construct new understandings of the potential to be found in formative assessment
as a pedagogic tool, which could inform future school practice.
Unfortunately, there is little evidence that this kind of knowledge work is
commonplace in mentoring conversations with student teachers schools. It is,
however, not impossible to achieve. Gonzales and Carter, for example, have argued
that student teachers“...should have the opportunity to discuss openly their per-
sonal histories and understandings of teaching...to help them understand what
drives their interpretations and decisions in classroom contexts.”(Gonzalez and
Carter 1996 , p. 46). They also suggest that there is a role for the cooperating teacher
(mentor) in enabling these discussions with them so that learners can connect their
limited understandings quite overtly to the networks of concepts that comprise
expert knowledge in teaching.
37.4 Cultural-Historical Approaches to Teacher
Education
The suggestions made in the previous section involve just a few of the tools that the
cultural-historical tool box offers teacher education to help it move on from weak“it
depends”responses, without falling into the trap of thinking that the scientifically
trained teachers that Vygotsky imagined (Vygotsky 1997 ) would be unthinkingly
applying researchfindings as they planned and worked in classrooms. The actions
of the Vygotskian teacher arise in social conditions, which are informed by publicly
validated knowledge and these actions are evidence of a capacity to agentically
externalise those understandings to interpret and shape those practices.
Van Huizen and his colleagues, arguing for a Vygotskian teacher education put
the case as follows:
...the close association of action and meaning in Vygotskian theory suggests that
apprentices will have to orient themselves towards the meanings of teaching informing the
practice in which they become participants. In particular, they will have to orient them-
selves towards a public standard of teaching that reflects the values and goals in the cultural
and political setting of the schooling in which they are engaging. This orientation should
not lead them to be recruited into any existing ideology, but clarify and define their own
allegiance and commitment to teaching as the core of their professional identity. (van
Huizen et al. 2005 , p. 276)Back in 2002, Peter Gilroy and David Hartley and I went a little further, by suggesting
that a Vygotskian approach to learning, with its emphasis on externalisation aimed at
improving the conditions in which we act, allows us to ask some fundamental ques-
tions about what kinds of teachers and learners does society need and therefore how
should practices be changed. Our answers led us to call for a future-oriented teacher
education which produces teachers who are able to hold an ethical commitment to
societal wellbeing together with developing agentic problem-solving in learners. We
suggested that this outcome could be achieved through what we described as
“collaborative responses to uncertainty”(Edwards et al. 2002 ).
37 Relational Expertise: A Cultural-Historical Approach... 563