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5 A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activity in novice teachers’ practicum blogs Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek

Introduction and aims

While we have argued that narrative, as a cultural activity, is a powerful semiotic tool that has the potential to facilitate cognitive development (Golombek & Johnson, 2004), we believe that given the ubiquity and import of teacher educators’ mediation for novice teachers, understanding the quality and character of their dialogic interactions can provide insight into the complex ways in which teacher educators mediate in novice teachers’ learning-to-teach expe-riences. In addition, such an understanding can provide insights into how novice teachers understand, respond to, and potentially take up that mediation as they are learning to teach. To that end, this chapter examines engagement in narrative activity in private, asynchronous online exchanges via a blog between two novice English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and a teacher educator during a 15-week Masters in teaching English as a second language (MA TESL) teach-ing practicum. The practicum blogs as narratives represent ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou, 2006) that were dialogically constructed (Bamberg, 2004) and reflect the emotional, moral, and relational dimensions of how teachers hold and use their knowledge (Elbaz, 1983). As such, the practicum blogs were examined to tease out the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activity in teacher learning and to explore the role of the teacher educator in mediating novice teach-ers’ learning-to-teach experiences. Overall, this study has three aims: (1) to tease out the cognitive and emotive processes that are ignited as novice teachers engage in narrative activity via practicum blogs, (2) to examine the role of the teacher educator in mediating nov-ice teachers’ learning-to-teach experiences via practicum blogs, and (3) to trace novice teachers’ attempts to take up that mediation and work towards greater self-regulation over their instructional practices while seeking to establish a sense of teaching expertise.

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2A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activity in novice teachers’ practicum blogs

Theory and narrative

As we have argued elsewhere, the field of second language teacher educa-tion (SLTE) has long recognized teacher inquiry as a productive mecha-nism for teachers not only to make sense of their learning and teaching experiences but also to make worthwhile changes in their teaching prac-tices (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). As a result, engagement in narra-tive activity has served as a central vehicle for teacher inquiry. When narrative is conceptualized as a mediational tool, engagement in narra-tive activity influences how teachers come to understand what they are narrating about, and this involves a complex combination of descrip-tion, explanation, analysis, interpretation, and construal of one’s private reality as it is brought into the public sphere. In line with Shore (1996: 58), engagement in narrative activity allows self-representation and self-interpretation as ‘experience is literally talked into meaningfulness’.

Within SLTE, engagement in narrative activity enables teachers to bring ‘meaningfulness’ to their learning-to-teach experiences, much like Flowerdew and Miller (this volume) suggest for language learners. More specifically, we argue that narrative functions as a mediational tool that both supports and enhances teacher learning in distinct yet interactive ways (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). Narrative as externalization func-tions to make perceptions and experiences overt by giving voice, oral or written, to those thoughts and feelings, creating opportunities for introspection, explanation, and sense making. Narrative as verbalization functions as a way to regulate the thinking process through the inten-tional use of scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1986), which represent the current research and theorizing generated by research on second lan-guage learning and teaching as tools for understanding, or thinking in concepts (Karpov, 2003). Narrative as systematic examination makes explicit the interconnectedness between what is learned and how it is learned; in other words, how teachers engage in narrative activity will fundamentally shape what they learn. Our argument is that ‘when narra-tive is used as a vehicle for inquiry, as is the case in SLTE, it functions as a powerful mediational tool that makes explicit, in teachers’ own words, how, when, and why new understandings emerge, understandings that can lead to transformed conceptualizations of oneself as a teacher and transformed modes of engagement in the activities of teaching’ (Johnson & Golombek, 2011: 490). Like Hayes (this volume) who envisions nar-rative research transforming issues of social justice in local contexts, we envision narrative practices transforming individual teachers’ concep-tions and activity of teaching in specific ways.

Particularly important in SLTE is the fact that engagement in narrative activity often exposes teachers’ emotional and cognitive dissonance, which can initiate the recognition of contradictions

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3A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition,

emotion, and activity in novice teachers’ practicum blogs

within a teaching context and push cognitive development (Cole & Engestrom, 1995; Golombek & Johnson, 2004). In fact, Golombek and Doran (2011) argue, guided by Vygotsky’s (1986) emphasis on the affective-volitional basis of cognition, that teachers’ expres-sion of emotions is not a distraction from teacher learning, but a structural component in the developmental process. Thus, how the teacher educator responds to, or mediates, the expression of emotion in teachers’ narrative activity is crucial to novice teachers’ profes-sional development.

