| Student-teaching residencies offer novice teachers opportunities to learn through real-world practice and professional collaboration experiences guided by experts including mentor teachers, university supervisors, and others. Each student teacher's experience takes place within a unique boundary zone that can be described as a confluence of two streams--that of a university teacher education program and of a residency partner-school site. What student teachers learn, how they learn, and why they learn is impacted by their work in intersecting social worlds that encompasses multiple and potentially conflicting goals, objectives, motives, discourses, and practices. Using cultural historical activity theory as a framework, the researcher examined organizational structures and forces enabling and constraining two secondary social studies student teachers' practices during a 15-week residency semester. Findings showed how participants' emergent forms of practice were conceptualized before the start of their residency semesters and then re-conceptualized, enacted, and evaluated within their respective communities of practice. Structures and forces impacting student-teacher practice produced a constellation of activities influenced by perceptions of student and student-teacher capabilities and needs, school curriculum and assessment requirements, division-of-labor decisions pertaining to student-teacher/mentor-teacher/student roles, and mentor-teacher evaluations of student-teacher performance. Creating explicit spaces for participants to discuss, negotiate, and act on problems posed or encountered during a residency experience may better align teacher educators' expectations for those experiences with actual outcomes. |
