5 A tale of two mediations: tracing

the dialectics of cognition, emotion,

and activity in novice teachers’
practicum blogs
 Karen E. Johnson
 and Paula R. Golombek

Introduction and aims

While we have argued that narrative, as a cultural activity, is a
powerful semiotic tool that has the potential to facilitate cognitive
development (Golombek & Johnson, 2004), we believe that given
the ubiquity and import of teacher educators’ mediation for novice
teachers, understanding the quality and character of their dialogic
interactions can provide insight into the complex ways in which
teacher educators mediate in novice teachers’ learning-to-teach expe-
riences. In addition, such an understanding can provide insights into
how novice teachers understand, respond to, and potentially take up
that mediation as they are learning to teach. To that end, this chapter
examines engagement in narrative activity in private, asynchronous
online exchanges via a blog between two novice English as a Second
Language (ESL) teachers and a teacher educator during a 15-week
Masters in teaching English as a second language (MA TESL) teach-
ing practicum. The practicum blogs as narratives represent ‘small
stories’ (Georgakopoulou, 2006) that were dialogically constructed
(Bamberg, 2004) and reflect the emotional, moral, and relational
dimensions of how teachers hold and use their knowledge (Elbaz,
1983). As such, the practicum blogs were examined to tease out the
dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activity in teacher learning and
to explore the role of the teacher educator in mediating novice teach-
ers’ learning-to-teach experiences. Overall, this study has three aims:
(1) to tease out the cognitive and emotive processes that are ignited
as novice teachers engage in narrative activity via practicum blogs,
(2) to examine the role of the teacher educator in mediating nov-
ice teachers’ learning-to-teach experiences via practicum blogs, and
(3) to trace novice teachers’ attempts to take up that mediation and
work towards greater self-regulation over their instructional practices
while seeking to establish a sense of teaching expertise.

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Theory and narrative

As we have argued elsewhere, the field of second language teacher educa-
tion (SLTE) has long recognized teacher inquiry as a productive mecha-
nism for teachers not only to make sense of their learning and teaching
experiences but also to make worthwhile changes in their teaching prac-
tices (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). As a result, engagement in narra-
tive activity has served as a central vehicle for teacher inquiry. When
narrative is conceptualized as a mediational tool, engagement in narra-
tive activity influences how teachers come to understand what they are
narrating about, and this involves a complex combination of descrip-
tion, explanation, analysis, interpretation, and construal of one’s private
reality as it is brought into the public sphere. In line with Shore (1996:
58), engagement in narrative activity allows self-representation and self-
interpretation as ‘experience is literally talked into meaningfulness’.
Within SLTE, engagement in narrative activity enables teachers to
bring ‘meaningfulness’ to their learning-to-teach experiences, much like
Flowerdew and Miller (this volume) suggest for language learners. More
specifically, we argue that narrative functions as a mediational tool that
both supports and enhances teacher learning in distinct yet interactive
ways (Johnson & Golombek, 2011). Narrative as externalization func-
tions to make perceptions and experiences overt by giving voice, oral
or written, to those thoughts and feelings, creating opportunities for
introspection, explanation, and sense making. Narrative as verbalization
functions as a way to regulate the thinking process through the inten-
tional use of scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1986), which represent the
current research and theorizing generated by research on second lan-
guage learning and teaching as tools for understanding, or thinking in
concepts (Karpov, 2003). Narrative as systematic examination makes
explicit the interconnectedness between what is learned and how it is
learned; in other words, how teachers engage in narrative activity will
fundamentally shape what they learn. Our argument is that ‘when narra-
tive is used as a vehicle for inquiry, as is the case in SLTE, it functions as
a powerful mediational tool that makes explicit, in teachers’ own words,
how, when, and why new understandings emerge, understandings that
can lead to transformed conceptualizations of oneself as a teacher and
transformed modes of engagement in the activities of teaching’ (Johnson
& Golombek, 2011: 490). Like Hayes (this volume) who envisions nar-
rative research transforming issues of social justice in local contexts, we
envision narrative practices transforming individual teachers’ concep-
tions and activity of teaching in specific ways.
Particularly important in SLTE is the fact that engagement in
narrative activity often exposes teachers’ emotional and cognitive
dissonance, which can initiate the recognition of contradictions
­

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 A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition,
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within a teaching context and push cognitive development (Cole &