Moreover, since engagement in narrative activity can open up the ‘meaningfulness’ of teachers’ experiences to social influence, when teacher educators have access to a teacher’s internal cognitive strug-gles as they are unfolding, this allows them to calibrate their mediation to address the teachers’ immediate needs and/or concerns. Vygotsky (1987: 209) discussed ways that teachers can mediate student activity, such as ‘demonstration, leading questions, and by introducing ele-ments of the task’s solution’. A potentially powerful feature of engage-ment in narrative activity via practicum blogs is the concretization of teachers’ thoughts, feelings, and understandings in real time, and an opening up, of sorts, of not only teachers’ internal emotional and cognitive struggles but also their potentiality, or what they might be able to do with assistance. Vygotsky (1978: 86) defined this arena of potentiality as the zone of proximal development (ZPD): ‘It is the dis-tance between the actual developmental level as determined through independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.’ Narrative activities, such as practicum blogs, can expose this arena of potentiality, giving teacher educators access to novice teachers’ potential for learning and their capabilities as they are emerging. And since much of what we do as teacher educators is to assist novice teachers as they attempt to teach in ways that they are not yet able to do on their own, ‘mediation directed at this metaphoric space of potentiality is essential’ (Johnson & Golombek, 2011: 6). Our interest in the dialogic interactions that emerge between novice teachers and teacher educators in practicum blogs is driven by our quest to understand how teacher educators can best support and enhance novice teachers’ cognitive development as they are engaging in their initial learning-to-teach experiences (see also Early & Norton, this volume).

Context

The teachers, Lesley and Kyla, were enrolled in an MA TESL teach-ing practicum, a capstone course, lasting one academic semester (15

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weeks), and offering different placement possibilities. Lesley fulfilled the requirements of the practicum in a low-intermediate ESL speak-ing and listening course that she had taught the previous semester at an intensive English language programme. Thus, Lesley was the instructor of record for her teaching practicum with one semester of prior ESL teaching experience. Kyla was assigned to an ESL course for international teaching assistants (ITAs) taught by an experienced ESL teacher (Emma). Both Lesley and Kyla were required to post weekly online blog entries which were read and responded to by the practicum supervisor (teacher educator). Both teachers also met regu-larly with the teacher educator, who observed their teaching twice, held pre- and post-observation meetings, and provided support and feedback throughout the practicum through both face-to-face meet-ings and the practicum blogs.

Data

The data for this study were limited to each teacher’s practicum blog. We ground our understanding of narrative in Bruner’s (1996) notion of narrative as a mode of thinking; that the narrating of experiences brings meaning to those experiences and exposes how such mean-ings are infused with interpretation and situated in the social world. Engagement in narrative activity in the practicum blogs created a virtual space for these teachers to make their tacit thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, fears, and hopes explicit, to create cohesion out of what they were experiencing during the practicum experience, and to bring their experience into ‘meaningfulness’ (Shore, 1996).

The first three blog entries were assigned by the teacher educa-tor and structured (focus on the course, focus on the students, and focus on the teacher) while the remaining blog entries were open-ended. In addition to weekly blog entries, to which the teacher educa-tor responded, written post-observation reports were also posted on each teacher’s blog. The teachers sometimes posted draft lesson plans, course handouts, and/or assessments when they wanted feedback from the teacher educator. They also posted a stimulated recall analysis of a videotaped lesson they taught, which included short (1–2 minute) transcribed teaching episodes with commentary on their instructional decision-making. As a final blog entry, the teacher educator asked both teachers to re-read their entire blog, with an eye towards tracing their own learning throughout the practicum, and post a final reflec-tive entry. Lesley completed 15 blog entries, while Kyla completed 23. The teacher educator commented on all but the last blog entry. The blogs were selected as data for this study because as a requirement of

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the practicum, they represent both authentic teacher reflection and teacher educator meditation.

Analysis

Using the discourse analytic principles of grounded content analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and ethnographic semantics (Spradley, 1979), the data were first analysed to identify emotive content. Then, instances of emotional and cognitive dissonance were identified because the result-ing contradictions have been found to play a catalytic role in the trans-formation of teachers’ thinking and activity (Golombek & Johnson, 2004). There proved to be a great deal of emotive content throughout the blogs, and several contradictions emerged for both teachers. Both Lesley and Kyla experienced a contradiction that resulted in an acute loss of self-regulation that compromised their ability to enact effectual instruction. The dialogic nature of the practicum blogs were of particu-lar interest because of the crucial role that strategic mediation (Wertsch, 2007) plays in cognitive development. Thus, the quality and character of the teacher educator’s blog entries were analysed to identify the nature of the mediation, or cognitive assistance provided. We view this as impor-tant furthermore in light of Tsui’s (2003: 281) point that when an expert teacher’s ‘ways of thinking and ways of learning’ is made explicit, it can help to orient beginning teachers in their own teaching and assist in the development of expertise. In addition, the novice teachers’ responses to the teacher educator’s mediation were analysed to trace their emergent conceptual understanding of themselves as teachers and their teaching as they attempted to enact newly acquired insights in their instructional practices. Examples of our data analyses are interwoven in the ‘Findings’ section below as we agree with Sarbin (1986) and others that narratives are holistic and cannot be reduced to isolated examples without losing the essence of the meanings begin conveyed.

