chapter, we look at responsive mediation through several sequenced and

­interconnected cultural practices that we have already discussed in previous c­ hapters.
More specifically, we examine engagement in structured mediational spaces between
a teacher educator and a beginning ESL teacher named Arya during her teaching
internship. We begin this chapter by describing the teacher educator’s mediational
intent behind the selection and sequencing of each of these practices in the intern-
ship, specifically because it is the capstone course of a TESL certificate program. As
we described in Chapter 6, the teaching journal is an invaluable tool through which
a teacher educator can learn about a teacher’s perezhivanie, the subjective significance
of lived experiences contributing to the development of one’s teaching personae.
The teacher educator needs to develop some understanding of each teacher as an
individual, so the journal entries provide a space for teachers to express their cog-
nition (idealized conception of teaching) and emotion (anxieties and strengths in
regards to teaching) before they even begin actual instruction. After the teachers
begin teaching, the teaching journal serves as a place for them to externalize their
thinking, doing, and feeling about their interactions with students and their activity
of teaching, and, thus, for the teacher educator to have some sense of how the teach-
ers are experiencing their instruction and where they need support.The relationship
and understanding developed through the written interactions in the journal help to
shape the moment-to-moment oral interaction between the teacher educator and
each teacher in a dialogic video protocol (DVP). As we described in Chapter 5, the
DVP provides a materialization of the instructional interactions that took place in real
 Conceptualizing Teaching 141

time in a given class, and thus, opens up the teacher’s thinking and activity to analysis,
mediation, and restructuring. By enacting the DVP, the teacher educator can identify
each teacher’s potentiality and work with him/her at his/her ‘ceilings,’ encouraging
teachers to reflect on whether and how their activity of teaching aligns with their
conceptions of teaching. If not, the DVP provides a ‘safe zone’ in which teachers can
play with and imagine alternative instruction. The DVP also provides teachers with
concrete instructions/activities that they can take into their teaching, and then reflect
on in their teaching journals. After the teachers complete their teaching, they once
again reflect on their thinking and doing of teaching but in retrospect, revisiting the
various forms of mediation in which they were engaged in the process, through the
writing of a narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry, as discussed in Chapter 8, can help
teachers to organize, articulate, and make sense of what they experience emotionally
and cognitively in their day-to-day teaching, and through the process, possibly gain
increasing control over their thinking and doing of teaching as they re-story their
learning-to-teach experience in their own words and minds.We remind readers that
in spite of similar cultural practices being used and described throughout Chapters
5–9, each interaction between a more expert teacher educator and a less experienced
teacher will take shape and unfold in distinctive ways because each teacher and each
teacher educator has a unique sociocultural history and perezhivanie, and motive.

The reflective teaching journal dialogic video protocol, and

narrative inquiry
The internship context
Arya’s internship placement was in a language program offering eight-week
­speaking/listening courses for visiting scholars at the university. The visiting schol-
ars have completed or are in process of completing a PhD or MA degree, and are
largely from China, Brazil, and Turkey.The scholars voluntarily participate in the free
English classes, and are awarded a certificate of participation on the basis of atten-
dance and requirements. Given the scholars’ age and professional accomplishments,
the teachers, as undergraduates and often first-time teachers, are initially intimidated
by this instructional context, so they generally teach with a partner.Arya co-­designed
and co-taught an advanced listening and speaking course with Mark.1
The mediational intent of the teacher educator who designed the program is
made overt to teachers as they design the syllabus for their classes. The teacher
educator begins by explaining the instructional goals and student needs for the
different levels in general, so teachers can design an initial syllabus, and then
expand it as they interact with their students. The teacher educator also sug-
gests specific instructional foci for the first weeks of teaching to focus t­eachers’
instructional thinking and alleviate feelings of being overwhelmed by too many
possibilities. Teachers can thus create instruction that is relevant to students’
needs and goals, providing some sense of beneficial instruction/interaction for
teachers and students alike. Also, by revising previous interns’ lesson plans for the
142 Conceptualizing Teaching

initial weeks of instruction, teachers can play in a ‘safe zone,’ imitating ­others’

ideal conceptions of implementing content through the artifact of a lesson plan.
As teachers overcome their initial teaching anxieties, they are then expected to
design their own lesson plans in order to address what they have identified as
instructional objectives through their interactions with students. Through her
mediational intent ­at-a-distance, the teacher educator is creating a structure for
intermental development zones (IDZs) to emerge by facilitating play and imitation
that is supported in a ‘safe zone’ for a group of students, and pushing teachers
at their ‘ceilings’ as they are increasingly expected to design and implement
instruction, still with support as needed, to meet their specific students’ needs
and abilities.
As a requirement of the internship, Arya wrote seven reflective journals (three
with prompts from the teacher educator and four to reflect on her actual teaching)
to which the internship supervisor (teacher educator) responded. The first two
journal prompts targeted cognitive and affective issues on an abstract level, asking
teachers first to describe their ideal class (what the learning activity of the class-
room would look like), and second to describe their strengths and challenges as
beginning teachers. The teachers also did a practice teach (see Chapter 7), presenting
a concept that they would be teaching in one of their initial classes as a way to
get feedback in a ‘safe zone’ from the teacher educator and fellow teachers. After
completing the lesson plan, Arya wrote a third journal entry in which she identified
important lessons and/or personal goals from doing the practice teach, allowing for
growth points to emerge. These three journal entries provide invaluable information
about Arya’s conception of teaching, perceived strengths, affective concerns, and
abilities that helped the teacher educator attune her mediation. Arya taught four
weeks of the eight-week internship, so she wrote four journal entries external-
izing how she was experiencing her classroom teaching. She participated in the
internship requirements (teaching journal, DVP, meeting with teacher educator,
narrative inquiry) according to her own needs. For example, she met weekly with
the teacher educator to touch base and sometimes go over lesson plans. She was
videotaped teaching during her third week of teaching, and she and the teacher
educator participated in a DVP the following day. At the end of the semester, she
reflected on her learning-to-teach experience and wrote a narrative inquiry (see
Chapter 8), including a draft and a final version that were commented on by the
teacher educator.
We follow a similar procedure with these data as we did in Chapter 6. In the
data extracts presented below, the bold-faced text and connecting lines utilize
the methodological techniques of sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004)
by capturing how language is being used as a social mode of thinking and illus-
trate the quality and character of interthinking on the linguistic, psychological,
and cultural levels. The teacher educator (right column) takes up dimensions of
Arya’s journal entries (left column), building a contextual foundation for their
exchanges, guiding her thinking as they jointly reconstruct Arya’s understanding
of her experiences, and supporting Arya as she works to develop instructional
 Conceptualizing Teaching 143

activities that align with her conception of teaching, thereby resolving the
­cognitive/emotional dissonance she is experiencing.

Recognizing Arya’s pre-understandings

A Linguistics major, Arya was in the last semester of her senior year at the uni-
versity when she participated in the internship. She was simultaneously enrolled
in a graduate-level course that focused on genre-based approaches to language
teaching. The teacher educator for the internship was also the instructor for this
graduate-level course. Arya was also working in a paid position as a language assis-
tant (LA) at the English Language Institute (ELI) at the university. As an LA, she
worked with a partner to create and implement communicative activities for the
same group of language learners four times per week. Though the ELI does not
characterize language assistants as teachers, they engage in many typical practices
of language teachers, such as making lesson plans, giving directions for activities,
and encouraging and responding to student participation.
The first three teaching journal entries, for which the teacher educator pro-
vided organized prompts, revealed some elements of Arya’s pre-understandings
and her perezhivanie. In the first journal entry, the teachers answered the following
prompt: What does your idealized classroom look like?

Excerpt 1
Arya Teacher Educator

My idealized classroom, whether it was Okay, you have a specific vision of

grammar or listening/speaking or what what you want to happen in your
have you, focus strongly on the socially class Arya! Can you explain WHY
relevant functions of language. I you think this is important?
would want the main focus of the class How this will result in student
to be the analysis of texts. Basically, I learning? It’s important to be able
would want my ideal classroom to to justify what you’re saying as well.
consist of students doing guided So in a sense, I’m asking you to bring
analyses of texts in which they your specifics into a more abstract
would come to understand level of how you think students learn
not only how semantic choices are language in the classroom. Why do
functioning with in the text, but texts matter? What do they
also how the text is functioning show? Why does being able to
with in a larger context. I would understand how linguistics
want my students to not only focus on relationships work in a particular
linguistic relationships with in the text, genre help someone to learn a
I would want them to be aware of language? Now you can imagine
what speech act is occurring that I agree with you. But that’s not
and how those linguistic sufficient for your purpose. YOU need
relationships are contributing to it. to make your argument for others
so they would understand what you are
trying to accomplish in your classroom
and why. Make sense?

Arya’s journal entry to this prompt put forth her ideal conceptualization of how
she wanted teaching and learning to occur in her classroom, to which the teacher
educator returned consistently when they engaged in interthinking about how Arya
144 Conceptualizing Teaching

was experiencing her actual teaching. In Arya’s ideal class, students are actively
constructing their understanding of language by “doing guided analyses of texts”
­
through a discourse-based approach through which students understand “how seman-
tic choices are functioning within the text.” She also describes a genre-based approach as
students understanding “how the text is functioning within a larger context.” She describes
how linguistic features are contextualized using the academic concept of a “speech
act,” and her goal seems to be to enable students to communicate effectively in their
daily lives abroad.
To foster an environment for interthinking, the teacher educator praises how spe-
cific Arya’s ideas concerning student activity are, punctuating this with an exclama-
tion point. She then lays the groundwork for an IDZ by asking Arya “WHY” she
thinks it is important to focus on the socially relevant functions of language. She asks
Arya to go beyond describing what they will do to describing the consequences
of this kind of student activity on students’ language development: “How this will
result in student learning?” With this question focusing on the impact of instruction
on learning, the teacher educator is orienting Arya’s thinking to a central purpose
of teaching, but one that typically emerges after much more teaching experience.
Though Arya describes her conception of teaching using academic concepts such
as “speech acts,” the teacher educator does not want Arya’s cognition to remain at
what Vygotsky (1988) described as a level of mimicry, an important but insufficient
aspect of teacher development. She supports Arya’s teacherly thinking by modeling a
series of questions, for example a direct question getting at the rationale behind her
instructional approach: “Why does being able to understand how linguistics relationships
work in a particular genre help someone to learn a language?” In fact, the teacher educator,
who understands Arya’s conceptualization, encourages her to express her rationale
for ­others (“YOU need to make your argument for others”). By modeling a series of
questions that Arya could be asking herself, the teacher educator is pushing Arya to
provide the pedagogical reasoning behind her instructional activity.
In the second teaching journal, the teacher educator asks teachers to describe
areas in need of improvement and strengths in order to gain some understanding
of how each teacher perceives her/himself.

