På vei mot rekontekstualisering av lærerutdanning i engelsk: Fordeler og utfordringer ved å implementere et tredje rom

Abstract

One of the long-lasting challenges in teacher education for English is that students in English struggle with transforming their academic knowledge (theory) into classroom practice and desire a more practice-integrated course design. The present article discusses and evaluates a teaching strategy, in an attempt to provide more practice-based English courses, which intends to adopt the emerging epistemology of teacher edu-cation, using a third space. The third space is an arena where a theory field (university courses) and a practice field (schools) are brought together as an integrated domain for developing students' academic knowledge and teaching competence. Based on surveys and student evaluations, this article presents and discusses the findings and challenges regarding implementing a third space in English courses taught by the authors. According to the findings, working in a third space brings a tighter con-nection between theory and practice, which facilitates students' understanding of theory and the important interplay between theory and practice. However, as our third space is still under development, it faces challenges in achieving an equally balanced status between university teachers and schoolteachers. Achieving such a balance has also been a central concern in university-school partnerships, which gave rise to our third space experiment. In order to create a more effective third space in teacher education for English, placing the third space at the centre of our English curriculum is argued to be important, which has also been emphasised in other studies discussing the third space epistemo-logy. Thus, there seems to be an emergent need to reconceptualise how student teachers of English should best prepare for their future profession as teachers. 2020