Engestrom, 1995; Golombek & Johnson, 2004). In fact, Golombek
and Doran (2011) argue, guided by Vygotsky’s (1986) emphasis
on the affective-volitional basis of cognition, that teachers’ expres-
sion of emotions is not a distraction from teacher learning, but a
structural component in the developmental process. Thus, how the
teacher educator responds to, or mediates, the expression of emotion
in teachers’ narrative activity is crucial to novice teachers’ profes-
sional ­development.
Moreover, since engagement in narrative activity can open up the
‘meaningfulness’ of teachers’ experiences to social influence, when
teacher educators have access to a teacher’s internal cognitive strug-
gles as they are unfolding, this allows them to calibrate their mediation
to address the teachers’ immediate needs and/or concerns. Vygotsky
(1987: 209) discussed ways that teachers can mediate student activity,
such as ‘demonstration, leading questions, and by introducing ele-
ments of the task’s solution’. A potentially powerful feature of engage-
ment in narrative activity via practicum blogs is the concretization of
teachers’ thoughts, feelings, and understandings in real time, and an
opening up, of sorts, of not only teachers’ internal emotional and
cognitive struggles but also their potentiality, or what they might be
able to do with assistance. Vygotsky (1978: 86) defined this arena of
potentiality as the zone of proximal development (ZPD): ‘It is the dis-
tance between the actual developmental level as determined through
independent problem solving and the level of potential development
as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in
collaboration with more capable peers.’ Narrative activities, such as
practicum blogs, can expose this arena of potentiality, giving teacher
educators access to novice teachers’ potential for learning and their
capabilities as they are emerging. And since much of what we do as
teacher educators is to assist novice teachers as they attempt to teach
in ways that they are not yet able to do on their own, ‘mediation
directed at this metaphoric space of potentiality is essential’ (Johnson
& Golombek, 2011: 6). Our interest in the dialogic interactions that
emerge between novice teachers and teacher educators in practicum
blogs is driven by our quest to understand how teacher educators can
best support and enhance novice teachers’ cognitive development as
they are engaging in their initial learning-to-teach experiences (see
also Early & Norton, this volume).

Context
The teachers, Lesley and Kyla, were enrolled in an MA TESL teach-
ing practicum, a capstone course, lasting one academic semester (15

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 A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition,
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weeks), and offering different placement possibilities. Lesley fulfilled

the requirements of the practicum in a low-intermediate ESL speak-
ing and listening course that she had taught the previous semester
at an intensive English language programme. Thus, Lesley was the
instructor of record for her teaching practicum with one semester of
prior ESL teaching experience. Kyla was assigned to an ESL course
for international teaching assistants (ITAs) taught by an experienced
ESL teacher (Emma). Both Lesley and Kyla were required to post
weekly online blog entries which were read and responded to by the
practicum supervisor (teacher educator). Both teachers also met regu-
larly with the teacher educator, who observed their teaching twice,
held pre- and post-observation meetings, and provided support and
feedback throughout the practicum through both face-to-face meet-
ings and the practicum blogs.

Data
The data for this study were limited to each teacher’s practicum blog.
We ground our understanding of narrative in Bruner’s (1996) notion
of narrative as a mode of thinking; that the narrating of experiences
brings meaning to those experiences and exposes how such mean-
ings are infused with interpretation and situated in the social world.
Engagement in narrative activity in the practicum blogs created a
virtual space for these teachers to make their tacit thoughts, beliefs,
knowledge, fears, and hopes explicit, to create cohesion out of what
they were experiencing during the practicum experience, and to bring
their experience into ‘meaningfulness’ (Shore, 1996).
The first three blog entries were assigned by the teacher educa-
tor and structured (focus on the course, focus on the students, and
focus on the teacher) while the remaining blog entries were open-
ended. In addition to weekly blog entries, to which the teacher educa-
tor responded, written post-observation reports were also posted on
each teacher’s blog. The teachers sometimes posted draft lesson plans,
course handouts, and/or assessments when they wanted feedback from
the teacher educator. They also posted a stimulated recall analysis of
a videotaped lesson they taught, which included short (1–2 minute)
transcribed teaching episodes with commentary on their instructional
decision-making. As a final blog entry, the teacher educator asked
both teachers to re-read their entire blog, with an eye towards tracing
their own learning throughout the practicum, and post a final reflec-
tive entry. Lesley completed 15 blog entries, while Kyla completed 23.
The teacher educator commented on all but the last blog entry. The
blogs were selected as data for this study because as a requirement of

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 A tale of two mediations: tracing the dialectics of cognition,
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the practicum, they represent both authentic teacher reflection and

teacher educator meditation.