Excerpt 2
Arya
Teacher Educator
I would say that my biggest
If I had one goal for you in
weakness in teaching is the
both classes, it would be for
same as my biggest weakness
you to grow in confidence...
in general. I often lack
I like to use self doubt as fuel
confidence, even if I am sure of
for what I need to do though.
what I am saying. Through I do a
It points me in the direction
better job of faking it in the classroom
I need to go. What am
(no statements ending with question
I doubtful about? Okay, then
intonation) I do think that I need to
I have to build my knowledge
work on becoming more confident
about that.
in myself as a teacher.
 Conceptualizing Teaching 145

Arya’s lack of self-confidence, her “biggest weakness,” created a lens of perezhivanie

through which she perceives herself “in teaching” and “in general.” This journal
entry confirmed what the teacher educator had inferred from previous interac-
tions with Arya as she often unnecessarily apologized for ideas she expressed. By
acknowledging her lack of self-confidence, Arya also reveals a personal attribute
to which the teacher educator will need to be sensitive if she is to mediate her
responsively. The teacher educator commented in Arya’s journal by confirming
that she had similar hopes for Arya (“If I had one goal for you in both classes it would
be for you to grow in confidence”). The teacher educator also validates Arya’s affective
concern by sharing her own experience with and response to self-doubt, noting
she uses it “as fuel for what I need to do.” In doing this the teacher educator corrobo-
rates the value of feeling-for-thinking (Golombek & Doran, 2014), that is, explicitly
integrating the catalytic function of emotion in teacher professional development.
She models self-talk, voicing the question-­response she would ask herself—“What
am I doubtful about? Okay, then I have to build my knowledge about that.” This interac-
tion thus provides the teacher educator and Arya with a shared understanding of
Arya’s fledgling confidence and the goal of building her self-confidence that can
guide them as they co-construct an IDZ.
When describing her strengths as a teacher, Arya noted her love of teaching
and willingness to work diligently outside class to prepare lessons and to grow. She
wrote what we see in Excerpt 3.

Excerpt 3
Arya

To me the majority of a teacher’s work should be done

outside of a classroom before class. I think that
learning should be mediated self-discovery...
Also, a quick note based on the last journal. I guess
the why behind what I’m saying is that students
remember better what they discover for
themselves. They take more home from an activity in
which they were challenged to discover a pattern
rather than when the pattern is spelled out for
them. The more control a student has over the
journey he takes to learn a language, the more in
control he feels over the language at the end.

Arya ties her own willingness to work hard outside class with her conception
of student learning: “mediated self-discovery.” Arya ended this journal entry by tak-
ing up the teacher educator’s invitation in the previous journal to “tease out” her
pedagogical reasoning for what she would like to do in her class. Arya’s taking
up in her second journal entry of the teacher educator’s mediation from the first
journal entry, that is, across journal entries, enables them to stay attuned to each
other’s thinking in an IDZ. Arya’s use of the phrase “mediated self-discovery” to
characterize student learning is something to which the teacher educator, given
146 Conceptualizing Teaching

her understanding of Karpov’s (2003) critique of discovery learning as inefficient

and misleading (see Chapter 1), responds. Rather than write in the margin com-
ments as she typically does, the teacher educator critiques discovery learning at
the end of Arya’s journal entry, and this is replicated here in a similar manner.

Excerpt 4
I feel the need to respond in text rather than in margin on this. Discover a
pattern rather than have it spelled out for them. Okay, now I under-
stand. Enabling your students to discover a pattern requires a great deal of skill
on the teacher’s part. After all, you don’t want to waste precious class time and
you want to lead to good discoveries. It’s interesting that you say this because
I believed this myself as a teacher. As I started to read about concept
based instruction, which is based on sociocultural theory (the theory
I use in my teaching and research), I had this idea of discovery chal-
lenged. Now I think the issue is the semantics of the word “discover,” so allow
me to elaborate a bit more.

Discovery learning became quite popular in American schooling and like all
things in education ( ) there was suddenly a critique of it. Actually, I would like to
share a reading with you on this. Anyhow, the critics’ point is that 1) sometimes
discovery learning activities take a lot of time and are thus not efficient,
and 2) sometimes students come to wrong discoveries. E.g., we look at
the stars and we think that the sun revolves around us. So the critics said that dis-
covery could be time consuming and lead to a lack of learning. So what then can
teachers do? It’s a long story to make concept based instruction clear but basically
the idea is that the teacher plays a crucial role in presenting the content
in meaningful ways to students. So in order to make meaning for themselves,
students have to have a strong conceptual understanding. Through their activities
in the classroom, they continue their sense-making processes, using the language
and explaining their metacognition. But it’s quite focused. It’s not discovery,
but it is personal sense making through the use of conceptual tools.
Of course I could say that personal sense making through concepts is a kind of
­discovery if I used that word differently.

Nonetheless, I am saying this because looking back on my early years as a teacher,

I used a highly inductive approach that I thought was great at the time.
But I came to question it in terms of the quality of instruction it led to. In fact,
I had one powerfully bad experience with a student that over time made
me realize a lot of how I was doing my discovery learning. To be honest, I real-
ized that I did not give myself credit for the role I should be playing as having
knowledge in the classroom as the teacher. I didn’t want to “give” my students
knowledge but to let them “discover” it. I understand why I did what I did at the
time and I’m not saying I was a bad teacher. I “think” I was good. But with new
 Conceptualizing Teaching 147

understandings and knowledge, I evaluate that teaching differently, somewhat

negatively (and can say why). My philosophy of teaching now is quite detailed
and explicit and I try to make my classrooms embody it though I know I have
degrees of success. Anyhow, perhaps this is more than you wanted to
know But I am going to question you about what you mean by “dis-
covery” because it’s a loaded word. And I hope this is okay with you.

In the first paragraph, the teacher educator signals that this is going to be a
detailed, important commentary because she is writing “in text rather than in mar-
gin” as she typically does. Throughout her comments, the teacher educator uses a
number of rhetorical strategies in order to push Arya’s thinking while remaining
sensitive to her level of confidence. The teacher educator lays the groundwork
for interthinking about what discovery learning means by trying to clarify her
understanding of what Arya means by ‘discovery,’ and then, so her commentary
is less face threatening, positions herself as a beginning teacher similar to Arya: as
a beginning teacher, “I believed this [discovery learning] myself ” but then she had
this idea “challenged” as she learned about Vygotskian sociocultural theory. The
teacher educator is uncertain whether she and Arya have the same meaning in
mind about ‘discovery learning’ as an academic concept, so wants to explain what she
means when she uses this concept.
In the second paragraph, the teacher educator, so that Arya does not feel as
though she is being attacked personally, prefaces her critique of discovery learn-
ing by noting with a smiley face how theories “like all things in education” are
critiqued. She attunes Arya to her understanding of why discovery learning is
problematic by summarizing Karpov’s (2003) argument (“sometimes discovery learn-
ing activities take a lot of time and are thus not efficient” and “sometimes students come
to wrong discoveries”). She provides an easy-to-understand example of the earth’s
revolution around the sun to show how discovery learning could go awry. The
teacher educator knows that she cannot cursorily explain an alternative instruc-
tional approach grounded in sociocultural theory, concept based instruction: “It’s
a long story to make concept based instruction clear”—but highlights that “teachers play a
crucial role in presenting the content in meaningful ways to students.” She highlights the
crucial role that teachers play in creating the “focused” conceptual understanding
students need beforehand for “using the language and explaining their metacognition.”
In the third paragraph, the teacher educator recalls “one powerfully bad experience
with a student” that pushed her understanding of ‘discovery learning’ as she uses her
expertise to mediate Arya’s understanding. She normalizes Arya’s understanding
of ‘discovery learning’ by in essence saying “I thought like that too,” but shares her
own negative experience in order to push Arya’s thinking. The teacher educator
sets up what she (mis)understood at that time as the two alternatives in teaching
conceptions—giving students knowledge versus students discovering knowledge.
However, “with new understandings and knowledge,” the teacher educator now has
a more complex conception, which she manifests in her own teaching and can
148 Conceptualizing Teaching

justify, and hopes to continue to share (“But I am going to question you about what
you mean by ‘discovery’ because it’s a loaded word. And I hope this is okay with you”). By
being attuned to Arya’s lack of self-confidence, the teacher educator downplays
the strength of her critique of ‘discovery learning’ (“perhaps this is more than you
wanted to know”) and inserts a smiley face emoticon2 as another softener.
Through this series of written dialogic interactions an IDZ emerges and a
more robust understanding of Arya’s conception of teaching begins to take shape.
This is accomplished as the teacher educator and Arya build this understanding
by thinking together, simultaneously explaining and critiquing their understandings
of discovery learning, and asking and answering questions about Arya’s ideal con-
ception of teaching and discovery learning; the teacher educator also shares her
ineffective implementation of it. They engage in responsive mediation by staying
attuned to Arya’s fledgling self-confidence as the teacher educator retells her own
experiences as a novice teacher practicing ‘discovery learning’ while also chal-
lenging Arya to deepen her conception of teaching by articulating the reasoning
behind her instructional activities and asking a series of questions to help her to
do so.

A growth point emerges

The teacher educator videotaped Arya teaching during her third week of teach-
ing (the fourth week in the course, as she and Mark alternated teaching weeks).
It is important to note that the earlier a teacher can be videotaped for a DVP
interaction, the more time the teacher will have to try to implement new under-
standings into their teaching activity. The teacher educator and Arya conducted a
DVP of a lesson in which Arya introduced the concept of intonation.
Arya began the lesson with a 10-minute mini-lecture on intonation in which
she tried to elicit the meaning of intonation from students. Then, she distributed
a transcript of a speech by President Obama that they would next watch. She told
them to mark places on the transcript where the President seemed to be express-
ing emotion through intonation.3 After watching the video, the class regrouped
for a whole class discussion concerning what they marked as intonation. The
pattern of teacher–student interaction repeatedly involved Arya asking for an
example, a student giving an example, and Arya paraphrasing the student’s answer,
a common initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequence. Arya recalled feeling
“uncomfortable” at the time because she felt as though students always focused
on her. Even when other students did participate, she expressed that “rather than
listening to their classmates they’re just waiting for the classmate to be done so they can
just have me go back over it all.” Because the teacher educator has Arya’s ideal con-
ception of teaching in mind and because Arya stated that she did not want to be
the one in the classroom doing the “telling” (DVP), the teacher educator works
to construct an IDZ with Arya by encouraging her to articulate an alternative
instructional response.
 Conceptualizing Teaching 149

Excerpt 5
TE:  Could you change the activity so that not everything is (.) you
leading the discussion? (4.0)
Arya: I mean I could have them in pairs discussing the questions (6.0)
TE: and then y’know imagine if you had (.) and this is why I think trans-
parencies are really great (.) if you have you have the um the uh (.)
transcript on the transparency, and then (.) um (.) they could even
highlight the things that they were talking about they could literally
stand in front of the classroom and highlight the things they
were talking about ((interruption in hall))
TE: y’know what I’m saying,
Arya: yeah I do
TE: I=
Arya: =I remember doing that in high school
TE: yeah.You did it in my class too with
Arya: oh wow. I forgot about that.