Findings

Lesley: emotional dissonance and loss of self-regulation

From the beginning of the semester, Lesley’s blog entries reflect narra-tive as externalization as she describes what she does in her class, why she does it, and how she feels about it, as well as explanations as to why something might be happening. The teacher educator offers her explicit mediation with suggestions for what she could do in response to a particular problem she is facing, thus exposing her ‘expert’ think-ing to Lesley. Lesley’s negative emotions index cognitive dissonance

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and, thus, tend to drive her concerns, as she expresses both a sense of ‘worry’ and ‘excitement’. After about one month of seemingly smooth teaching, Lesley encounters some vexing interactions with her students.

This past week has been rough. Teaching wasn’t exactly the way I planned it to be, and I’ve trying to self-reflect during the past week. I’ve ended up with two answers, one is that I don’t have a goal for both classes, and two, I’m too nice to the students.

Each level and class in the IECP has its own course objectives. I plan to complete the course objectives one by one. But lately, perhaps it’s because we’ve been doing summaries for too long, both the students and I are get-ting tired of doing it. So I’m thinking of mixing a few of other objectives in before I complete this one. But wouldn’t that be unorganized? I’m worried that students will feel I’m skipping things, today we do this and the next class we suddenly do something else. I think I have to set a standard for each of the objectives: how well do I want them to complete something before I can tick that off the promotion criteria? I really have to stop escaping and get organized …

I think I’m not working hard enough. I think I have to change something around before the situation gets worse. First thing is to get things orga-nized, take out the promotion criteria and nail them!

Lesley’s journal begins with an evaluation of the past week with the emotive adjective of ‘rough’, and this evaluation is detailed through emotive content representing a mismatch between the reality of her teaching and her expectations: ‘teaching wasn’t exactly the way I planned it to be’. She identifies, through her own self-reflection, what she believes to be the roots of this mismatch; ‘doing summaries too long’. She is trying to reorient her thinking and activity as she begins her blog and tentatively offers an instructional alternative of intro-ducing other objectives into her coming lessons. She questions the value of this alternative and explicitly seeks mediation by asking the teacher educator; ‘But wouldn’t that be unorganized?’. She expresses emotional dissonance in response to her self-generated alternative, being ‘worried that students will feel I’m skipping things’. Through-out, she expresses an underlying anxiety concerning her responsibility to meet the expectations of both the students and the institution. Les-ley shows a loss of self-regulation in that she blames herself for ‘not working hard enough’. She is emotionally distressed and, in terms of cognition, cannot articulate an instructional response to a situation she anticipates can get ‘worse’.

To explain the second problem, Lesley uncovers a tension in her teaching that is pervasive in beginning teachers’ professional lives:

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trying to find ‘a balance between being nice and still have my author-ity as a teacher’.

The other thing is because I’m nice and funny to the students, I feel that sometimes they don’t take me seriously enough. Also, partly because I look young to them. I have to find a balance between being nice and still have my authority as a teacher. Before I said that I like my students alot, I think I’ve spoiled them. At the same time, if they tell me something nega-tive, I feel inferior to them, which I shouldn’t. I have a question, do this happen only to me? or to all teachers? do they feel inferior when students say no to what they say or directly point out their mistakes?

She again seeks mediation from the teacher educator by asking; ‘do[es] this happen only to me? or to all teachers?’ This questioning of whether what she is experiencing is normal again represents emo-tive content. She does not have the experiential knowledge base upon which to draw to answer her own questions and looks to a more expert teacher for mediation, specifically validation.

Meditational response: ‘What you are experiencing is pretty norMal …’

The teacher educator’s first response to Lesley’s blog entry is to vali-date what she is experiencing.

First of all, what you are experiencing is pretty normal for a novice teacher, especially one who is working in an institution with a pretty loose curriculum ... and secondly you are being too hard on yourself – but let’s meet asap to talk about how you can set a plan for the next few weeks so that you feel and seem organized and you can establish a balance between being their teacher and being their friend … And when we meet, bring your course objectives, any and all of your lesson plans, and we’ll get down to business right away. Cheer up – things will get better ...

