Professional inquiry in teacher education: Positioning student teachers as co-developers

Research is presented from the Danish LULAB-initiative where student teachers and teacher educators are involved in professional inquiry projects. The aim is to examine in what ways the participation contributes to teacher educators’ experience of professional agency and what kinds of practices of participation and cooperation the initiative enables for the student teachers. Multiple qualitative data is analyzed in a process of reflexive thematic analysis. Findings show that teacher educators experience in LULAB a possibility to participate and contribute in decision making (elements of agency). Furthermore, they refer to being positioned as competent professionals and they emphasise that the professional inquiry approach is giving them a possibility to contribute with practitioner research close to their teaching. The experimental approach is also positively acknowledged by the student teachers. Data indicates a complex pattern across projects in the roles given and taken by the student teachers. In general, they value being positioned as co-developers, and they emphasize relations with the teacher educators, being listened to and taken serious as (future) professionals. Hence, the possibilities teacher educators are given through the approach to organizational development appears to be mirrored in the way they position the student teachers and, furthermore, student teachers to a higher degree position themselves as students instead of pupils, referring also to inspiration for future work in schools.