A growth point (McNeill, 2005) emerges as the teacher educator and Arya d­ iscuss
the contradiction between Arya’s ideal concept of teaching and the reality of what is
transpiring in her classroom activity.The teacher educator asks her “Could you change
the activity so that not everything is (.) you leading the discussion,” allowing for a ‘do over’
in a ‘safe zone.’ Depending on how Arya answers this, the teacher educator will be
able to gauge better how to enact responsive mediation. The teacher educator offers
her a space to think by remaining silent after her question. And after a four-second
pause, Arya presents a brief response, “I could have them in pairs discussing the questions.”
The teacher educator again gives her the space to elaborate on her suggestion of
pair activity by remaining silent. After six seconds of silence, the teacher educator
builds on Arya’s response by inviting her to “imagine” having students also look at
a transcript on a transparency. Although we could imagine a less explicit form of
mediation being offered, the teacher educator works to create joint mental activity
through more explicit mediation by referencing what she thinks is a shared under-
standing of how she used transparencies to support student activity in her own class
in which Arya had been a student. Using this shared understanding as a concrete
model of what Arya could have done, the teacher educator makes clear how students
could “literally stand in front of the classroom and highlight the things they were talking
about” rather than the teacher eliciting and controlling the results of pair/small group
work in a ­teacher-fronted way. Arya does confirm the value of students’ working
through their understandings with a transparency, but by recalling her experience
doing this in high school.The teacher educator reminds Arya that they have a shared
experience of using transparencies in this fashion from the teacher educator’s class,
to which Arya replies, “oh wow. I forgot that.” This is a useful reminder that what we,
as teacher educators, assume to be shared knowledge may not be shared in ways we
expect.
150 Conceptualizing Teaching

Arya later stops the video after another series of initiation-response-feedback

(IRF) sequences prevalent in her instruction. She again expresses frustration about
repeatedly creating teacher-fronted lessons in spite of her deliberate efforts to
revise her lesson plans to make them less so, an example of emotional/cognitive
dissonance. The teacher educator acknowledges Arya’s efforts and frustration.

Excerpt 6
TE: you think you’re breaking out of it (0.5) I don’t- this is no: ­deficiency
on your part, this is like speaks to how: POWERfully ingrained
(1.0) that model is
Arya: yeah
TE: even when you had (.5) examples trying to break away from that (.)
they don’t translate (.) it’s not like (.) I said something to you and then
it transfers to your way of thinking
Arya: yeah
TE: I think (.) I think what’s happening now: is an incredibly ­crucial
step (.) you see what your intention was and you see how it’s
playing out
Arya: mm
TE: and you’re saying that this is still (2.0)
Arya: uh so much to do (laughs)
TE: so: instead of watching (1.0) let’s talk about how this could’ve been
different
Arya: okay
TE: and more (2.0) more what I think you want your class to be
Arya: uh hm (2.0)

The teacher educator emphasizes “how: POWERfully ingrained” the teacher-­

fronted model of teaching is as a way to normalize Arya’s struggle to make her
activity of teaching align with her idealized conceptualization. This interaction
highlights the growth point as the contradiction between Arya’s thinking and doing
of teaching comes squarely into focus.The teacher e­ ducator and Arya work to stay
attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge, understanding, and emo-
tion within an emerging IDZ about overcoming teacher-­fronted ­instruction.The
teacher educator notes that recognition of the ­contradiction and the ­difficulty
of changing teaching “is an incredibly crucial step” in her d­ evelopment. The two-­
second pause after she notes that Arya is “saying that this is still [a ­problem]” sug-
gests that the teacher educator is using that space to determine what responsive
mediation might look like next. Arya attempts to save face through her inflated
comment “so much to do” and laughter. The teacher educator makes a strategic
choice to stop watching the video, especially given Arya’s perezhivanie concerning
her lack of self-confidence, in order to address this growth point. Rather than just
asking what she could have done differently as she had done earlier, the teacher
 Conceptualizing Teaching 151

educator signals that they will participate in ­interthinking (“let’s talk about how this
could’ve been different”) with an orientation to how she thinks Arya wants her class
to be. As the DVP continues, the teacher educator tries to create joint mental
activity with a more specific prompt.

Excerpt 7
TE:  how could you have the sa:me (1.0) resources (1.0) but
changed (2.0) what was happening in this class (1.0) and from
­physically changing the class to activities changing the class
Arya: well I really like what you said about transparencies (1.0) because
there’s an overhead projector in every UF classroom (1.0) which I used
to think was ridiculous but now (1.0) I’m kind of (.) ­sensing (.) um I
like the idea of (1.0) maybe not the sa:me resources,
TE: uh hmm
Arya: but having several things we watch with the transcripts printed ON
(1.0) the transparencies,
TE: uh hm
Arya: and then having several STUdents go up and (2.0) y’know they don’t
have to provide all the information but kinda be the one-like have a
list of questions (.) to ask the class to find and circle words but
once again I don’t want to do it within the framework of intonation
cause (.) I don’t know it
TE: right right right right right. But again again (.) y’know think about
how I use the transparencies to work in a group,
Arya: uh hm
TE: you have specific things ya have to do (1.0) then you’ve gotta come
back with your explanation (.) You gotta present your answer and jus-
tify it right? (.5) so if you think in terms of this, (1.0) y’know (1.0) so
(2.0) what was (1.0) I don’t know what your questions were (.), I can’t
remember what your questions were.

The teacher educator mediates responsively here by introducing “elements of

the task’s solution” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 209) by orienting Arya to using “the sa:me
(1.0) resources” while altering the physical arrangement of teacher and students
(“physically changing the class”) and what students were doing in class with the
resources (“activities changing the class”). Arya takes up this mediation by appropri-
ating the teacher educator’s earlier suggestion to use transparencies (“I really like
what you said about transparencies”), but expresses agency as she negatively appraises
the resources she used (“not the sa:me resources”), suggesting she would like to
come up with a better explanation of intonation and more appropriate texts. Arya
continues to detail how she would change her instructional activity, “have a list of
questions to ask the class to find and circle words,” but she would use a new “framework”
to remedy her unclear explanation.The teacher educator emphatically approves of
152 Conceptualizing Teaching

this idea (five “rights”), and then attempts to create intersubjectivity by r­eferencing
their shared knowledge, encouraging her to “think about how I use transparencies.”
The teacher educator communicates her expert thinking by recapping her pro-
cedures for using transcripts, and reiterating that the teacher provides specific
objectives for the students when doing the activity, and then has students present
their answers and justify the reasoning behind the answers. In essence, the teacher
educator is encouraging Arya to engage students in a similar kind of interthinking
that was embodied in the instructional activities she enacted in the pedagogical
grammar class and in her interactions with Arya in the DVP.
The responsive mediation that emerged in the structured mediational space of the
DVP was predicated to some degree on the teacher educator’s targeted under-
standing of Arya’s perezhivanie and ideal conception of teaching as expressed in
her teaching journals (and, of course, as discussed in their other interactions) as a
growth point emerged. At the same time, responsive mediation was dynamic, contin-
gent, and emergent in the real-time, moment-to-moment dialogic interaction in
the DVP as the teacher educator tried to gauge where Arya was in her cognition,
emotion, and activity concerning teaching. Though the teacher educator began
with a more implicit approach by asking Arya what she could have done differ-
ently, the teacher educator engaged in joint mental activity by noticing silences
and lack of detail, thereby providing explicit mediation when Arya needed assis-
tance to change the activity of her teaching to align with her emerging concep-
tion of teaching. She offered a pedagogical strategy, using transparencies in pair or
small group work, from their shared experiences in the teacher educator’s class, as
a way to engage students in the kind of sense making of language in context that
Arya valued.Though Arya had not recognized the teacher educator’s pedagogy in
the pedagogical grammar class as a model for accomplishing the kind of student
interaction that she desired, she could, once prompted, appropriate the model
and reimagine what she could have done differently in the class she taught on
intonation. As we will see in the next section, the consequences of this responsive
mediation played out inconsistently when Arya tried to materialize her emerging
conceptions of her teaching in the internship.

Arya’s (inconsistent) aligning of her activity of teaching with her

conception of teaching
In the week following the DVP, Arya and Mark were presenting a unit on polite-
ness and directness in American English requests, responding to requests, and
hedging. Arya attempted to implement her new conception of instruction when
she introduced politeness in American English requests. She put students into
pairs and gave each a transcript of a request dialogue between two native speakers
of English.They were also given three questions about the transcript.The students
were told that they had 15 minutes to analyze their dialogues and come up with
answers for their questions. Once the 15 minutes were up, one member from each
 Conceptualizing Teaching 153

pair used the overhead to explain the group’s ideas to the rest of the class. She
evaluated this lesson in her teaching journal entry:

Excerpt 8
Arya Teacher Educator

It went great! (I know I’m supposed Actually, I am quite relieved to hear

to say more than that, but I want to this. Yah.
say that, too!)
I can see you are explaining why
I may have gone into the lesson nervous, here I am so excited reading this.
but it went better than any other lesson You are describing everything
so far. The students were incredibly I have been trying to convey to you
engaged in their groups, discussing about this way of teaching. You have
what they thought was being experienced it and you “understand”.
accomplished and how. Wow.
During the presentation portion, there
was an open conversation with the entire
class. I never had to explain anything,
I just had to facilitate the conversation
by pointing out what I agreed with and
what was really interesting and asking
questions to further their thoughts about it.