Analysis
Using the discourse analytic principles of grounded content analysis
(Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and ethnographic semantics (Spradley, 1979),
the data were first analysed to identify emotive content. Then, instances
of emotional and cognitive dissonance were identified because the result-
ing contradictions have been found to play a catalytic role in the trans-
formation of teachers’ thinking and activity (Golombek & Johnson,
2004). There proved to be a great deal of emotive content throughout
the blogs, and several contradictions emerged for both teachers. Both
Lesley and Kyla experienced a contradiction that resulted in an acute
loss of self-regulation that compromised their ability to enact effectual
instruction. The dialogic nature of the practicum blogs were of particu-
lar interest because of the crucial role that strategic mediation (Wertsch,
2007) plays in cognitive development. Thus, the quality and character of
the teacher educator’s blog entries were analysed to identify the nature of
the mediation, or cognitive assistance provided. We view this as impor-
tant furthermore in light of Tsui’s (2003: 281) point that when an expert
teacher’s ‘ways of thinking and ways of learning’ is made explicit, it can
help to orient beginning teachers in their own teaching and assist in the
development of expertise. In addition, the novice teachers’ responses to
the teacher educator’s mediation were analysed to trace their emergent
conceptual understanding of themselves as teachers and their teaching
as they attempted to enact newly acquired insights in their instructional
practices. Examples of our data analyses are interwoven in the ‘Findings’
section below as we agree with Sarbin (1986) and others that narratives
are holistic and cannot be reduced to isolated examples without losing
the essence of the meanings begin conveyed.

Findings
Lesley: emotional dissonance and loss of self-regulation
From the beginning of the semester, Lesley’s blog entries reflect narra-
tive as externalization as she describes what she does in her class, why
she does it, and how she feels about it, as well as explanations as to
why something might be happening. The teacher educator offers her
explicit mediation with suggestions for what she could do in response
to a particular problem she is facing, thus exposing her ‘expert’ think-
ing to Lesley. Lesley’s negative emotions index cognitive dissonance

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and, thus, tend to drive her concerns, as she expresses both a sense
of ‘worry’ and ‘excitement’. After about one month of seemingly
smooth teaching, Lesley encounters some vexing interactions with
her students.
This past week has been rough. Teaching wasn’t exactly the way I planned
it to be, and I’ve trying to self-reflect during the past week. I’ve ended up
with two answers, one is that I don’t have a goal for both classes, and two,
I’m too nice to the students.
Each level and class in the IECP has its own course objectives. I plan to
complete the course objectives one by one. But lately, perhaps it’s because
we’ve been doing summaries for too long, both the students and I are get-
ting tired of doing it. So I’m thinking of mixing a few of other objectives in
before I complete this one. But wouldn’t that be unorganized? I’m worried
that students will feel I’m skipping things, today we do this and the next
class we suddenly do something else. I think I have to set a standard for
each of the objectives: how well do I want them to complete something
before I can tick that off the promotion criteria? I really have to stop
escaping and get organized …
I think I’m not working hard enough. I think I have to change something
around before the situation gets worse. First thing is to get things orga-
nized, take out the promotion criteria and nail them!

Lesley’s journal begins with an evaluation of the past week with the
emotive adjective of ‘rough’, and this evaluation is detailed through
emotive content representing a mismatch between the reality of her
teaching and her expectations: ‘teaching wasn’t exactly the way I
planned it to be’. She identifies, through her own self-reflection, what
she believes to be the roots of this mismatch; ‘doing summaries too
long’. She is trying to reorient her thinking and activity as she begins
her blog and tentatively offers an instructional alternative of intro-
ducing other objectives into her coming lessons. She questions the
value of this alternative and explicitly seeks mediation by asking the
teacher educator; ‘But wouldn’t that be unorganized?’. She expresses
emotional dissonance in response to her self-generated alternative,
being ‘worried that students will feel I’m skipping things’. Through-
out, she expresses an underlying anxiety concerning her responsibility
to meet the expectations of both the students and the institution. Les-
ley shows a loss of self-regulation in that she blames herself for ‘not
working hard enough’. She is emotionally distressed and, in terms of
cognition, cannot articulate an instructional response to a situation
she anticipates can get ‘worse’.
To explain the second problem, Lesley uncovers a tension in her
teaching that is pervasive in beginning teachers’ professional lives:

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trying to find ‘a balance between being nice and still have my author-
ity as a teacher’.
The other thing is because I’m nice and funny to the students, I feel that
sometimes they don’t take me seriously enough. Also, partly because I
look young to them. I have to find a balance between being nice and still
have my authority as a teacher. Before I said that I like my students alot, I
think I’ve spoiled them. At the same time, if they tell me something nega-
tive, I feel inferior to them, which I shouldn’t. I have a question, do this
happen only to me? or to all teachers? do they feel inferior when students
say no to what they say or directly point out their mistakes?

She again seeks mediation from the teacher educator by asking;

‘do[es] this happen only to me? or to all teachers?’ This questioning
of whether what she is experiencing is normal again represents emo-
tive content. She does not have the experiential knowledge base upon
which to draw to answer her own questions and looks to a more
expert teacher for mediation, specifically validation.

