<b>Between the ‘utilization’ and the provision of practice in the continuing teacher education

Abstract

Certain current academic educational discourses have given special importance to teaching practice and to the knowledge produced in their professional environment, seeing them as essential to the learning process of teachers and to the argument in favor of the professionalization of teaching. This standpoint finds conceptual support in the epistemology of professional practice, first proposed by Donald Schön, and requires the use of specific training devices in order to establish closer relations with the classroom practice of school teachers. These new requirements regarding teacher training devices led us to conduct a research on the conceptions of supervised internship, which are part of special training programs aimed at in-service teachers. The results suggest the existence of serious difficulties in special training programs to overcome the existing conventional academic training model, and to incorporate socio-professional components into this training process by taking the teacher’s acquired knowledge and former experiences as objects of analysis and theorization.