Arya evaluates the lesson as going “great” but knows that the teacher educator
expects an explanation for her evaluation (“I know I’m supposed to say more”). The
teacher educator validates Arya with “Yah.” Arya then provides evidence of why
she believes the class went so well: “students were incredibly engaged in their groups”
as they grappled with “what they thought was being accomplished and how.” The stu-
dents presented their ideas, the content that Arya wanted them to discover, and
she “just had to facilitate.” The teacher educator responds to Arya’s earlier aside
that she knows that the teacher educator will want her to explain by noting “I
can see you are explaining here,” using the smiley face emoticon as evidence of their
shared understanding. The teacher educator validates Arya’s implementation of
her emerging conceptualization in her instruction by expressing her excitement.
She also signifies with ‘understand’ in quotes that Arya has enacted her new
conceptualization into her material activity; from a Vygotskian sociocultural per-
spective, she has developed as a teacher. She expresses the significance of Arya’s
accomplishment with “[W]ow.” However, given our understanding that teacher
development occurs through sustained participation in the activities of teaching,
it is hardly surprising that Arya does not experience the same success the next
time she teaches.
Because of the success she experienced in this lesson on requests, Arya planned
to do her next lesson on the different situational meanings of ‘sorry’ using a sim-
ilar instructional activity. Classroom conditions changed as only three students
showed up for class, and Arya expressed her disappointment with the lesson
in her teaching journal. Once again we are reminded how a lesson plan is an
154 Conceptualizing Teaching

idealized conception of teaching activity that will be influenced by various con-

textual factors emerging in the material activity of teaching.

Excerpt 9
Arya Teacher Educator

Because of the lack of cultural variety Did you have them analyze
(and the lack of our normal, together or as individuals/pairs
talkative, analytical students) the first? It seems like the former or
lesson did not go very well. My wait your wait time comment wouldn’t
time has never been so tested! I ended have been such a concern. I guess
up having to completely change my I’m just not to understanding
question every time, essentially walking why this didn’t work out if you had
them through each context in order texts for analysis.
to reach the answer I was looking for.
Are you sure about this? Did
It was incredibly frustrating for me they NOT want to talk or did
as the teacher, and I’m sure they not understand what you
uncomfortable for the students, wanted from them? Did you give
who did not want to talk as much them an opportunity to prepare
as they ended up having to. Despite to talk? Again, I just don’t
this, however, I feel as though the understand what the problem
students got something out of the lesson. was from what you describe. I
They were surprised by the number of would encourage you to think
different ways that sorry is used in more on this and what you did.
American English. They also by the end It may not be as you think...
had a grasp of how sorry can be used
with sarcasm (they did not have a perfect
understanding of sarcasm obviously, but
they understood the possible relationship
between I’m sorry and sarcasm).

Arya attributes the lesson not going “very well” to the absence of the “talkative,
analytical students” who normally participate. Students did not respond despite
her varied questions and protracted wait time, so she took up a more teacher-­
centered role (“walking them through each context”) to elicit appropriate answers.
The teacher educator, assuming that Arya followed the similar pattern of inter-
action and a­ ctivity as in the previous successful lesson on politeness in requests,
expressed confusion by asking “Did you have them analyze together or as individuals/
pairs first?” The teacher educator’s expertise is evident in her response as she spec-
ulates that Arya changed the activity from pair analysis of text before returning for
whole-class discussion to whole-class analysis of texts together with her (“It seems
like the former”). The teacher educator, knowing from experience working with
beginning teachers that they may initially blame students if a lesson goes awry as
a kind of face-saving mechanism, speculates and then downplays her speculation
(“I guess I’m just not understanding”) as a way to encourage Arya to reflect and
explain further.
 Conceptualizing Teaching 155

Arya expresses negative emotions in the next paragraph as she describes what
transpired in the class, describing it as “frustrating” for her and “uncomfortable for
the students.” She attributes her frustration and student discomfort to their unwill-
ingness to participate (“did not want to talk as much as they ended up having to”).
The teacher educator shifts to more direct questioning because if she is going
to mediate Arya responsively, she needs to know more about what transpired.
She directly asks Arya if she is “sure about this [her interpretation],” modeling
questions she should ask herself about whether it was student unwillingness to
participate, punctuated by ‘not’ in capital letters, or lack of an understanding
of how to participate. She directly asks her if she enabled them to participate
(“Did you give them an opportunity to prepare to talk?”) as a reminder of their shared
understanding created through the DVP. The teacher educator uses a rhetorical
strategy of modals as hedgers, hedging her inducement to reflect with a distanc-
ing modal (“I would encourage you to think more on this and what you did”) and then
suggesting the possibility of another explanation through another modal (“It may
not be as you think”).
To close this section, Arya’s final week of teaching involved a number of
review activities, so this lesson marked the end of her attempts to integrate
her new conceptualization of students co-constructing their understandings
of language through text analysis into her teaching activity with new s­ubject
­matter. Arya’s return to her teacher-centered style of teaching in the next
­lesson and her reflections in her teaching journal demonstrate the inconsis-
tencies so prevalent in the learning-to-teach experience, representing what
Vygotsky (1987) called the twisting path of development. Though Arya had
some initial success addressing the contradiction of her growth point, she has
not fully internalized her conceptualization of students co-constructing their
understandings of language, that is, she is not fully self-regulating in her activ-
ity of teaching.

Re-storying what triggered Arya’s return to

teacher-fronted instruction
By including a narrative inquiry project at the end of the teaching internship, the
teacher educator intended for the teachers to step back from their experience;
revisit it through their journal entries, the audiotape of the DVP, videotapes
of their teaching, and whatever other artifacts the teachers might have; narrate
their experience; and, in the process, come to new understandings of their learn-
ing-to-teach experience. Arya’s narrative reveals how she construed the teacher
educator’s and her responsive mediation as shaping her learning, as well as what she
learned. In her narrative inquiry, Arya highlighted the importance of her interac-
tions with the teacher educator during the DVP.
156 Conceptualizing Teaching

Excerpt 10
Being able to sit with [the teacher educator] and have my teaching analyzed
in an interactive way, both of us being able to stop the video and talk about
whatever came to our mind, allowed me to see myself in a new way.
Watching myself teach and talking about it was incredibly helpful because it
took the abstract concepts that we had been discussing all s­emester
and put them in a concrete framework. Right in front of me was
the evidence that my class, even though it was participatory, still remained
­teacher-centric. Though I may be thinking about discovery learning or
genre theory while creating my lessons, I was not applying them as
well as I had thought.

Arya describes how the experience of watching herself on video and discuss-
ing what she was doing and why with the teacher educator allowed her to “see
myself in a new way.” This was in part done by “how abstract concepts that we had been
discussing all semester” were put “in a concrete framework”—Arya herself suggesting
a Vygotskian notion of the dialectic between the abstract and concrete. What the
DVP showed her was that even though her class was “participatory” (students were
asking and answering questions), it was not the kind of participation she wanted
because it was teacher-centered. A contradiction existed between her “thinking
about discovery learning or genre theory while creating my lessons” and “applying them”
in her actual teaching.
Arya also acknowledges in her narrative the impact of her journal writing and
her and the teacher educator’s responsive mediation of the entries as she re-stories
her “frustrating” teaching experience with the lesson on ‘sorry.’

Excerpt 11
I realized after the fact (after a journal and a journal reaction from my
­professor) that I could have handled the situation better…I allowed myself to
feel pressured into changing the format of my lesson… I was incredibly ner-
vous when I realized how few students had showed up, however. For some
reason I did not think that this format would work. I think I was nervous about
having all of the students work in one small group and how that would affect the
atmosphere of the classroom.

Arya appears to have taken up the teacher educator’s advice to reflect fur-
ther on and reinterpret what happened by directly referencing the journal
entries (“I realized after the fact”). Arya’s narrative functions as externalization as
she describes her emotions and thoughts when she was teaching that lesson. She
describes feeling “nervous” first when she realizes that only three students were
attending class that day and then when she thinks about them working together
in one group. Consequently, she allowed herself “to feel pressured” and reverts to
her ­teacher-centered pattern of interaction with students analyzing the varied
 Conceptualizing Teaching 157

situational meanings of ‘sorry’ one by one with her at the front of the class.
Whereas previously in her journal entry Arya attributed her return to teacher-­
centered teaching to student unwillingness to participate, here she attributes it to
her nervousness as she feels “pressured” to modify her plan. Arya explained that the
students:

Excerpt 12
…felt pressured in the normal “classroom” environment to let the teacher
be the one providing the information. Because of this dynamic, the class was
incredibly difficult to get through. It felt like it dragged, taking a longer
than usual amount of time because of how many long pauses there were follow-
ing me asking a question and no one having an answer to volunteer. In my
nervousness I returned to my teacher-centric classroom model, feeling
more comfortable in the role of information-provider because I was unsure about
how the students would participate in a less “standardized” classroom.

Students likewise felt “pressured” to revert to their previous norms of participa-

tion. Rather than forge ahead, albeit nervously, with the successful kinds of activ-
ity and interaction she established in the previous class, Arya resumes the comfort
of being the information provider. Arya evaluates the resulting classroom interac-
tions through negative emotional language (“felt pressured,” “incredibly difficult to get
through,” “it dragged”). Because she has not given them the space to construct their
understandings of the texts with a partner or group before whole-class discussion,
she describes “no one having an answer to volunteer.” Rather than trusting in her
newly emerging cognitions, her conceptualization of teaching, she is regulated by
her emotions (“In my nervousness I returned to my teacher-centric classroom model”).
In describing her emotions and how they influenced her teaching activity, Arya,
through her narrative inquiry, was able to reinterpret and re-story her experience.
Arya’s re-storying of this experience reveals what she learned.

Excerpt 13
I had prepared my lesson in a certain way that, in my mind, necessitated a larger
group of students. In reality, however, any group of students could have com-
pleted my assignment. I just needed to be sure to give them the informa-
tion in an environment where they were primed to participate with
answers they have had to time to figure out themselves . . .

The 3 students that I had come to class that day were all incredibly
interested in sociocultural aspects of language. As we went through the
lesson it was apparent that they were understanding the points and were
enjoying them. They were not, however, primed to participate in the discus-
sion. They did not have knowledge of the different usages of “sorry” and were
not inclined to just speak up in class.
158 Conceptualizing Teaching

In order to make that class be much more successful, I should have just stayed
with my original plan. Rather than allowing the low number of students to
make me uncomfortable and change my mind for how to lead that day’s class,
I should have trusted myself as the teacher and carried forward with the
lesson normally, allowing the students time to talk among themselves about the
material before expecting them to be able to offer information in front of the
class, however small it may have been that day.

