Is it possible to enhance the teacher students’ quality of learning in the school based periods of teacher education by providing the supervising mentors with a sharpened ability to notice, discuss and articulate their own practical knowing? Results from one of our previous projects show that the sharpening of such abilities can provide tools for shared generic knowledge amongst teachers, but can it also enhance the mentoring quality or the possibilities of transferring practical knowledge to new members of the profession? And does such consciousness- raising lead to an increased ability to assess the students practical knowing? Results from a design experiment where we - in collaboration with field mentors - have studied these questions will be at the center of the presentation. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council.

The current study takes it point of departure in the results from a previous project where the central questions dealt with teachers’ practical knowing, mainly the possibilities of expressing it. But also the possibilities and impractabilities of transferring and translating this type of knowledge from the practice based periods into academia. Something essential seem to be lost in these efforts, the specific qualities of practical knowing become “lost in translation” (Lindqvist & Nordänger, 2007a; Lindqvist & Nordänger 2010). In teacher education the concepts of theory and practice are often used as if they were two completely separated phenomena, located to separate phases in the education, but relationships between them are of course more complex. Teacher education can neither be seen as divided into “theoretical” and “practical” sections, nor as “one practice”. Instead you have to perceive it as consisting of a whole lot of “practices” (Wenger, 1998 ) – placed on university campus as well as in the schools and preschools and sometimes overlapping the physical and sequencial placing. These practices hold partly differing perspectives concerning what teachers’ professional skills are (and are supposed to be), they draw their arguments from different knowledge areas and they use different languages to present them. In this theoretical perspective the student becomes a traveler between practices, a broker in different forms of knowledge by moving across this landscape. The intended integration of “theoretical” and “practical” knowledge comes to existence within the students and in their sense of growing professional integrity (Rogers & Scott, 2008).

One way of qualifying teacher education and enhancing the possibilities of the travelers’ integration of “theory” and “practice” would – in this perspective - be to qualify each of the practices on their own terms and then let them meet as equally qualifying experiences within the student.