Claims of teacher learning and retrospective tracing of claimed events in video-mediated transnational virtual exchange interactions

Abstract

Teachers are increasingly being recognized as active agents whose in situ pedagogical decisions are socially manifested. Relatedly, teacher education cycles, including collaborative pedagogical design work and reflective conversations on the pedagogical outcomes of design decisions, gained momentum in preservice language teacher education to explore the affordances of these decisions for teacher learning in talk-in-interaction across multiple pedagogical events. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study describes how transnational groups of preservice language teachers, within the scope of a Virtual Exchange project, reflect on their experiences of teacher education activities such as collaborative task design, teacher educator feedback, and critically analyzing the implementation of their designs by actual L2 learners. A close examination of the video-mediated interactions of preservice teachers (PSTs) shows that small-group reflective conversations create opportunities to identify the interactional practices and teacher education activities that lead to claims of teacher learning. We present a collection of cases that include the PSTs’ claims of teacher learning (e.g. I learned X) as a learning-relevant discursive construction and retrospectively trace the moments of claimed teacher learning across earlier teacher education events.