Arya now believes that her lesson plan would have worked with any num­
ber of students. She reinterprets her students as being “incredibly interested,” and
re-stories what happened in class: “it was apparent that they were understanding the
points and were enjoying them.” Students were not unwilling to participate. They
needed to be “primed to participate” and have time to construct their understand-
ings of the language feature before they were expected to participate. She realizes
she should have “stayed with my original plan” and “trusted [her]self as the teacher,” an
important reminder in light of her and the teacher educator’s goal of her building
her confidence through the learning-to-teach experience in the internship.
The teacher educator commented on Arya’s narrative as she described her
return to a more teacher-centered role.

Excerpt 14
This is so interesting because you showed that you had “learned” something import-
ant earlier. Yet when faced with quite a different context, what you had “learned”
seemed not to be fully internalized. This is not meant as a critique of you at
all. I am trying to point out how “learning” is not linear. It is, as Vygotsky
says, a twisting path. It might be helpful for you to think about this in your own
learning, but your students as well! Their learning is not ­linear either.

The teacher educator’s response to Arya’s resumption of her teacher-centered

manner of teaching in the face of a changed context is “not meant as a critique” of her
but as an acknowledgment of how learning to teach requires extended participation
in the activity of teaching. The teacher educator revoices Vygotsky’s (1987) image
that development is a twisting path involving fits and starts, suggesting that Vygotsky’s
ideas were part of their dialogic interactions throughout the internship. In addition,
the teacher educator connects Arya’s learning experience to that of her students
(“Their learning is not linear either”). Once again, the teacher educator tries to orient
Arya to the impact of instruction on learning, but this time through Arya’s learning.

Conclusion
The sequencing of structured mediational spaces that the internship provided—
the teaching journal, DVP, and narrative inquiry—enabled the teacher educator
and Arya to develop a shared understanding of her pre-understandings of her
 Conceptualizing Teaching 159

conception of teaching as students co-constructing their understanding of lan-

guage as discourse through texts, her execution of this conception in her teach-
ing, as well as her perezhivanie. As the teacher educator became attuned to Arya’s
­conceptions of teaching and emotions expressed in her teaching journals, the
teacher educator tried to mediate responsively in her written responses to push
Arya at her ‘ceiling’ to articulate the justifications behind her conception of
teaching. The contingent and dynamic mediation as they engaged in joint talk in
the DVP assisted Arya’s ability to identify and address the central reasons why she
was not enacting her idealized conception of teaching and tangible pedagogical
activities to do so, a growth point. Though Arya was successful in aligning her
instructional activity with her idealized conception of teaching in her next class,
she reverted back to her teacher-centered ways in the following class, a common
experience for many beginning teachers. Through the reflection and external-
ization facilitated by the narrative inquiry she conducted, Arya was able to rein-
terpret both her and her students’ activity, and re-story the experience to exhibit
cognitive (knowing what she could have done) and emotional growth (trusting
herself), exhibiting a more nuanced understanding of what participation means in
the language classroom. Though she had some opportunities to materialize her
emerging conceptualization of students co-constructing their understandings of
language in meaning-based activity, Arya needs continued opportunities to enact
her conceptualization in teaching activities in new and varied contexts if these
written and spoken dialogic interactions with the teacher educator are to become
psychological tools that regulate her teaching.
In this chapter we have highlighted how a teacher participating in an intern-
ship engaged in a sequence of structured mediational spaces that allowed for pro-
longed participation in the activities of language teaching. This sequence made
responsive mediation possible, and the teacher experienced both gains and setbacks,
with the opportunity to turn setbacks into gains in the learning-to-teach expe-
rience. In spite of having an ideal for teaching, the teacher struggled to enact
that conceptualization, as is typical of many beginning teachers. The teacher
thought that she was enacting her ideal, but realized otherwise when watching
and talking about a video of her teaching with the teacher educator. Providing
mediation that is responsive to the immediate needs of a teacher can be chal-
lenging when the teacher has to teach in next to no time, has limited resources
to enact a conceptualization of teaching, and may feel insecure. We believe it
was the teacher educator’s sequencing of cultural activities with specific media-
tional intentions that allowed for an ongoing co-construction of an IDZ, which
enabled a shared understanding of the teacher’s cognitive and emotional needs to
emerge through the journal entries before and during teaching, a growth point to
emerge and be addressed through the DVP, and Arya’s re-storying of an unsuc-
cessful teaching experience to occur through the writing of the narrative inquiry.
We also believe it was the teacher educator’s balanced attention to pedagogy
(such as using transparencies, providing guiding questions to work on in pair
160 Conceptualizing Teaching

work before discussion) and the teacher’s tenuous confidence that facilitated the
teacher educator’s ­responsive ­mediation as the teacher verbalized, materialized, and
enacted her emerging conceptualization of teaching as students co-constructing
their understanding of language as discourse through texts. Both her successful
and unsuccessful experience with enacting her conceptualization, with supportive
mediation, helped to foster the development of greater levels of teacher/teaching
expertise. By tracing teacher development as it is in the process of formation in/
through the varied activities of the internship, we are able to see the interdepen-
dence between engaging teachers in different kinds of thinking about teaching
and providing multiple opportunities to enact instruction, as well as the kinds of
mediation that can emerge in these varied cultural practices of teacher education.

Notes
1 Mark undoubtedly mediated Arya’s thinking and doing of teaching, but this
interaction is beyond the scope of this chapter.
2 The teacher educator is not normally a user of emoticons, but finds them
essential in softening critique and creating emotional solidarity with beginning
teachers as they learn to teach.
3 Arya confused emotion as signaling intonation in her class. Although this was
discussed in the DVP and no doubt contributed to her students’ answers, it is
beyond the scope of this chapter to address this issue.

References
Golombek, P. R., & Doran, M. (2014). Unifying cognition, emotion, and activity
in language teacher professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education,
39, 102–111.
Karpov, Y. V. (2003). Vygotsky’s doctrine of scientific concepts: Its role for con-
temporary education. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V. S. Ageyev, & S. M. Miller
(Eds.), Vygotsky’s educational theory in cultural context (pp. 65–82). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analyzing classroom talk as a
social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech (N. Minick, Trans.). In R.W. Reiber
(Ed.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 3. Problems of the theory and history
of Psychology (pp. 37–285). New York: Plenum Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1988). The problem of age (M. Hall, Trans.). In R. W. Reiber
(Ed.), The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 5. Child psychology (pp. 215–231).
New York: Plenum Press.
PART IV

Mindful L2 Teacher Education

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10
Responsive Mediation
The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

In our earlier work, we argued that taking up a Vygotskian sociocultural theory of

mind radically transforms how we understand L2 teacher learning, L2 teaching,
and the entire enterprise of L2 teacher education (Johnson, 2009; Johnson &
Golombek, 2011). In this project, by looking closely at our teachers as they are
learning to teach and our activity in mediating their learning, we have become
mindful of our role in cultivating their professional development. And this, accord-
ing to Vygotsky, is the ultimate goal of formal education: “to point the road for
development…to create conditions for certain cognitive processes to develop…
for a child to transform an ability ‘in itself ’ into an ability ‘for himself ’” (as cited
in van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, p. 331). As L2 teacher educators and applied
linguistics researchers, writing this book has created the conditions for our own
professional development, enabling us to become mindful of our pedagogy for L2
teacher education. By putting our pedagogy under a microscope, we have delib-
erately sought to unpack what we have fully internalized as L2 teacher educators,
and, in true Vygotskian fashion, externalized our own expertise as we seek to
cultivate L2 teachers’ professional development. Doing so, we believe, has changed
our expertise as well, cultivating a higher level of consciousness, a more nuanced
understanding of our work, and a mindfulness of what, how, and why we do what
we do and its consequences on and for our teachers. As we mentioned at the
outset, we believe that the educational value of analyzing our practices with our
teachers, in our programs, is in enabling others to scrutinize their practices, to hold
themselves accountable to the teachers with whom they work, and to become
mindful of their pedagogy for L2 teacher education.
Early on in this project, the notion of responsiveness captured our imagina-
tion. We could feel and see an intense level of responsiveness in how our inter-
actions with teachers unfolded. Yet to articulate what we meant by responsive
164 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

mediation, we needed to tease out its dynamic, emergent, and contingent qualities
while also articulating a theoretically sound rationale for why we do what we
do with the teachers with whom we work. We also needed to empirically doc-
ument the consequences of our pedagogy on and for our teachers’ professional
development. The end result of this project, the writing of this book, has led us
to conceptualize our pedagogy as Mindful L2 Teacher Education.
Framed as Vygotsky might, Mindful L2 Teacher Education is about creating
the ‘social conditions for the development’ of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. It
is about engaging in dialogic interactions that assist teachers as they transform
knowledge, dispositions, skills, and abilities ‘in itself, for themselves.’ It is about
exposing teachers to psychological tools that ‘point the road toward’ more the-
oretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices and greater levels of
professional expertise. In practice, Mindful L2 Teacher Education requires that we
recognize and intentionally direct what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher
education. To do this, we need to be mindful of our motives, intentions, and goals
when designing, sequencing, and enacting our pedagogy. We need to be mindful
of who our teachers are, where they are in cognitive, affective, and experiential
terms, how they are experiencing both being and becoming teachers, and what
we collectively are attempting to accomplish throughout our time together. We
need to maintain an intense level of responsiveness, one that permeates all of
our interactions, whether moment-to-moment, asynchronous, or at-a-distance, in
order to encourage collective responsiveness within our practices. We need to be
mindful of the consequences of our pedagogy on how teachers come to under-
stand both the scope and impact of their teaching. More now than at any point
in our professional careers, we have become mindful of the tremendous level of
reflexivity, sensitivity, and specialized expertise that is required of us if we are to
cultivate L2 teachers’ professional development.
Yet we are also well aware that in a time when there is growing public con-
sensus that teachers matter, this has not been matched by a consensus that teacher
education matters (Cochran-Smith, Feiman-Nemser, & McIntyre, 2008; Edwards,
Gilroy, & Hartley, 2002). On the contrary, political challenges to the value of
teacher education and alternative pathways into teaching through initiatives such
as ‘Teach for All’ (http://teachforall.org/en) have reified the common sense notion
that teaching is best learned on the job. Additionally, the neoliberal de-skilling of
the teaching profession that is being propagated through teacher-proof, scripted
curriculum (see Beatty, 2011) is purposefully designed to take the mindfulness
out of teaching by telling teachers exactly what to think, say, and do irrespective
of who the students are or where the educational setting is. These trends and
their socially situated meanings both reflect and are reflective of contemporary
societal, institutional, and political expectations that shape and are shaped by the
sociocultural contexts in which teachers and teacher educators live, learn, and
work. Mindful L2 Teacher Education, we believe, offers a counter-narrative to these
discourses. Mindful L2 Teacher Education requires that we make visible the unique
 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education 165