The teacher educator validates Lesley’s emotions by first noting that what she is going through is emblematic of a teacher’s initial expe-rience confronting the realities of the classroom and suggests that this tension is further complicated by the freedom that her instruc-tional context affords. By noting that she is ‘being too hard’ on her-self, she suggests that Lesley’s expectations of herself are unrealistic and unproductive. She recognizes Lesley’s loss of self-regulation and suggests a face-to-face meeting where she can be more immediately responsive to her. Still, she helps to re-orient Lesley in this blog entry by explaining what material tools Lesley needs to bring to their meet-ing, course objectives and lesson plans, which will be used to mediate

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Lesley’s understanding of this teaching challenge and the development of an instructional response. The teacher educator also establishes the objective of the meeting: ‘so that you seem and feeling organized and you can establish a balance between being their teacher and being their friend’. By expressing that they’ll ‘get down to business right away’, the teacher educator focuses her on the task at hand: over-coming the emotional and cognitive dissonance she is experiencing through the mediation she will provide in their meeting, so they can develop a plan of action that Lesley will implement in her instruction.

lesley’s plan of action: ‘i feel alive again …’

In Lesley’s next blog, she directly thanks the teacher educator for her support and then explains how she implemented the plan of action that resulted from their face-to-face meeting:

After being depressed for a little while, I talked to Dr. [ ] about my con-cerns. (Thank you so much [ ]. I feel alive again. ^_^) …

The next morning, I went to class with excitement and a little sense of fear. I explained to the students why I wanted to do this presentation. I said the reason was I didn’t want to crash them together with the other teachers on their final week, I want to move this presentation forward to have a better quality and discussion. I showed them examples and encouraged them to bring in any article they liked, but it has to be something they’re interested. Their reactions were not as bad as I thought it would be, and when I had them write their name down on the sign up sheet, some of them didn’t mind starting next week. I was really happy with their attitude.

Lesley recognizes the emotional dissonance she experienced and the role the teacher educator’s mediation played in helping her to over-come the dissonance so that she now feels ‘alive again’ and she ‘was really happy with their attitude’; signs of positive emotional congru-ence with the implementation of the plan of action. The blog func-tions as narrative as externalization as she describes what she said to her students, basically a rationale for what she decided about the presentation assignment, and what she felt as she approached her class – ‘excitement’ and ‘fear’. She evaluates their reactions, the real-ity being much better than what she had anticipated. She has imple-mented the meditational means from her interaction with her teacher educator into her teaching and is, thus, showing signs of regaining self-regulation.

After the students begin to do their presentations in class, Lesley evaluates their performance as successful and speculates on the rea-sons for this success:

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This week the students started doing presentations in Level 3. They were surprisingly good because of the topics the students chose. When I gave out the assignment, they were saying 15 minutes is too much, but when they made the presentation, they easily stayed up there for over 30 minutes until I pulled them down. Perhaps it is because of the topic they chose, all the people had some opinions to say about it and the presentation always ended with a very enthusiastic discussion. I am very pleased about their work. Just like [you] said, they’re having fun and I’m more relaxed, yet their learning go on.

In this excerpt, Lesley describes and evaluates the outcome of the plan of action that she took up as a result of the mediation provided by the teacher educator during the face-to-face meeting. In this case, the reality was better than Lesley’s expectations as she describes the stu-dents’ presentations as ‘surprisingly good’. That she feels emotional congruence is evident in her evaluation of the students’ discussions as ‘enthusiastic’ and in her statement of being ‘very pleased about their work’. She confirms the value of the mediation she received by com-menting on her students’ and her own well-being and re-voicing the teacher educator’s words that ‘their learning go[es] on’.

the Meditational response: ‘giving theM a little bit of oWnership’

The teacher educator further mediates Lesley’s evaluation of her instructional response to her loss of self-regulation by inserting the theoretical concept of ‘ownership’ and its connection to student engagement and motivation as an explanation for what may have made Lesley’s revised instructional activity successful.

Sounds like giving them a little bit of ownership over even a small aspect of your course (the topic of their presentations) has made a huge difference in terms of their engagement and motivation. And the fact that some of them spoke for such a long time suggests that when properly motivated they probably have stronger speaking skills than you (or they) might have suspected. Not to mention how the sort of engagement that resulted in their presentations will help to set the tone for more active participation in the coming weeks. As you are planning for the coming weeks, try to think of other small ways that they can have some control or choice over what they are talking about or what they are expected to do. Sometimes by cre-ating the right conditions for engagement and then just stepping back and letting them go can really turn things around – as it appears it has!

