ABSTRACT
The field of second language teacher education (SLTE) has embraced a view of teacher learning as being socially negotiated, resulting through participation in the sociocultural practices and contexts of teaching, that is, grounded in the professional thinking and activities of teachers (Borg, 2003; Freeman, 1996, 2002; Freeman & Richards, 1996; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 2006a; D. Woods, 1996). This epistemological shift within SLTE mirrors a number of disciplines that have reconceptualized what it means to know a subject and, consequently, how to teach it. Mathematics and biology, for example, have fundamentally changed their notions of the knowledge needed to learn these subjects from knowledge of content only to knowledge as a dialectical relationship between content and the cognitive processes necessary to understand that content conceptually. Bishop (1988) has labeled this “mathematical enculturation,” a process of learning math that connects the concepts that mathematicians know with how they think systematically and problem solve. The goal of instruction is to move students beyond their intuitive and empirical understanding of concepts to scientific thinking (Adey, 1999; Driver, Guesne, & Tiberghien, 1985), or mathematical thinking (Nelissen, 1999). Similarly with SLTE, the goal of instruction is to move learners of teaching beyond their experiential “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975) ways of thinking to expert teachers’ ways of thinking.