contributions that teacher educators as professionals and teacher education as

professional preparation make toward the development of L2 teacher/teaching
expertise and its deeply personal and moral consequences on and for L2 teachers.
We once again call attention to Vygotsky’s idea that properly organized formal
education is the exemplary activity to achieving a deeper understanding of the
object of study, and thus argue that L2 teacher education can be that compel-
ling force in teacher professional development.Vygotsky argued that children go
through critical periods, not linked to age, but periods of upheavals, where new
psychological tools (literacy, math, etc.) are introduced with the goal of recon-
structing the child’s mental structures.These critical periods are marred by contra-
dictions between the child’s current abilities and the dominant mental formations,
what we described in Chapter 2 as the social situation of development. Overcoming
these contradictions creates the potential for cognitive development. We thus
envision Mindful L2 Teacher Education as a critical period in the learning of teach-
ing, in which contradictions emerge between teachers’ apprenticeship of observa-
tion (Lortie, 1975) and what they are experiencing and being exposed to in and
through the practices of L2 teacher education. Responsive mediation, as the nexus of
Mindful L2 Teacher Education, emerges during systematic instruction aimed at the
ceilings of teachers’ ZPDs and supports the emergence of new meanings, enabling
teachers to gain increasing control over true concepts that regulate their teaching
activity and burgeoning teaching expertise.
In Chapters 1–4 we offered the foundation of sociocultural theory and a col-
lection of Vygotsky and Vygotskian-inspired theoretical concepts to situate and
operationally define the concept of responsive mediation. In Chapters 5–9 we high-
lighted various iterations of responsive mediation that emerged in different material
cultural activities that constitute our own L2 teacher education practices. In this
chapter we shift our attention to a much more abstract level, one in which we
consider the logic that is ignited when responsive mediation becomes a psycholog-
ical tool for L2 teacher educators, teachers, and researchers to both examine and
inform their own pedagogy. We propose responsive mediation as an academic con-
cept that “develops dynamically through use, to be learned over time and formed
through a process of synthesis and analysis while moving repeatedly between
engagement in activity and abstract reasoning” (Johnson, 2009, p. 20).
Given our Vygotskian sociocultural stance on internalization as the ongo-
ing process of transforming from the social-external to the personal-internal,
we know that readers will not simply read about responsive mediation and use it
to regulate their thinking and activities. Nor does responsive mediation include
just any interaction. Through our description of responsive mediation as a psy-
chological tool, we encourage readers to ascend to the concrete by external-
izing and examining the conceptual and material features of their L2 teacher
education practices (activity). We invite readers to document and analyze
empirically the impact of responsive mediation on, for, and with the L2 teachers
with whom they work.
166 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

Dialectics and responsive mediation

In proposing responsive mediation as a psychological tool for L2 teacher educators,
we draw on the origins of Vygotsky’s approach to investigating the development of
higher-order mental functioning (i.e., human cognitive development). In his attempt
to reformulate the dominant psychological theories of his time,Vygotsky sought to
overcome the deficiencies of binary logic (i.e., mind versus body) by uncovering
how dialectical principles functioned in the domain of human consciousness, spe-
cifically the uniquely human ability to use symbols to mediate the psyche (Mahn,
2009). Dialectical logic, based on the writings of Hegel (1965), is a method of rea-
soning that aims to understand the world concretely in all of its movement, change,
and interconnections, unifying its opposite and contradictory sides. Put simply, to
understand anything in our everyday experience, we must know something about
how it arose and developed (processes) and how it fits into the larger context or
system of which it is a part (relations).Vygotsky was attracted to how Marx had used
dialectical principles in his political-economic analysis of capitalism, and thus he
attempted to apply these same principles to the field of Psychology. Obviously much
more can be said here, but for our purposes, it is Marx’s dialectical methodology
that we find fruitful in articulating the internal logic of responsive mediation. Briefly,
Marxist methodology entails deconstructing the present to find its preconditions in
the past (how did it come to be as it is), which allowed Marx to project its likely
future (what it could be), in essence, seeking out the preconditions of the future in
the present (what is happening now that allows us to imagine the future). Marx’s
‘dance of the dialect,’ according to Ollman (2003), is never truly finished. Thus,
while “change is always part of what things are, the central question becomes how,
when, and into what they change and why they sometimes appear not to (ideology)”
(Ollman, 2003, p. 66). For teacher educators, this means thinking dialectically and
having a theorized idea of how, when, and into what we expect teachers to change
their thinking and activity, all the while recognizing why they may not change, or
choose not to change, in ways that we may have intended and/or imagined.
We find this dialectical methodology vital in defining the internal logic of
responsive mediation. When we respond to our teachers’ blog entries, when we
discuss their videotaped instruction, or when we ask them to conduct narra-
tive inquiry projects, we continually ask ourselves, “Given the activity we are
currently asking our teachers to engage in (present), how have their ways of
thinking, talking, and acting come to be as they are (past)?” Moreover, “How can
we collaboratively co-construct an imagined future, one in which they come to
embody theoretically and pedagogically sound ways of thinking, talking, and act-
ing (future)?” Thus, while we are engaged in the present, we must collaboratively
and cooperatively acknowledge the past and imagine the future, all the while
recognizing what we are doing as happening in an evolving, ever-changing, and
challenging system. And as a result, responsive mediation has come to represent the
nexus of our pedagogy for L2 teacher education through which this process is
 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education 167

accomplished. It is not simply about what we do, but how we think about what
we do that matters. And how we think about what we do is grounded in an ideal/
material dialect that (re)shapes responsive mediation continually.

Ideal/material dialect
In addition to being driven by dialectical logic, we also find responsive mediation
as constituting an ideal/material dialectic. One opposition, the ideal (conceptual),
represents our motives, intentions, and goals, which inform not only the design
and sequencing of the mediational spaces, tools, and activities that we create, but
also how we envision our teachers should begin to think, talk, and act. The other
opposition, the material (activity), is what we actually say and do together, our
moment-to-moment, asynchronous, and at-a-distance interactions, that are, of
course, enacted with real people, with histories, needs, emotions, in real time and
in real contexts. This dialectic is endemic to our work in that a new path forward,
or a new way of thinking, must be put forth both ideally and materially for devel-
opment to occur. And this is where responsive mediation comes into play. Teacher
educators have an ideal of what they want to accomplish in an activity and an
individualized sense of each teacher, but it is in the material, the in situ enactment
of that activity, that teacher educators attempt to identify concretely the lower and
upper thresholds of each teacher’s ZPD as they seek to cultivate development.The
in situ activity, on the social plane, may alter the teacher educator’s ideal, as well
as understanding of the teacher, while also, we hope, altering the teacher’s ideal
and activity. Responsive mediation, once again, functions as the mechanism through
which to resolve the dialectical relationship between the ideal (conceptual) and
the material (activity) that exists in the social conditions and interactional spaces,
mediated through language, where obuchenie takes place. Not every interaction
between a teacher educator and a teacher leads to development, so when enacting
responsive mediation, the concept of obuchenie positions teacher educators squarely
on the instructional side of expert/novice interactions, as the ultimate goal of
Mindful L2 Teacher Education is to cultivate teachers’ professional development.
The ideal/material dialectic does not only represent the teacher educator’s
mental processes and activity in L2 teacher education. Teachers likewise come
into these interactions with an ideal (conceptual), though we expect that this ideal
does not contain the specificity characteristic of the teacher educator’s expertise.
Teacher educators thus also need to have some understanding of the teacher’s
ideal if they are to mediate responsively. This is where intersubjectivity is partic-
ularly important as teacher educators try to create a shared understanding of the
instructional situation that is the focus of their activity. This dialectic plays out
in dialogic interactions with teachers, when teacher educators and teachers are
highly responsive to one another, when they share some of the same motives and
are working toward the same objective, and when their dialogic interactions are
directed at the upper limits of teachers’ current capabilities.
168 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

Junctures within mindful L2 teacher education

Given the complexity and dynamism of the dialectic we are describing, especially
the ideal/material, readers may be struggling to understand how to place these
abstract notions into concrete activity. We have found it helpful to consider the
ideal/material dialectic emerging at three unique but continuously interacting
junctures in our work as teacher educators—intentions, in situ, and consequences.
The first encompasses our intentions. In whatever practice or sequence of prac-
tices that we are creating for and/or enacting with teachers, we begin with basic
questions concerning what we hope teachers will accomplish, what we anticipate
as being difficult for them, and what the consequences of activity may be on
and for teachers. The second juncture is in situ, as it is happening, in moment-
to-moment, asynchronous, or at-a-distance interactions. The dialogic nature is
obvious in both moment-to-moment and asynchronous interactions, but it is also
evident in the at-a-distance interactions. If we consider Bakhtin’s (1986) notion
of dialogism as utterance and discourse, chains of utterances and discourses not only
anticipate a listener, but also anticipate a response, being “shaped and developed
in continuous and constant interaction with others’ individual utterances” (p. 89).
As teacher educators, our mediational intentions at-a-distance serve to anticipate
teachers’ responses, and to maintain an ongoing dialogue. We again ask ourselves
questions in situ concerning what we seem to be achieving and how it links with
our and our teachers’ intentions. The third juncture entails the end result, the
consequences on and for professional development. As we enact our intentions
in activity, we expect there will be significant consequences for teachers, for their
students, and for ourselves, so we question what those consequences might be,
both in situ and after the fact.
We emphasize both the recursive and interactive nature of these junctures.
Even when one juncture is a focal point, the others are still present. When con-
sidering our intentions, we are concomitantly reflecting on what we anticipate,
to some degree, will happen in situ, as well as the possible consequences. When
interacting in situ, we are appraising whether and how our intentions are being
carried out as well as their potential consequences. And when we experience and
appraise the consequences, we are reflecting on their effect on our intentions and
the in situ.