Meditational response: ‘What you are experiencing is

pretty normal …’

The teacher educator’s first response to Lesley’s blog entry is to vali-

date what she is experiencing.
First of all, what you are experiencing is pretty normal for a novice
teacher, especially one who is working in an institution with a pretty loose
curriculum ... and secondly you are being too hard on yourself – but let’s
meet asap to talk about how you can set a plan for the next few weeks so
that you feel and seem organized and you can establish a balance between
being their teacher and being their friend … And when we meet, bring
your course objectives, any and all of your lesson plans, and we’ll get
down to business right away. Cheer up – things will get better ...

The teacher educator validates Lesley’s emotions by first noting that

what she is going through is emblematic of a teacher’s initial expe-
rience confronting the realities of the classroom and suggests that
this tension is further complicated by the freedom that her instruc-
tional context affords. By noting that she is ‘being too hard’ on her-
self, she suggests that Lesley’s expectations of herself are unrealistic
and unproductive. She recognizes Lesley’s loss of self-regulation and
suggests a face-to-face meeting where she can be more immediately
responsive to her. Still, she helps to re-orient Lesley in this blog entry
by explaining what material tools Lesley needs to bring to their meet-
ing, course objectives and lesson plans, which will be used to mediate

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Lesley’s understanding of this teaching challenge and the development

of an instructional response. The teacher educator also establishes the
objective of the meeting: ‘so that you seem and feeling organized and
you can establish a balance between being their teacher and being
their friend’. By expressing that they’ll ‘get down to business right
away’, the teacher educator focuses her on the task at hand: over-
coming the emotional and cognitive dissonance she is experiencing
through the mediation she will provide in their meeting, so they can
develop a plan of action that Lesley will implement in her instruction.

Lesley’s plan of action: ‘I feel alive again …’

In Lesley’s next blog, she directly thanks the teacher educator for her
support and then explains how she implemented the plan of action
that resulted from their face-to-face meeting:
After being depressed for a little while, I talked to Dr. [ ] about my con-
cerns. (Thank you so much [ ]. I feel alive again. ^_^) …
The next morning, I went to class with excitement and a little sense of fear.
I explained to the students why I wanted to do this presentation. I said the
reason was I didn’t want to crash them together with the other teachers on
their final week, I want to move this presentation forward to have a better
quality and discussion. I showed them examples and encouraged them to
bring in any article they liked, but it has to be something they’re interested.
Their reactions were not as bad as I thought it would be, and when I had
them write their name down on the sign up sheet, some of them didn’t
mind starting next week. I was really happy with their attitude.

Lesley recognizes the emotional dissonance she experienced and the

role the teacher educator’s mediation played in helping her to over-
come the dissonance so that she now feels ‘alive again’ and she ‘was
really happy with their attitude’; signs of positive emotional congru-
ence with the implementation of the plan of action. The blog func-
tions as narrative as externalization as she describes what she said
to her students, basically a rationale for what she decided about the
presentation assignment, and what she felt as she approached her
class – ‘excitement’ and ‘fear’. She evaluates their reactions, the real-
ity being much better than what she had anticipated. She has imple-
mented the meditational means from her interaction with her teacher
educator into her teaching and is, thus, showing signs of regaining
self-regulation.
After the students begin to do their presentations in class, Lesley
evaluates their performance as successful and speculates on the rea-
sons for this success:

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This week the students started doing presentations in Level 3. They were
surprisingly good because of the topics the students chose. When I gave
out the assignment, they were saying 15 minutes is too much, but when
they made the presentation, they easily stayed up there for over 30 minutes
until I pulled them down. Perhaps it is because of the topic they chose, all
the people had some opinions to say about it and the presentation always
ended with a very enthusiastic discussion. I am very pleased about their
work. Just like [you] said, they’re having fun and I’m more relaxed, yet
their learning go on.

In this excerpt, Lesley describes and evaluates the outcome of the plan
of action that she took up as a result of the mediation provided by
the teacher educator during the face-to-face meeting. In this case, the
reality was better than Lesley’s expectations as she describes the stu-
dents’ presentations as ‘surprisingly good’. That she feels emotional
congruence is evident in her evaluation of the students’ discussions as
‘enthusiastic’ and in her statement of being ‘very pleased about their
work’. She confirms the value of the mediation she received by com-
menting on her students’ and her own well-being and re-voicing the
teacher educator’s words that ‘their learning go[es] on’.

The meditational response: ‘giving them a little bit

of ownership’

The teacher educator further mediates Lesley’s evaluation of her

instructional response to her loss of self-regulation by inserting the
theoretical concept of ‘ownership’ and its connection to student
engagement and motivation as an explanation for what may have
made Lesley’s revised instructional activity successful.
Sounds like giving them a little bit of ownership over even a small aspect
of your course (the topic of their presentations) has made a huge difference
in terms of their engagement and motivation. And the fact that some of
them spoke for such a long time suggests that when properly motivated
they probably have stronger speaking skills than you (or they) might have
suspected. Not to mention how the sort of engagement that resulted in
their presentations will help to set the tone for more active participation in
the coming weeks. As you are planning for the coming weeks, try to think
of other small ways that they can have some control or choice over what
they are talking about or what they are expected to do. Sometimes by cre-
ating the right conditions for engagement and then just stepping back and
letting them go can really turn things around – as it appears it has!

