ABSTRACT
In this chapter I draw on one aspect of a long-term ethnographic study of school-based teacher education in England, and present analyses of the learning opportunities for student teachers as they take part in meetings with their supervising teachers (subject mentors) in two school subject departments. The student teachers were participating in a one-year Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) programme at one university and were placed in different departments in the same school. Mentor meetings took place between mentors (subject specialists in the departments where student teachers work) and student teachers, as protected, timetabled time once a week, and were designed to help support the professional development of student teachers in the school. Meetings were expected to help student teachers to analyse and evaluate their teaching and any other lessons they had seen, to reflect on and evaluate their developing skills, and to arrange learning opportunities and plan activities. In this chapter I compare and contrast how learning is constructed across the learning opportunities of mentor meetings in the two departments, and consider the key features of the sessions. The analyses indicate how the learning opportunities are constructed differently in the two departments, even though they are in the same school and working within the same PGCE course. Analyses particularly illustrate how pedagogical practices in mentor meetings shape student teachers’ experiences of school-university partnerships as training programmes. There was very little communication between mentors in the different departments (in school and the university), and therefore the departments operated in relative isolation.