Vygotsky (1986) argues that the use of scientific concepts is meant to enable students to name and define their experience, to re-examine

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their everyday understanding of what they are experiencing through more explicit, systematic, theoretical knowledge. The teacher edu-cator connects the concept of ownership to the concrete realities of Lesley’s practice by telling her to think about this concept explicitly as she plans her instruction; ‘try to think of other small ways that they can have some control or choice over what they are talking about or what they are expected to do’. By orienting Lesley to what she should be thinking about as she plans her instruction, the teacher educator is attempting to assist Lesley as she begins to take up and try out this concept, encouraging her to use this concept to regulate her thinking (verbalization), as she plans for upcoming lessons. By connecting Les-ley’s emerging understandings of what has happened in her classroom (the concrete-past) through the scientific construct of ownership (the abstract-present), the teacher educator is pushing Lesley’s thinking in concepts (Karpov, 2003) in order to create congruence among her feelings, thinking, and doing, and in a sense forming a dialectical unity of the abstract and the concrete past and the projected future.

Kyla: constructing a teaching persona

Throughout the practicum experience, Kyla’s blog entries reflect narrative as externalization as she brings into conscious awareness and struggles to construct a teaching persona that will enable her to function successfully as an ESL teacher. She expresses this struggle through emotive language that shifts from overconfidence, ‘the stu-dents appeared to again speak more when I was teaching (without Emma around)’, to deep disappointment, ‘I was really disappointed in myself’ to humility ‘I was very humbled.’ The teacher educator’s blog entries function as an important meditational tool by provid-ing emotional support, offering concrete instructional strategies, and modelling expert thinking, all of which appear to work in consort to assist Kyla as she struggles with the dissonance she is experiencing between her imagined teaching persona and the instructional experi-ences she is attempting to create for the ESL students in her practicum placement.

Kyla’s iMagined teaching persona: ‘i coMpletely forgot that i Was teaching ...’

During the initial weeks of the practicum experience, Kyla expresses optimism and confidence in her abilities as a teacher while at the same time indicating negative impressions of her practicum placement based on observations of the class. She emphasizes the students’ lack of

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participation and initially attributes this to the ESL teacher’s style of teaching being ‘intimidating for students’ who view her ‘as an author-ity figure rather than a peer’ due to their cultural backgrounds. After teaching a lesson for the ESL teacher, who was called away on an emer-gency, she contrasts her own ability to generate student participation, attributing it to her ‘relaxed and comfortable’ teaching style.

I did some things differently than from what my master teacher would have done.

I expected a lot of participation from the students and I did this by having a very relaxed and comfortable environment for the students.

This class was so mellow and fun that I completely forgot that I was teach-ing ... I don’t know if that was bad or good, but this teaching experi ence felt really good.

Throughout these early stages of the practicum, the teacher educa-tor uses the blog to validate Kyla’s reported successes: ‘Well, if it felt good, it probably was good.’ In spite of Kyla’s positive congruence with her experience, ‘relaxed and comfortable environment for the students’, ‘so mellow and fun’, ‘felt really good’, the teacher edu-cator uses the blog to push her to articulate the rationale behind her instructional decisions – ‘How do you engage students with the text in ways that highlight its essential features?’ – and to reiterate the instructional responsibilities of a teacher – ‘Yes, you need to have a clear goal in mind, model what you want them to do, create comfort-able spaces for them to do it, and support them as they carry out the activities.’ Although there is no apparent tension in Kyla’s teaching, the teacher educator, anticipating from her expertise the multilayered nature of such largely emotional evaluations of teaching, encourages her to articulate the pedagogical reasoning behind her instructional activities.

the tension eMerges: ‘MelloW and fun’ and ‘… being the “teacher”’

Both the content and the function of the blog exchanges shift dra-matically after the teacher educator’s first teaching observation of and feedback to Kyla. Her self-described non-authoritarian teaching per-sona becomes destabilized when her first ‘official’ lesson goes awry as expressed in her post-observation blog entry.

So, on Monday I was really disappointed in myself for doing such a horrible job. I noticed myself get pretty nervous while teaching ... and

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it also didn’t help when I wasn’t completely prepared. Just because I was nervous, didn’t mean I should have jumped from one idea to the next. In reflecting back, I think I set off this frantic pace for myself in my head which made me want to keep rushing things. I realized that one of the things that I needed that day was understanding what my purpose was ...