Vygotsky (1986) argues that the use of scientific concepts is meant to

enable students to name and define their experience, to re-examine

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their everyday understanding of what they are experiencing through

more explicit, systematic, theoretical knowledge. The teacher edu-
cator connects the concept of ownership to the concrete realities of
Lesley’s practice by telling her to think about this concept explicitly as
she plans her instruction; ‘try to think of other small ways that they
can have some control or choice over what they are talking about or
what they are expected to do’. By orienting Lesley to what she should
be thinking about as she plans her instruction, the teacher educator
is attempting to assist Lesley as she begins to take up and try out this
concept, encouraging her to use this concept to regulate her thinking
(verbalization), as she plans for upcoming lessons. By connecting Les-
ley’s emerging understandings of what has happened in her classroom
(the concrete-past) through the scientific construct of ownership (the
abstract-present), the teacher educator is pushing Lesley’s thinking
in concepts (Karpov, 2003) in order to create congruence among her
feelings, thinking, and doing, and in a sense forming a dialectical
unity of the abstract and the concrete past and the projected future.

Kyla: constructing a teaching persona

Throughout the practicum experience, Kyla’s blog entries reflect
narrative as externalization as she brings into conscious awareness
and struggles to construct a teaching persona that will enable her to
function successfully as an ESL teacher. She expresses this struggle
through emotive language that shifts from overconfidence, ‘the stu-
dents appeared to again speak more when I was teaching (without
Emma around)’, to deep disappointment, ‘I was really disappointed
in myself’ to humility ‘I was very humbled.’ The teacher educator’s
blog entries function as an important meditational tool by provid-
ing emotional support, offering concrete instructional strategies, and
modelling expert thinking, all of which appear to work in consort to
assist Kyla as she struggles with the dissonance she is experiencing
between her imagined teaching persona and the instructional experi-
ences she is attempting to create for the ESL students in her practicum
placement.

Kyla’s imagined teaching persona: ‘I completely forgot

that I was teaching ...’

During the initial weeks of the practicum experience, Kyla expresses

optimism and confidence in her abilities as a teacher while at the same
time indicating negative impressions of her practicum placement based
on observations of the class. She emphasizes the students’ lack of

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­ articipation and initially attributes this to the ESL teacher’s style of

p
teaching being ‘intimidating for students’ who view her ‘as an author-
ity figure rather than a peer’ due to their cultural backgrounds. After
teaching a lesson for the ESL teacher, who was called away on an emer-
gency, she contrasts her own ability to generate student participation,
attributing it to her ‘relaxed and comfortable’ teaching style.
I did some things differently than from what my master teacher would
have done.
I expected a lot of participation from the students and I did this by having
a very relaxed and comfortable environment for the students.
This class was so mellow and fun that I completely forgot that I was teach-
ing ... I don’t know if that was bad or good, but this teaching experi­ence
felt really good.

Throughout these early stages of the practicum, the teacher educa-

tor uses the blog to validate Kyla’s reported successes: ‘Well, if it felt
good, it probably was good.’ In spite of Kyla’s positive congruence
with her experience, ‘relaxed and comfortable environment for the
students’, ‘so mellow and fun’, ‘felt really good’, the teacher edu-
cator uses the blog to push her to articulate the rationale behind
her instructional decisions – ‘How do you engage students with the
text in ways that highlight its essential features?’ – and to reiterate the
instructional responsibilities of a teacher – ‘Yes, you need to have a
clear goal in mind, model what you want them to do, create comfort-
able spaces for them to do it, and support them as they carry out the
activities.’ Although there is no apparent tension in Kyla’s teaching,
the teacher educator, anticipating from her expertise the multilayered
nature of such largely emotional evaluations of teaching, encourages
her to articulate the pedagogical reasoning behind her instructional
activities.

The tension emerges: ‘mellow and fun’ and ‘… being the

“teacher”’
Both the content and the function of the blog exchanges shift dra-
matically after the teacher educator’s first teaching observation of and
feedback to Kyla. Her self-described non-authoritarian teaching per-
sona becomes destabilized when her first ‘official’ lesson goes awry as
expressed in her post-observation blog entry.
So, on Monday I was really disappointed in myself for doing such a
horrible job. I noticed myself get pretty nervous while teaching ... and

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it also didn’t help when I wasn’t completely prepared. Just because I

was nervous, didn’t mean I should have jumped from one idea to the
next. In reflecting back, I think I set off this frantic pace for myself in
my head which made me want to keep rushing things. I realized that
one of the things that I needed that day was understanding what my
purpose was ...
To tell you the truth, that was one of the criticisms that my mentor profes-
sor had given me in the past. She noticed how when I teach in the class-
room I have a tendency to appear unsure of myself. But by the end of that
year, she said I was able to nicely balance my mellow and nice attitude
with being the ‘teacher’. I guess again I was a bit disappointed in myself
because in the process of thinking of my students, I, in my rusty state of
teaching, reverted back to my old ways.

