Simulerade skoldilemman – redskap för utveckling av reflektionsförmåga?

The aim of the thesis is to study pre-service teachers’ conversations about simulated school- and classroom dilemmas within teacher education. This is done in order to understand and illuminate opportunities and constraints with the use of simulations to support development of reflection. The study is conducted in Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland. The research process consisted of three phases; construction of simulations, test of simulations and the investigation phase. During the construction phase the simulations were produced, based on semi-structured interviews with newly qualified teachers and a narrative analysis. In the investigation phase instructional questions were developed and the empirical data were collected during fifteen conversations in five seminars at three different universities, two in Sweden and one in Finland. The pre-service teachers in the empirical data were in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of their teacher education. Video recordings obtained the data and the analysis was based on Schön’s different notions of reflection. Neo- Vygotskian and Vygotskian socio-cultural theories served as the framework for interpretation of the data. The results show that the pre-service teachers were for the most part highly engaged. The engagement was related to the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the simulations’ fidelity. The simulations and the instructional questions were used both as secondary and tertiary artefacts by the pre-service teachers. Among the multimodal affordances, the voice recordings appeared to be the key modality in order to engage and understand nuances of the content. The instructional questions were used as scaffolding for communication. When the pre-service teachers used the simulation in order to de-contextualise in an open dialogue, a tertiary dialogue appeared where new meaning was negotiated. Creative reflection where multiple perspectives took place and reciprocal reflection – open challenging dialogues, appeared in many of the conversations where a pedagogical-analytical community of practice were created. The conclusions are that the simulated dilemmas showed to be a potential for reflection in peer-groups when the learning environment is organised and related to the course content and offers a variation of examples from school practice to be exposed in teacher education. However, if the content of the simulation is not perceived as an authentic dilemma, there is a risk for cementation of preassumptions in case there is a lack of intellectual challenge from peers or a teacher educator.