Responsive mediation
We emphasize that our concept of responsive mediation is theoretically informed
and multifaceted and, thus, cannot be reduced to a bite-sized definition.
Grounded in dialectical principles, responsive mediation starts with the teacher
as a whole person, or as much of the person as teacher educators know or can
come to know. It also requires establishing a sense of teachers’ perezhivanie,
both past and present, as well as recognizing teacher educators’ own complex
 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education 169

interplay of cognition and emotion, originating in and reshaped through their

perezhivanie. Thus, responsive mediation recognizes how teachers have come to
be who and where they are (processes) as well as how they and what they
do fit into the larger sociocultural contexts in which they operate (relations).
From here responsive mediation proceeds to the particulars: the challenges teach-
ers are facing, the tensions they are experiencing, the excitement they are
feeling. These particulars may represent potential growth points where responsive
mediation may be most beneficial. For example, a teacher’s idealized teaching
persona (e.g., Kyla’s persona as fun and mellow), or the partial understand-
ing of an academic concept (e.g., Ryan’s everyday notion of parallelism), or
an externally imposed teacher identity (e.g., Patrick’s identity as ‘grammar
inquisitor’) all represent the particulars or preconditions that exist in the pres-
ent that can help open up the past and imagine the future. As teacher educators
work on and through these particulars, they must come to recognize the upper
limits of teachers’ potential, be strategic in the sort of assistance given, and
remain highly responsive to teachers’ immediate needs and emerging capaci-
ties. As we mentioned previously, we emphasize the multidirectional nature
of these dialogic interactions and the fluidity with which responsive mediation
evolves. Such responsiveness requires that teacher educators intentionally
forge intermental development zones (IDZs)—multiple and sustained opportuni-
ties to think together about the problems, concerns, and/or issues at hand; offer
assistance that is responsive to immediate needs and emerging capabilities; and
design, sequence, and enact various mediational spaces, tools, and/or activities
through which teachers can function successfully ahead of themselves. Yet,
responsive mediation also entails moving back and forth between the particulars
and the abstract, drawing on academic concepts to restructure everyday concepts,
assisting teachers in naming or renaming new ways of reasoning about and
enacting their teaching activity in various instructional situations, for different
pedagogical purposes. As new generalizations take shape, true concepts begin to
emerge and hopefully become the psychological tools that enable teachers to
enact theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices in the set-
tings and circumstances where they teach.
Responsive mediation also requires that teachers come to think dialectically
too. We expect teachers to reflect on their experiences with us by recognizing
the past in the present, and imagining the future, as predicated on the present.
For example, in Chapter 6 Kyla’s idealized teaching persona originated in her
past and was challenged when she was unable to enact it in the present, but
with the teacher educator’s assistance and their dialogic blog exchanges, she
became increasingly capable of materializing her idealized teaching persona.
As a consequence, her idealized teaching persona had changed. Her mellow and
nice attitude now had a purpose and clear objectives that regulated her thinking
and activity. She was not only able to describe what she did, she was able to
imagine what she could have done. Her newly imagined teaching persona
170 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

emerged from the fluid social relations and dialogic interactions that she had
with the teacher educator. These interactions were not and could not have
been predicted ahead of time, but instead were negotiated and constituted in
situ as teacher and teacher educator engaged in and with the blog during Kyla’s
practicum placement. We saw a similar tension unfold for Abra in Chapter 5.
Her idealized conception of teaching originated in her perezhivanie about what
it means to be a ‘good’ person in how she treated others. Even though she did
not enact this conception materially in her instructional activities, at least to
her way of thinking, engagement in the digital video protocol (DVP) with the
teacher educator created a safe zone, a ‘do over’ of sorts, where she was able
to express what she could have done differently to engineer student partici­
pation in the future. And in Chapter 9, we saw how Arya expressed her ideal
conceptualization of teaching as students co-constructing their understanding
of language as discourse through texts, and how she thought she was enact-
ing it until she participated in the DVP. Even though the teacher educator’s
assistance through their emerging, moment-to-moment dialogic interactions
in the DVP enabled Arya to design and enact material activity aligned with
her ideal conceptualization in her next class, when faced with new classroom
conditions, she resorted to her teacher-fronted approach. The self-inquiry and
mediation provided through the process of writing a narrative inquiry enabled
her to re-story this entire experience, transforming her understanding that she
could implement her conceptualization in material activity with any n ­ umber
of students if they were ‘primed to participate’ and she ‘trusted [her]self as the
teacher.’
As we have argued throughout this book, L2 teacher education as a cul-
turally embedded, socially constructed educational activity is designed and
carried out to support the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. Yet,
in many ways, and based on our analyses in Chapters 5–9, what we are really
attempting to do in our pedagogy is to project an imagined future on, with, or
sometimes for our teachers. For us, Mindful L2 Teacher Education is about how
to enact obuchenie, focusing specifically on the central role of social interaction
and meaning-making in building teaching repertoires for how to be and how to
mean in the L2 teaching world. Mindful L2 Teacher Education entails attention to
what teachers bring to their learning-to-teach experiences (pre-understandings),
how teachers are experiencing what they are learning (perezhivanie), the emer-
gent, contingent, and responsive nature of teacher/teacher educator mediation
(responsive mediation), the development of new understandings (concept develop-
ment) in situations where teachers’ p­ re-understandings are inadequate, and the
mediational means (­ mediational spaces, tools, and activities) through which teach-
ers begin to reconceptualize how they think about and attempt to enact their
instructional practices in the setting in which they teach. To enact obuchenie as
Vygotsky intended, we argue, responsive mediation lies as the nexus of Mindful
L2 Teacher Education.
 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education 171

An invitation for L2 teacher educators, teachers, and researchers

In the opening pages of van der Veer and Valsiner’s (1991) book, Understanding
Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis, they offer a quote from Vygotsky that captures the
principles that have inspired us to write this book. In true dialectical thinking,
Vygotsky states:

Every inventor, even a genius, is always the outgrowth of his time and
­environment. His creativity stems from those needs that were created before
him, and rest upon those possibilities that, again, exist outside of him. That
is why we notice strict continuity in the historical development of tech-
nology and science. No invention or scientific discovery appears before the
material and psychological conditions are created that are necessary for its
emergence. Creativity is a historically continuous process in which every
next form is determined by its preceding ones. (p. xi)

In this book we have opened up for closer scrutiny the material (practices)
and psychological (conceptual) conditions of our work as ‘inventors,’ as teacher
educators, and in doing so, unpacked what we know and do as L2 teacher educa-
tors and researchers. By turning our analytic gaze inward and grounding what we
know and do in a sociocultural theoretical perspective, we have articulated our
pedagogy for L2 teacher education by uncovering ‘the material and psychological
conditions’ underlying it. It is our hope that by making our pedagogy accessible
to others, we have created the theoretical and pedagogical conditions that will
promote Mindful L2 Teacher Education. Our commitment to Mindful L2 Teacher
Education and the concept of responsive mediation as the mechanism through which
it is enacted would not have been possible if we had not empirically documented
and analyzed the material and psychological conditions of our work as L2 teacher
educators. Thus, to conclude, we invite readers to take up a mindful stance, one
that we believe will enable them to enact Mindful L2 Teacher Education in the set-
tings and circumstances in which they work and that offers a counter-narrative to
dominant discourses that degrade teacher/teaching agency and the role of teacher
education in the development of teaching/teacher expertise.

Cultivating development
Teachers do not enter L2 teacher education programs to mirror the experi-
ences they have in the everyday world. Instead, they expect to engage in prac-
tices that will, by design, enable them to materialize and enact theoretically and
pedagogically sound instructional practices that support productive language
learning within the contexts in which they teach. In the introduction of our
2011 edited book, we argued that a Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind offers
tremendous explanatory power to both capture the elusive processes of teacher
172 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

professional development and articulate sound ways to support and enhance

teacher ­professional development within L2 teacher education programs (p. xi).
While much of our earlier work focused on capturing the processes of teacher
learning, our more recent work, and this book in particular, has focused on the
deployment of specific Vygotskian-informed concepts and principles in order to
intentionally promote the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. It is
for these reasons that we have sought to examine not only how we attempt to
cultivate teachers’ professional development but also the consequences on and
for the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. We see our work as very
much in line with Lantolf and Poehner’s (2014) recent attention to the peda-
gogical imperative in L2 education. They state that the pedagogical imperative reflects
“Vygotsky’s position that to be successful, psychology cannot be a science lim-
ited to observation of human psychological processes and their development,
but it must become a science that takes seriously the obligation stated succinctly
in Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (italics in original)” (Lantolf
& Poehner, 2014, p. 7). This project and our conceptualization of Mindful L2
Teacher Education is a serious attempt to change L2 teachers, L2 teaching, and L2
teacher education.

Thinking dialectically
This is hard for most of us to do. Thinking dialectically about anything we do
requires a sea change in how we understand the world. Aristotelian philosophy
has long dominated Western thinking through its dualistic mind/body distinc-
tion, based on formal logic and characterized by a schism between the ideal
(mind) world and the material (body) world. Thus, in L2 teacher education we
are often stuck in dualisms such as theory/practice, novice/expert, or teach-
ing/learning, positioned as if they represent fundamental distinctions that distort
our understandings of the relationship between and consequences of teaching
and learning, how and what we need to know to learn to teach, and what it
means to be a teacher and a learner. Dialectic thinking, in contrast, is the logic
of interconnectivity, of movement, of change, and accepts as fundamental that
reality is constantly changing especially through the dialectic unity of opposing
forces (Novack, 1971, pp. 77–78). To enact Mindful L2 Teacher Education, teacher
educators and teachers must think dialectically. The present must be viewed as
reflecting the preconditions of the past that made it possible and the future can
only be imagined by reflecting on the preconditions in the present that make
the future possible. We believe our characterization of responsive mediation does
create the social conditions for dialectic thinking and, thus, makes development
possible. But, as we mentioned above, we are also humbled by the reflexiv-
ity, sensitivity, and expertise that are needed to cultivate teachers’ professional
development.
 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education 173

Unpacking expertise
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Ball and Forzani (2010) describe the activity
of teaching as ‘unnatural work’ since it requires teachers to unpack something
that they know so well, yet now must make accessible to and learnable by oth-
ers. We argue that the same can be said for teacher educators. To enact Mindful
L2 Teacher Education, teacher educators must unpack their own expertise, or
what they have internalized; make it systematic, accessible to, and learnable by
their teachers; and provide appropriate assistance as teachers attempt to first
imitate, then play, and eventually internalize features of their expertise, moving
from external (interpsychological) to internal (intrapsychological) and thus estab-
lishing the psychological basis of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. We have done
this for our work in Chapters 5–9, and invite other teacher educators, teachers,
and researchers to do the same. We believe for teacher educators and teachers,
doing so will change the nature of their expertise, while for researchers, doing
so will change the nature of their understanding of expertise. The material-
ization of teacher educator expertise, whether through self-study or study by
others, reveals the complexity and socially situated nature of such expertise,
located L2 teacher education (Johnson, 2006), and thus offers evidence against
the de-skilling of teachers, discourses of teaching as ‘learning on the job,’ or
teaching as scripted activity.