To tell you the truth, that was one of the criticisms that my mentor profes-sor had given me in the past. She noticed how when I teach in the class-room I have a tendency to appear unsure of myself. But by the end of that year, she said I was able to nicely balance my mellow and nice attitude with being the ‘teacher’. I guess again I was a bit disappointed in myself because in the process of thinking of my students, I, in my rusty state of teaching, reverted back to my old ways.

Kyla’s highly emotional response, being ‘really disappointed’ in her-self ‘for doing such a horrible job’ and her recognition that her ner-vousness fostered ‘this frantic pace’, connects a current tension in her teaching with one from her history as a learner of teaching. She attempts to show the teacher educator that she does know better by blaming it on her ‘rusty state of teaching’, a strategy to buttress her imagined teaching persona. Like Lesley, Kyla experiences the com-mon novice teacher tension of being ‘the teacher’ while still being friendly with students.

In response to Kyla’s entry, the teacher educator, with a greater sense of Kyla’s ZPD after the observation, initially provides emo-tional support and uses her expertise to ground Kyla in more realistic expectations of her teaching persona and the practicum:

No one expects you to be ‘the perfect teacher’ right off the bat – that’s what the internship is for – so you can try some things out in a semi-real context, reflect on it, learn from it, and move forward.

She then reorients Kyla away from the current behaviours she is exhibiting in her ‘mellow’ teaching persona by first highlighting the pedagogical value of establishing a stronger teaching persona, thus once again articulating her expert thinking.

It is one thing to relate to students as a fellow student but you need to establish a teaching persona in which you look and sound like you know what you are doing. Acting ‘sheepish’ or ‘coy’ or ‘silly’ may get a laugh out of them, but you need to establish a sense of authority in the classroom – I’m not talking domination here or a power trip, but developing a strong sense of self, that you know what you are doing, you know where you are going, you know and care about them as people, as future ITAs, and as L2 learners, and together you are working toward a common goal.

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The teacher educator’s assistance shifts to a series of concrete sug-gestions about what Kyla needs to think about and do to realize her imagined persona.

All lessons have some sort of organization – depending on what you are going to teach, where, to whom, why, and when … so consider these issues as you plan out your next lesson.

Today’s could have been as simple as ‘Today we are going to focus on language that is used to get people to do things … this sort of language is used all the time, in lots of different contexts, but it is especially important in teaching, because in teaching, ITAs and/or teachers are always trying to get students to do things … so first we are going to do X, and then Y, and then I’m going to put you in groups and ask you to do Z, and then your groups will share ZZ with us … ’

The teacher educator’s assistance models expert thinking about the process of organizing a lesson; the pedagogical value of co-construct-ing knowledge with students, rather than simply evaluating their con-tributions; and the importance of giving clear and specific directions throughout the lesson. The teacher educator exemplifies her expert thinking by explicitly voicing what Kyla could have said and thereby grounds her mediation through a concrete instance in the practical activity of Kyla’s teaching.

Kyla’s loss of self-regulation: ‘i’M really buMMed and disappointed …’

Despite this mediation, Kyla’s anxieties remain high after she teaches her next lesson. When the students failed to participate she finds her-self ‘slowly doing more of a monologic lecture’, a teaching style that is contrary to her imagined teaching persona and that represents a loss of self-regulation.

I guess I’m really bummed and disappointed with today, only because I tried really hard to make the lesson meaningful for the students, and I felt I didn’t fully do that … But what DO you do when your students are not prepared for the material? What happens then?... What does a good teacher do with the lesson plan, when the students are unprepared?

Kyla once again uses highly emotive language, describing herself as ‘really bummed and disappointed’. She asks questions, another way that emotional and cognitive dissonance is displayed, as a way to seek assistance from the teacher educator because she lacks alternative conceptualizations of her instructional practice. The teacher educator

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responds to this loss of self-regulation with emotional support, ‘Well, believe it or not, this happens all the time …’, and then offers various suggestions for what Kyla could have done:

... so, you could have listed the different purposes of office hours on the blackboard (to ask a content question, to get help with a problem, to explain why something wasn’t handed in, to contest a grade, etc.) and then asked them to talk about what role the TA would have to play as the purpose changes.

You could have shared an experience you had in office hours (real or made up) and asked them how they would have handled it differently …

You could have asked them to speculate on what sort of small talk might be appropriate in office hours ...

You could have had them make up a problem/issue that might be resolved in an office hours setting, present it to the class, and have the rest of the class come up with different ways to resolve the problem/issue ...