Kyla’s highly emotional response, being ‘really disappointed’ in her-

self ‘for doing such a horrible job’ and her recognition that her ner-
vousness fostered ‘this frantic pace’, connects a current tension in
her teaching with one from her history as a learner of teaching. She
attempts to show the teacher educator that she does know better by
blaming it on her ‘rusty state of teaching’, a strategy to buttress her
imagined teaching persona. Like Lesley, Kyla experiences the com-
mon novice teacher tension of being ‘the teacher’ while still being
friendly with students.
In response to Kyla’s entry, the teacher educator, with a greater
sense of Kyla’s ZPD after the observation, initially provides emo-
tional support and uses her expertise to ground Kyla in more realistic
expectations of her teaching persona and the practicum:
No one expects you to be ‘the perfect teacher’ right off the bat – that’s
what the internship is for – so you can try some things out in a semi-real
context, reflect on it, learn from it, and move forward.

She then reorients Kyla away from the current behaviours she is
exhibiting in her ‘mellow’ teaching persona by first highlighting the
pedagogical value of establishing a stronger teaching persona, thus
once again articulating her expert thinking.
It is one thing to relate to students as a fellow student but you need to
establish a teaching persona in which you look and sound like you know
what you are doing. Acting ‘sheepish’ or ‘coy’ or ‘silly’ may get a laugh out
of them, but you need to establish a sense of authority in the classroom –
I’m not talking domination here or a power trip, but developing a strong
sense of self, that you know what you are doing, you know where you are
going, you know and care about them as people, as future ITAs, and as L2
learners, and together you are working toward a common goal.

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The teacher educator’s assistance shifts to a series of concrete sug-

gestions about what Kyla needs to think about and do to realize her
imagined persona.
All lessons have some sort of organization – depending on what you are
going to teach, where, to whom, why, and when … so consider these issues
as you plan out your next lesson.
Today’s could have been as simple as ‘Today we are going to focus on
language that is used to get people to do things … this sort of language is
used all the time, in lots of different contexts, but it is especially important
in teaching, because in teaching, ITAs and/or teachers are always trying to
get students to do things … so first we are going to do X, and then Y, and
then I’m going to put you in groups and ask you to do Z, and then your
groups will share ZZ with us … ’

The teacher educator’s assistance models expert thinking about the

process of organizing a lesson; the pedagogical value of co-construct-
ing knowledge with students, rather than simply evaluating their con-
tributions; and the importance of giving clear and specific directions
throughout the lesson. The teacher educator exemplifies her expert
thinking by explicitly voicing what Kyla could have said and thereby
grounds her mediation through a concrete instance in the practical
activity of Kyla’s teaching.

Kyla’s loss of self-regulation: ‘I’m really bummed and

disappointed …’

Despite this mediation, Kyla’s anxieties remain high after she teaches
her next lesson. When the students failed to participate she finds her-
self ‘slowly doing more of a monologic lecture’, a teaching style that
is contrary to her imagined teaching persona and that represents a
loss of self-regulation.
I guess I’m really bummed and disappointed with today, only because
I tried really hard to make the lesson meaningful for the students, and I
felt I didn’t fully do that … But what DO you do when your students are
not prepared for the material? What happens then?... What does a good
teacher do with the lesson plan, when the students are unprepared?

Kyla once again uses highly emotive language, describing herself as

‘really bummed and disappointed’. She asks questions, another way
that emotional and cognitive dissonance is displayed, as a way to seek
assistance from the teacher educator because she lacks alternative
conceptualizations of her instructional practice. The teacher educator

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responds to this loss of self-regulation with emotional support, ‘Well,

believe it or not, this happens all the time …’, and then offers various
suggestions for what Kyla could have done:
... so, you could have listed the different purposes of office hours on the
blackboard (to ask a content question, to get help with a problem, to
explain why something wasn’t handed in, to contest a grade, etc.) and
then asked them to talk about what role the TA would have to play as the
purpose changes.
You could have shared an experience you had in office hours (real or made
up) and asked them how they would have handled it differently …
You could have asked them to speculate on what sort of small talk might
be appropriate in office hours ...
You could have had them make up a problem/issue that might be resolved
in an office hours setting, present it to the class, and have the rest of the
class come up with different ways to resolve the problem/issue ...

