Conference Agenda

This paper presents a dialogic inquiry design in teacher education for in-service part-time student teachers working in early childhood, primary, and special/inclusive education. The workshops are an integral part of a Teacher Studies module. Students first produce semi-structured interviews or self-interviews, and then, in groups, we work with selected anonymised fragments.

The starting point is a recurring tension visible in participants’ “experience texts”: institutional demands (curriculum, routines, accountability, and multi-actor coordination) meet lived dilemmas and burdens (uncertainty, boundary work, responsibility for others, and relationship tensions including collaboration with parents). Rather than treating interviews primarily as “data about teachers,” the paper analyses how student teachers work with interviews and self-interviews as experience texts, and how this workshop work supports professional agency and professional identity-in-the-making.

The conceptual framing draws on dialogic perspectives in which dialogicity is more than “talk”: dialogue is a way of organising meaning, learning, and social relations across multiple perspectives (Alexander, 2020; Wegerif, 2019). While research on classroom dialogue often focuses on interactional features of classroom talk (Howe & Abedin, 2013), this paper treats dialogicity not as a technique of speaking but as a structure of pedagogical action in which meaning, knowledge, and identity emerge in the tension of institutional norms, relational responsibility, situated experience, emotions, values, and competing obligations. Teachers continuously mediate between their own perspective and that of the learner; neither is sufficient for pedagogical decisions. Instead, decisions emerge through mediation that opens a potential “next step” in learning and participation, akin to a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). In this approach, the inquiry object shifts from classroom talk to experience texts, which is especially useful in in-service part-time cohorts because it surfaces institutional constraints and lived tensions without requiring classroom video.

The central, author-designed practical tool is the Dialogic Analysis Board (a three-column workshop board/table) used to animate teachers’ work with anonymised interview fragments and to document the analysis's axial outcomes. The left column captures the institutional framing of the narrated situation; the right column captures the personal/experiential dimension (including emotional load and boundary work). The middle column supports dialogic analysis that goes beyond the interview’s explicit statements: it is a discussion of new and potential meanings that can be initiated or proposed. It negotiates between the ‘state of affairs’ (left and right columns), the tensions and contradictions between them, and new perspectives that participants bring in by referencing their own experiences and additional possibilities for involvement and action (Dewe et al., 1992; Bohnsack, 2020). Importantly, dialogic analysis already begins when participants negotiate what belongs in the left and right columns: multiple interpretations emerge and are often compared with participants’ own cases. The middle column then intensifies dialogicity by shifting from description to the projection of possible actions: participants generate hypotheses, identify contradictions, and propose mediations that expand the field of action by bringing “Others” (students, parents, colleagues, specialists, institutions) into shared sense-making and responsibility. This supports a trajectory from individual agency (“I must manage”) toward extended, relational agency (“we reorganise meanings, conditions and responsibilities with others”), consistent with ecological understandings of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015) and dialogic accounts of the agency–control contradiction (Rajala et al., 2016).

The paper contributes to NW10 debates by offering an empirically grounded and scalable design for linking professional knowledge, identity, and agency through dialogic inquiry with experience texts—particularly relevant for inclusive education and multi-actor professional contexts.

Reflective practices in teacher education have been widely adopted but are also questioned in research contexts that privilege standardisation, measurability, and external validation. Although reflective practices have repeatedly been shown to support preservice teachers’ (PSTs) learning and identity development, ambiguities remain regarding how reflective thinking should be conceptualised and evaluated. Thus, in the context of both current educational research and teacher education practices, clarifying the value of reflective thinking has become particularly important. Drawing on Williams et al.’s (2002) five-level model, this study examines how different levels of reflective thinking correspond to PSTs’ self-positioning as both students and novice teachers, as portrayed in their reflective discourse.

Feedback is a cyclical process amplifying a signal from e.g., an electric guitar, dependent on the interplay of guitarist, amplifier and distance (Deane-Freeman, 2025). In cybernetics, feedback is also cyclical, enabling control of a system by ‘reinserting into it the results of its past performance’ (Wiener, 1985:6). In most teacher education contexts, however, feedback devolves to a one-way process from a tutor/mentor to a student-teacher. This can occur even when a deliberately relational approach is taken (Heron et al., 2023). The cyclical aspect is often ignored in favour of relaying sufficient information to enable the student-teacher to ‘improve’ their practice in a short period of time. Hence feedback in ITE settings in England, for example, is couched in the simplified status-language of the Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework (ITTECF: a ‘trainee receiving…mentoring, through structured feedback from expert colleagues…for improving practice’ DfE, 2024, p.7). Rather than cyclical, feedback becomes impartation or just ‘telling.’

Feedback in this context is fraught with issues of agency and power: it downplays discourse and privileges unidirectional ‘training.’ It reflects precisely how the ‘persons’ involved in feedback are understood: the tutor/mentor and the student-teacher are replaced, in the ITTECF, by their doppelgangers of ‘expert colleagues’ and ‘trainees’ respectively (Pierlejewski et al, 2025). The status hierarchy thus created means that feedback from one doppelganger to the other (‘expert colleague’ to ‘trainee’) cannot help but be unidirectional.

Distinguishing between hierarchy of status and a hierarchy of expertise enables us to reconfigure relationships assumed in feedback conversations (Biesta, 2025). Tutor/mentors function in a range of personal and professional roles as they develop skills and critical dispositions in teachers-to-be. Careful separation of real selves from their ‘doppelgangers’ is necessary to reconfigure the tutor/mentor, student-teacher and the learning-from-feedback in a fuller, more complex relationship to one another.

I argue from the work of Palmer (being both the knower and the known; Palmer, 1983), from Bakhtin (engaging the ‘excess of sight’ that enables the knower/known to see what the ‘other’ cannot; Bakhtin, 1993), the conceptions of self described in Butler (2005), Levinas (1981) and Wirzba (2021), and the discipline of ‘noticing’ in the work of Mason (2011), that there exist varying ways to reconfigure the relationship between the new knowledge provided by feedback, the participant providing the ‘feedback signal’ and the ‘other’ who ‘amplifies’ it. Either person can provide a signal or its amplification. That is the nature of feedback.

This has several practical applications to the reconfigured relationship between tutor/mentors, student-teachers and the learning the feedback conversation generates. These concern the requirement for a shared feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2023), the use of feedback to unearth student criticality, to recast the pedagogy of feedback as fundamentally relational, to welcome excess of sight as a means to deeper learning and to equalise the status-hierarchy to a respectful one so that the experience and expertise of both actors comes into play.