The teacher educator’s meditation is highly explicit and contextual-ized as she recognizes Kyla’s need for other-regulation. She answers Kyla’s abstract question of what a ‘good’ teacher does when students are unprepared with concrete examples of what she could have done in the classroom interaction she just experienced, again grounding the mediation she offers in a particular instance of the practical activity of Kyla’s instruction.

Kyla continues to express her frustration with her inability to ‘think on my feet’ but begins to offer an explanation for why she is struggling to gain a sense of self-control over her teaching. Such a realization, according to Vygotsky (1978), constitutes an important initial step in cognitive development.

When things aren’t going exactly as planned, I end up freezing up, being unable to think of other things I could do. And in the attempt to come up with something, and having multiple thoughts racing through my mind, I end up fumbling over my words even more and I start jumping from one thing to another.

(re)invisioning her teaching persona: ‘i’M really proud of Myself…’

Near the end of the practicum, Kyla’s blog shows evidence of attempts to take up the teacher educator’s mediation. She describes herself as consciously slowing down and feeling more comfortable with not completing the lesson as planned.

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Even while I was teaching on Wednesday, and I wasn’t able to start on the activity as I had first intended, I kept telling myself to slow down, and be okay with continuing on Friday. While I was doing the first half of the lesson, I started getting flustered at one point because things I thought weren’t going as I planned in my head, but I purposely tried my best to remain calm and still slow down. I kept reminding myself that it was OKAY to not have finished the class as I had initially planned it.

She begins to describe how the teacher educator’s instructional strate-gies are beginning to regulate her thinking while she is teaching.

Today in class, we reviewed closings and most of the students appeared to have grasped the essential elements of closings. However, I did realize that I should have been more concrete with the students.

For Friday’s class, I’m very proud of myself for sticking with my objec-tives. I think before, I let the content rule over the objectives, when the content should have illustrated or supplemented my objectives. This time around myself, I purposefully memorized my objectives so that it would be running through my mind as I taught.

Kyla evaluates her activity and is able to say what she ‘should have’ done, as well as what she did, ‘purposefully memorized’ her objec-tives, so she could enact her emerging teaching persona. There is positive congruence between her thinking and feelings in that she expresses pride in ‘sticking with my objectives’. The teacher educator responds with praise and then reframes Kyla’s lesson in expert terms.

What a pleasure to watch you teach today!

You provided a nice overview of the lesson, you situated it nicely in what had come before, why it is important, and you provided concrete and detailed directions so that the students knew exactly what they would be asked to do.

At the end of the session it was clear to me that they not only got what you were trying to teach them, they were able to do it. You also presented yourself as a confident, genuine, interested teacher who is competent to teach them but also willing to work and learn with them.

The teacher educator positively evaluates what Kyla did, especially in terms of the instructional challenges that emerged through the blogs, for example emphasizing the overall clarity of the organization of the lesson. Students clearly participated, as the teacher educator com-ments on how student learning was evident. Finally, she commends Kyla for establishing a stronger teaching persona, one that is more in line with what the teacher educator has attempted to assist her

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in developing. This post-teaching observation blog serves to validate Kyla’s overcoming of her dissonance through identifiable changes in her teaching activity.

Discussion

Overall, the practicum blogs created a mediational space where both novice teachers were found to bring into conscious awareness their understandings of and struggles with their own professional growth as novice teachers. Both Lesley and Kyla struggled with the age-old dilemma of what role (friend vs. authority) teachers should play in the classroom (Farrell, 2003), and for both the shift from one towards the other seemed to occur when their teaching did not go as planned. And while the resulting emotional turmoil led to expressions of guilt, disappointment, and a crisis of self-confidence, the blog entries became a virtual space where they could make their tacit thoughts and beliefs explicit, create a sense of cohesion out of the tensions they were experiencing, and seek assistance from the teacher educator. For her part, the teacher educator acknowledged their expressions of emotional dissonance and emphasized the ‘normalness’ of what they were experiencing and feeling as novice teachers in order to validate both what they were experiencing and what they were feeling. She also provided expert characterizations of the dilemmas they faced and offered concrete suggestions for how they might (re)think and (re)enact their teaching practices. As such, her blog entries contain mediational means that supported the teachers as they worked to (re)gain internal control over their cognitive and emotional states.

