ABSTRACT
Centred on an intervention research study within a pre-service teacher education course in England this chapter explores the use of the semantic theory of inferentialism by pre-service teachers and its impacts on their planning and teaching a sequence of lessons and their perceptions of how it can harness students’ conceptual development. The chapter highlights the challenges that pre-service teachers face in engaging with subject knowledge and developing a more explicit subject pedagogy when learning to teach due to the way schools and pre-service teacher education increasingly operate within settings defined by policy definitions of what is important. It shows how the intervention helped the pre-service teachers to direct attention towards subject knowledge, intensify discipline specific insights and discern a more coherent knowledge structure within lesson plans and teaching. However, the intervention did not develop their practice in the design of learning tasks. It also unsettled established understandings of student learning. Additionally, the research stimulated renewed thinking about the nature of teacher preparation courses and professional knowledge and learning.