The teacher educator’s meditation is highly explicit and contextual-

ized as she recognizes Kyla’s need for other-regulation. She answers
Kyla’s abstract question of what a ‘good’ teacher does when students
are unprepared with concrete examples of what she could have done
in the classroom interaction she just experienced, again grounding the
mediation she offers in a particular instance of the practical activity
of Kyla’s instruction.
Kyla continues to express her frustration with her inability to
‘think on my feet’ but begins to offer an explanation for why she is
struggling to gain a sense of self-control over her teaching. Such a
realization, according to Vygotsky (1978), constitutes an important
initial step in cognitive development.
When things aren’t going exactly as planned, I end up freezing up, being
unable to think of other things I could do. And in the attempt to come up
with something, and having multiple thoughts racing through my mind, I
end up fumbling over my words even more and I start jumping from one
thing to another.

(R e)invisioning her teaching persona:

‘I’m really proud of myself…’
Near the end of the practicum, Kyla’s blog shows evidence of attempts
to take up the teacher educator’s mediation. She describes herself as
consciously slowing down and feeling more comfortable with not
completing the lesson as planned.

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Even while I was teaching on Wednesday, and I wasn’t able to start on the
activity as I had first intended, I kept telling myself to slow down, and be
okay with continuing on Friday. While I was doing the first half of the
lesson, I started getting flustered at one point because things I thought
weren’t going as I planned in my head, but I purposely tried my best to
remain calm and still slow down. I kept reminding myself that it was
OKAY to not have finished the class as I had initially planned it.

She begins to describe how the teacher educator’s instructional strate-

gies are beginning to regulate her thinking while she is teaching.
Today in class, we reviewed closings and most of the students appeared to
have grasped the essential elements of closings. However, I did realize that
I should have been more concrete with the students.
For Friday’s class, I’m very proud of myself for sticking with my objec-
tives. I think before, I let the content rule over the objectives, when the
content should have illustrated or supplemented my objectives. This time
around myself, I purposefully memorized my objectives so that it would
be running through my mind as I taught.

Kyla evaluates her activity and is able to say what she ‘should have’
done, as well as what she did, ‘purposefully memorized’ her objec-
tives, so she could enact her emerging teaching persona. There is
positive congruence between her thinking and feelings in that she
expresses pride in ‘sticking with my objectives’. The teacher educator
responds with praise and then reframes Kyla’s lesson in expert terms.
What a pleasure to watch you teach today!
You provided a nice overview of the lesson, you situated it nicely in what
had come before, why it is important, and you provided concrete and
detailed directions so that the students knew exactly what they would be
asked to do.
At the end of the session it was clear to me that they not only got what
you were trying to teach them, they were able to do it. You also presented
yourself as a confident, genuine, interested teacher who is competent to
teach them but also willing to work and learn with them.

The teacher educator positively evaluates what Kyla did, especially in

terms of the instructional challenges that emerged through the blogs,
for example emphasizing the overall clarity of the organization of the
lesson. Students clearly participated, as the teacher educator com-
ments on how student learning was evident. Finally, she commends
Kyla for establishing a stronger teaching persona, one that is more
in line with what the teacher educator has attempted to assist her

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in developing. This post-teaching observation blog serves to validate

Kyla’s overcoming of her dissonance through identifiable changes in
her teaching activity.

Discussion
Overall, the practicum blogs created a mediational space where both
novice teachers were found to bring into conscious awareness their
understandings of and struggles with their own professional growth
as novice teachers. Both Lesley and Kyla struggled with the age-old
dilemma of what role (friend vs. authority) teachers should play in
the classroom (Farrell, 2003), and for both the shift from one towards
the other seemed to occur when their teaching did not go as planned.
And while the resulting emotional turmoil led to expressions of
guilt, disappointment, and a crisis of self-confidence, the blog entries
became a virtual space where they could make their tacit thoughts
and beliefs explicit, create a sense of cohesion out of the tensions they
were experiencing, and seek assistance from the teacher educator.
For her part, the teacher educator acknowledged their expressions of
emotional dissonance and emphasized the ‘normalness’ of what they
were experiencing and feeling as novice teachers in order to validate
both what they were experiencing and what they were feeling. She
also provided expert characterizations of the dilemmas they faced
and offered concrete suggestions for how they might (re)think and
(re)enact their teaching practices. As such, her blog entries contain
mediational means that supported the teachers as they worked to (re)
gain internal control over their cognitive and emotional states.
Not surprisingly, the teacher educator’s mediation and how both
teachers responded to that mediation reflect both the idiosyncratic
and the variable nature of novice teachers’ developmental trajectories
and differing ZPDs. Lesley remained highly responsive to the teacher
educator’s mediation as when, for example, she uses the teacher edu-
cator’s suggestions to establish a plan of action and then evaluates its
effectiveness. She credits the teacher educator’s mediation as enabling
her to establish emotional congruence that, in turn, helped her become
more self-regulated in her teaching. Kyla appears less responsive to
the teacher educator’s mediation until her teaching goes awry. Only
then does she begin to seek assistance and consciously attempt to
use the teacher educator’s mediation to regulate her thinking while
she is teaching. For both teachers, their requests for assistance indi-
cate a willingness to take greater responsibility for their own learning
(Poehner, 2009), and as they open themselves up to social mediation,
they become ‘ripe’ (Vygotsky, 1978) for the mediation offered by the

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teacher educator. Taking up and trying out the teacher educator’s

mediational means occurs only as they continue to teach, and here
too both teachers use the blog entries to externalize their attempts to
reorient their thinking and their teaching practices and how they feel
about the enactment of these changes in their teaching.