Not surprisingly, the teacher educator’s mediation and how both teachers responded to that mediation reflect both the idiosyncratic and the variable nature of novice teachers’ developmental trajectories and differing ZPDs. Lesley remained highly responsive to the teacher educator’s mediation as when, for example, she uses the teacher edu-cator’s suggestions to establish a plan of action and then evaluates its effectiveness. She credits the teacher educator’s mediation as enabling her to establish emotional congruence that, in turn, helped her become more self-regulated in her teaching. Kyla appears less responsive to the teacher educator’s mediation until her teaching goes awry. Only then does she begin to seek assistance and consciously attempt to use the teacher educator’s mediation to regulate her thinking while she is teaching. For both teachers, their requests for assistance indi-cate a willingness to take greater responsibility for their own learning (Poehner, 2009), and as they open themselves up to social mediation, they become ‘ripe’ (Vygotsky, 1978) for the mediation offered by the

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teacher educator. Taking up and trying out the teacher educator’s mediational means occurs only as they continue to teach, and here too both teachers use the blog entries to externalize their attempts to reorient their thinking and their teaching practices and how they feel about the enactment of these changes in their teaching.

Reflections

As teacher educators, we are all too familiar with the emotional roll-ercoaster that novice teachers experience during the practicum. Most enter with a naïve sense of what is actually involved in the enact-ment of teaching and only come to realize how complicated teaching is once they are engulfed in/by it. Engagement in narrative activity through practicum blogs creates a virtual space where novice teach-ers can bring meaning and significance to their experiences while at the same time opening themselves up to our mediation. And once we have access to how they understand those experiences, we are in a much better position to calibrate our mediation at their metaphoric space of potentiality, or ZPD. Likewise, as it is often the emotional, moral, and relational dimensions of teaching (Elbaz, 1983) that come to the surface first, it is critical that we, as teacher educators, recog-nize the social origins of emotions and their relationship to cogni-tion. Once again, it is the affective-volitional web (Vygotsky, 1978) that plays a catalytic role in the process of cognitive development. Analysing the practicum blog entries has made us acutely aware that we should neither ignore nor downplay the emotional processes that are at work in novice teachers’ initial learning-to-teach experiences. Instead, we echo the position that emotions play a motivated and functional role in the development of teachers’ thinking and activity (Golombek & Doran, 2011). More importantly, our mediational role in this developmental process comes into clearer focus when we have access to the cognitive and emotive processes that are ignited when teachers engage in narrative activity. Because of the immediacy of the blog entries, we can be responsive to where individual teachers are in their development and enable them to enact their day-to-day teaching while also pushing more expert conceptualizations of teaching. Our mediation as teacher educators thus embodies core principles while being dynamically and situationally realized.

Further research

Further research on the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activ-ity in novice teachers’ blogs has enormous potential. For us, how-

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ever, the most fruitful line of research should focus on the quality and character of the strategic mediation or cognitive assistance (Werstch, 2007) provided by teacher educators. Specifically, we are interested in the extent to which the teacher educator’s mediation is, in fact, responsive to immediate need (within the ZPD), as well as the extent to which it is more productive when it is concerned with cognitive transformation (thinking) rather than performance (activity). Such research has the potential to inform our practices in ways that can enable us to better support novice teachers’ developing conceptions of teaching and their evolving instructional practices.

We are also struck by a limiting feature of working with narrative data, in that when engagement in narrative activity stops, the ‘story’ of a teacher’s development ends. Thus, as a research tool, narrative data often provide us with a limited view of teacher development and may fail to capture cognitive transformation that can only be con-firmed by seeing how new modes of thinking play out in new modes of activity. Further research that strives for narrative continuity by capturing the continuous and longitudinal nature of teacher learning is clearly warranted. Furthermore, we recognize the limits of working only with narrative data that is written, as was the case for this study of novice teachers’ practicum blogs. We fully recognize the value of ‘talking’ oneself into new understandings, in particular, as we found in the case of Lesley where her total loss of self-regulation led the teacher educator to suggest a face-to-face meeting to deal with the immediacy of her emotional and cognitive dissonance. Combining various types of narrative data with an eye towards ‘re-visiting’ nar-rators at various points in time suggest areas of further research that can only enrich our understanding of and mediation in the complex processes of learning to teach.

Conclusion

Unlike the traditional reflective journal, the immediacy and dialogic nature of the practicum blogs creates a sense that we are ‘right there, in the thick of things’ with our novice teachers. We cannot imagine returning to the days when we relied solely on weekly face-to-face practicum meetings where we asked, ‘So, how are things going?’ to which our novice teachers replied, ‘Fine’. Rather, we learn through teachers’ narrative externalizations what they are feeling, thinking about, and doing in their classrooms, and can respond in the practi-cum blog and, when necessary, in face-to-face interactions. Moreover, because of the dialogic nature of blogs, we as teacher educators can integrate the functional role that emotions play in novice teachers’

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development as we strategically mediate the emotional and cognitive dissonance they express with the goal of transforming their cognition, emotion, and activity.

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