Abstract for NERA 2013, Iceland

Theory and Practice – Knowledge Forms, Culture Analysis and Embodiment
Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen
‘Teacher Education Network’
Compared to other Nordic teacher education programs the Danish teacher education is as designated to the teacher profession but not necessarily towards studies for a master’s degree. This constitutes what I call the teacher education program problematique – an identifying and structuring question that includes different perspectives on what constitutes a good teacher education program, a good student, a good teacher. In a theoretical framework of Aristotle, Thomas Højrup and Maurice Merleau-Ponty I develop an analytical model called the topos and logos model designing a qualitative case and methodological design. In a six months period of fieldwork two students including their teachers and supervisors are observed, interviewed and videotaped in the last placement period and in the students’ phase of writing the bachelor thesis. The analysis demonstrates that the intended and practiced knowledge forms are cultural structured and bodily anchored in the self-images of the placement and teaching sites which points to a significant distance between the academic intentions of the Bologna process and the students examinations of the bachelor thesis. This distance constitutes a site of its own, and as a cultural event the analysis is illustrating how the process of the teacher education program becoming academic begs the question of what form of academic formation is actually being debated. The dissertation can conclude in sum the following points:
1. The policy documents of the teacher education program are intending and practicing contradictory frames for the academic formation and mobility
2. In spite of the initiatives there are still significant contradictions between placement and teaching sites in the understandings of the means and ends of the teacher education program and in the relations between theory and practice.
3. The process of becoming academic and professional formation is in an interpellation process headed towards the perceptions and conditions at the placement site and in the students’ main subjects.
4. The academic eidos of the bachelor of education program can be formulated by a methodological point of departure in fieldwork related to the Bachelor thesis.