Forging true concepts

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Vygotsky (1986) did not privilege academic con-
cepts over everyday concepts, arguing that neither is sufficient for a child to become
fully self-regulated. Instead, he argued that the goal of formal education is for
academic concepts and everyday concepts to become united into true concepts; an aca-
demic concept “gradually comes down to concrete phenomena” and an everyday
concept “goes from the phenomenon upward toward generalizations” (p. 148).
We believe this same process of internalization is essential for the development
of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. Mindful L2 Teacher Education that supports the
internalization of true concepts, a concrete example of how we can think dialecti-
cally, assists teachers as they transform their tacit knowledge and beliefs acquired
through their schooling histories, enabling them to rethink what they thought
they knew about teachers, teaching, and student learning. Mindful L2 Teacher
Education supports teachers as they begin to use true concepts as tools for thinking,
enabling them to see themselves and classroom life and the activities of teach-
ing/learning through new theoretical lenses. Mindful L2 Teacher Education assists
teachers as they begin to think in concepts (Karpov, 2003), to reason about and
enact their teaching effectively and appropriately in various instructional situa-
tions, for different pedagogical purposes, and to articulate theoretically sound rea-
sons for doing so. Likewise, through unpacking expertise, we expect that teacher
174 The Nexus of Mindful L2 Teacher Education

educators can, as they identify what they do in their pedagogy and why, engage
in a similar process of thinking through concepts more intentionally and respon-
sively—with the goal of cultivating teacher development.

Working responsively
In line with cultivating development, thinking dialectically, unpacking expertise,
and forging true concepts, enacting Mindful L2 Teacher Education requires that teacher
educators work responsively as the nexus. We invite readers to embrace responsive
mediation as a continuous process of recognizing and then working at the upper limits
of teachers’ ZPD, mindful of their own and their teachers’ perezhivanie, sociocul-
tural history, idealized conceptions, motives, and goals, while continually respond-
ing to teachers’ needs, motives, and goals as they unfold in ­moment-to-moment,
­asynchronous, and at-a-distance dialogic interactions while engaged in the practices
of L2 teacher education. As we articulate our pedagogy, we are even more humbled
by the reflexivity, sensitivity, and expertise that are needed to work responsively to,
ultimately, cultivate L2 teachers’ professional development.

Conclusion
In this book we offer Mindful L2 Teacher Education as a counter-narrative to the
dominant political and educational discourses that teacher education doesn’t matter.
We believe it does. We see Mindful L2 Teacher Education as theoretical learning that
is intentional, deliberate, and goal-directed by teacher educators who are skilled at
moving teachers toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional
practices and greater levels of professional expertise. We have empirically docu-
mented how teacher learning and development are assisted by the dialogic interac-
tions that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher education.We propose responsive
mediation as a psychological tool for examining the quality and character of the dia-
logic interactions that emerge inside the practices of L2 teacher education, as well as
a mediational means for orienting to and enacting a mindful pedagogy that supports
the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise. We end by leaving our readers
with the same ‘quest for synthesis’ that Vygotsky called for more than 85 years ago.
Though this book may be completed, our quest for understanding, supporting, and
enhancing L2 teacher professional development inside the practices of L2 teacher
education continues to constitute the essence of our scholarly and professional work.

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Index

academic concepts 5, 7, 10: case example discovery learning 10

of use 121; conscious knowledge discourse analysis activity 11, 119–21
of 11; development of 40; everyday dual simulation, functional method of 29
concepts, connecting to 52, 173; dynamic assessment (DA), second
functional understanding of 42; language learning 31, 32
internalization, relationship between
24; mediation, relationship between 24; egocentric speech 22
systematic use of 15; teachers’ learning emotional/cognitive dissonance. See
opportunities 11; understanding of 132 cognitive/emotional dissonance
activity systems 12 engineering student participation 61: case
affective tendencies 39, 43 example 68, 70–3
apprenticeship of observation 5, 43 empty verbalism 5
artifacts teaching-related 136 ESL classes: description 93; EFL, versus
asking why 104 93; FL, versus 93; lesson planning 94;
purpose of 127–8; simulated recall
cognitive development: school teaching sessions 94; student participation 102;
and learning, relationship between training in 93–4
39–40 everyday concepts 5–6: academic concepts,
cognitive/emotional dissonance 44–5: case versus 173; internalization, relationship
example 69 between 24; teachers and teaching,
consciousness, levels of 163 regarding 25, 121
contextualizing approaches 129–30
conversation, ground rules of 49–50 genetic method 40–1
genre, academic concept of 123,
development, social situation of 25, 92, 122 124, 128–9
dialectical thinking 171, 172 grammar inquisitor, case example 127
dialogic video protocols (DVPs) 60–1: case growth point: benign instability, creation
example 61–3, 64–9, 73; instructional of 45; case example 67, 72, 118, 131;
interactions 140; intermental cognitive/emotional dissonance as
development zone (IDZ), use with 61; potential 44–5; defining 45; emergence
objectives of 73; safe zone of 141; of 117; responsive mediation directed at
value of 69 39, 45–6, 169
 Index 177

ideal/material dialectic 167 118, 120, 123, 124; symbolic 32–33;

identity-in-activity 12–13, 118, 124–5, Vgotsky’s theory of mind, as central
127, 130, 131 concept 21–2, 24; ZPD activity,
identity, teacher: development of 12–13, co-regulation during 30–1
13–14 microgenetic analyses 53
imagery-language dialectic 45 microteaching simulations 91
international teaching assistants (ITAs) 61 mindfulness: concept of 163; education, in
instructional context 44 168; unpacking 173
instructional setting 93 multiple correct answers 98, 99, 100, 101,
intermental development zone (IDZ): 103, 104, 105, 108
case example 70, 101, 121; concept of
51; dialogic video protocols (DVP), narrative: engagement in 116–17;
use with 61; formation of 169; externalization, as 131; inquiry 119,
interthinking, relationship between 123–4, 126, 128, 129, 132, 141, 159;
48–9; maintaining 78; overview 50–1; mediational tool, as 14; reflective process
preservation of 70; structure for 142; of 136; verbalization, as 117, 129
video use 60; ZPD, versus 51–2 native speaker myth 13
internalization 4, 22; academic concepts, necessity, degree of 11
relationship between 24; everday
concepts, relationship between 24 obouchenie: case example 110-11; cognitive
intersubjectivity 30, 33, 68, 69, 152, 167 development, relationship between
interthinking: case example 81, 142, 143–4; 39–40; conversational ground rules,
character of 79, 142; communicative relationship between 50; defining 40;
space for 61, 78; concept of 49; construct dialogic interactions in support of 51;
of 49–50; contextualizing 85; defining dialogic video protocol, use with 72;
48–9; environment for 144; groundwork effectiveness 40; value of 132
for 81; intermental development zone
(IDZ), relationship between 48–9; parallelism: case example of teaching of
process of 50; psychological processes 96, 97–101, 104–5, 105-7; concept
engaged in 54; quality of 79, 142 95; practice teach example 101–3;
teaching 95
journaling: case examples 142, 143, 144, pedagogical content knowledge 9, 10, 63
145, 156; impact of 156; reflective pedagogical imperatives 53
thinking 141; usage 77, 79, 140 pedagogies, L2 teacher education programs
8–9, 111: reasoning behind 118–19. See
L2 teachers: competence 87; dialogic also specific pedagogical techniques
interactions 15–6; professional perezhivanie 42–3; case example 65, 66,
development 3–4 72, 80, 83, 152; lens of 145; teachers’
learning: teaching, versus 51 past and present 111, 140, 168–9;
learning-in-practice 13 understanding 152
lesson plans 33: collaborative performance receding competence 10–11
preparation 86–7 personas 83, 86
play: mental development from 27;
Marx, Karl 166 Vygotsky’s view of 27–8
material sign vehicle 41 practicum, teacher: case examples 79–80,
meaning development 42 80–1, 82–4, 85–6; dialogic blogs 77–8,
mediation: case example 81, 103; 79, 81, 82, 84, 86; Internet-based
cognitive 30; dialogue, versus 52; communications 77; overview 76–7;
defining 21; enacting 28; human 25–6, structured reflective component 77, 78
32, 33, 34; interpretations of 28–9; probability 11
metacognitive 30; quality of 103; professional knowledge base 8–9
responsive (see responsive mediation); psychological tools 128
strategic 30; structured spaces 95, 110, Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) 97
178 Index

reasoning teaching 7, 8 teacher education programs, L2 4–5:

reflective teaching movement 91 appropriate practices 22–3; cognition
responsive mediation 31, 32, 33–4: 114–15; content 8; coursework 114,
capturing 48; case examples 101, 115, 116; cultural embedding 170;
110–11, 123, 152, 155; challenges importance of 164; knowledge bases
of 118; character of 49; conditions 114; motives 118; pedagogical reasoning
for 65, 116; consequences of 54; behind 118; psychological tools 23;
defining 39; dialogic video protocols sequenced assignments 122–3
(DVP), use with 74; growth point, teacher-fronted instruction 155
directed at 39, 45–6; internal logic teacherly thinking 8
of 166; nexus of 174; sign meanings, TESL methodology 94
relationship between 42; structured theory/practice dichotomy 90, 91
spaces for 110–11, 140 theory of mind 163, 171–2
re-storying 157 think in concepts 5, 6
rhetorical strategies 100 thinking-for-speaking 45
true concepts 5, 11
safe zones 116
self-regulation, teacher 70–3 verbalization 14–15
sign forms 41 video recall. See stimulated recall
sign meanings 41, 42 video study groups 60
sign systems 41 volitional tendencies 39, 43–4
space, teaching 28 Vygotskian sociocultural theory 4:
social relations: internalization, relationship development, social situation of
between 24 25; disciplinary knowledge 11, 12;
sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) higher-ordered mental functioning,
52–3, 54 examination of 166; innovation of 26;
sociocultural environments: narrative activities, transformative
teacher education, relationship power of 15; psychological tools 22
between 6–7
Stanford Model 91 words: thoughts, relationship between 41
stimulated recall: case example of usage
107–9; evolution 59; overview 59; usage zone of proximal development (ZPD)
59–60, 94 26–7, 28: ceilings of 117; intermental
structured mediational spaces 92, 93 development zone (IDZ), versus 51–2;
students: motives of 23 mediation as co-regulation during 30–1;
synergy 129, 130, 132 upper limits of 34, 167