Reflections
As teacher educators, we are all too familiar with the emotional roll-
ercoaster that novice teachers experience during the practicum. Most
enter with a naïve sense of what is actually involved in the enact-
ment of teaching and only come to realize how complicated teaching
is once they are engulfed in/by it. Engagement in narrative activity
through practicum blogs creates a virtual space where novice teach-
ers can bring meaning and significance to their experiences while at
the same time opening themselves up to our mediation. And once we
have access to how they understand those experiences, we are in a
much better position to calibrate our mediation at their metaphoric
space of potentiality, or ZPD. Likewise, as it is often the emotional,
moral, and relational dimensions of teaching (Elbaz, 1983) that come
to the surface first, it is critical that we, as teacher educators, recog-
nize the social origins of emotions and their relationship to cogni-
tion. Once again, it is the affective-volitional web (Vygotsky, 1978)
that plays a catalytic role in the process of cognitive development.
Analysing the practicum blog entries has made us acutely aware that
we should neither ignore nor downplay the emotional processes that
are at work in novice teachers’ initial learning-to-teach experiences.
Instead, we echo the position that emotions play a motivated and
functional role in the development of teachers’ thinking and activity
(Golombek & Doran, 2011). More importantly, our mediational role
in this developmental process comes into clearer focus when we have
access to the cognitive and emotive processes that are ignited when
teachers engage in narrative activity. Because of the immediacy of the
blog entries, we can be responsive to where individual teachers are in
their development and enable them to enact their day-to-day teaching
while also pushing more expert conceptualizations of teaching. Our
mediation as teacher educators thus embodies core principles while
being dynamically and situationally realized.

Further research
Further research on the dialectics of cognition, emotion, and activ-
ity in novice teachers’ blogs has enormous potential. For us, how-

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ever, the most fruitful line of research should focus on the quality and
character of the strategic mediation or cognitive assistance (Werstch,
2007) provided by teacher educators. Specifically, we are interested
in the extent to which the teacher educator’s mediation is, in fact,
responsive to immediate need (within the ZPD), as well as the extent
to which it is more productive when it is concerned with cognitive
transformation (thinking) rather than performance (activity). Such
research has the potential to inform our practices in ways that can
enable us to better support novice teachers’ developing conceptions
of teaching and their evolving instructional practices.
We are also struck by a limiting feature of working with narrative
data, in that when engagement in narrative activity stops, the ‘story’
of a teacher’s development ends. Thus, as a research tool, narrative
data often provide us with a limited view of teacher development and
may fail to capture cognitive transformation that can only be con-
firmed by seeing how new modes of thinking play out in new modes
of activity. Further research that strives for narrative continuity by
capturing the continuous and longitudinal nature of teacher learning
is clearly warranted. Furthermore, we recognize the limits of working
only with narrative data that is written, as was the case for this study
of novice teachers’ practicum blogs. We fully recognize the value of
‘talking’ oneself into new understandings, in particular, as we found
in the case of Lesley where her total loss of self-regulation led the
teacher educator to suggest a face-to-face meeting to deal with the
immediacy of her emotional and cognitive dissonance. Combining
various types of narrative data with an eye towards ‘re-visiting’ nar-
rators at various points in time suggest areas of further research that
can only enrich our understanding of and mediation in the complex
processes of learning to teach.

Conclusion
Unlike the traditional reflective journal, the immediacy and dialogic
nature of the practicum blogs creates a sense that we are ‘right there,
in the thick of things’ with our novice teachers. We cannot imagine
returning to the days when we relied solely on weekly face-to-face
practicum meetings where we asked, ‘So, how are things going?’ to
which our novice teachers replied, ‘Fine’. Rather, we learn through
teachers’ narrative externalizations what they are feeling, thinking
about, and doing in their classrooms, and can respond in the practi-
cum blog and, when necessary, in face-to-face interactions. Moreover,
because of the dialogic nature of blogs, we as teacher educators can
integrate the functional role that emotions play in novice teachers’

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development as we strategically mediate the emotional and cognitive

dissonance they express with the goal of transforming their cognition,
emotion, and activity.

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