ABSTRACT
The transition from abstract notions of pupils to specific understandings of concrete individual pupils and differences among them is often seen as a natural consequence of novice teachers’ exposure to interactions with pupils. Teacher training programmes can take this transition for granted. Trainee teachers (hereafter called ‘trainees’) are expected to move from abstract notions of pupils taught at the university to real teaching experiences in schools which materialize the abstract notions. In this chapter I argue that this transition instead represents a critical phase and a learning challenge in the professional development of teachers. The chapter discusses the materialization of the pupil as a professional object for Italian elementary school trainee teachers who were involved in a project of developmental intervention (Engeström 2007). Davydov’s (1990) theory of learning as ascending from the abstract to the concrete and Leont’ev’s (1978) notion of object are used as theoretical lenses to conceptualize this process. The project aimed at introducing in the school a computer-mediated learning practice internationally known as the ‘Fifth Dimension’ or the ‘5D’ (Cole 1996; Nilsson and Nocon 2005). The 5D was used as an interventionist methodology of teacher education for university students who would become teachers (for an analysis of this 5D as a school-based innovation, see Sannino 2008). The 5D was designed to be a response to the critique by the trainees of the traditional university internship programme in the school which did not allow them to interact directly with the pupils. During the phase of preliminary ethnographic fieldwork, interviews were conducted in which these trainees repeatedly pointed out their need to directly interact with pupils in order to prepare themselves for the teaching profession. The chapter analyses the intervention as a process of progressive discovery of pupils as the concrete object of the trainees’ activity of teaching. More specifically, the chapter aims to answer the following research questions: what are the dynamics that characterize the materialization of
pupils as professional object for trainee teachers? And what is the relevance of these dynamics in terms of improvement of learning in teacher education and the 5D type of research interventions?
