DEMANDA DE CLORO Y BREAK POINT

In activity theory, subjects come together to perform tasks to achieve desired objects (Engeström, 1987) of the activity system. The tasks that student teachers performed had implications on how they were able to meet the object of teaching practice in the school. As pointed out in Chapter Four, objects (or objectives) are looked at as the immediate goals of the subjects involved in a variety of tasks. The immediate object of student teachers for conducting teaching practice had to do with learning to teach. However, the school had teachers who had their own object of teaching pupils. Student teachers did not necessarily belong to the activity system of the school. They were there temporarily and would leave and go back to the college system where they belonged. This suggested that there were two activity systems in the school which were driven by different goals.

I found out that student teachers at the school were assigned tasks which were misaligned to student teachers’ immediate objectives of learning to teach but rather in line with the school goal of pupil learning. A student teacher commented:

I have been allocated 20 periods per week. I was against this but the school has two streams. This makes it difficult to have one teacher teach one stream while the other teacher teaches the other stream. The periods are manageable but when you have other exercises or tests to mark it is difficult. I think this is too much for successful teaching practice. I think this prevented me from a number of things because I was very busy usually. I would not say I encountered a lot of problems even though I had a lot of preparations to do, a lot of marking to do considering that the classes were big. Now when it comes to giving exercises and marking exercise books, I needed a lot of time and in that very same time I needed to prepare for the next lesson, so that was really tough. I was lacking the ways to properly launch specific topics (student teacher).

This suggested that the school system may not have been aware of the student teachers’ goals or assumed that student teachers had to subscribe to the school goals while they were there. This was a manifestation of a dissonance between objects of two activity systems. It should be remembered that student teachers who conducted teaching practice at the school were in the second year of their studies. They were expected to return to college to complete a third year of studies. Their level of knowledge and skills about teaching was lower than student teachers who were in third year of their studies (see Chapter Eight). However, the findings showed that there was no major difference in terms of tasks assigned to both cohorts of student teachers. Again this represented a creation of a single activity system of student teachers from conceivably two different activity systems of third year student teachers with more knowledge and second year student teachers with less knowledge.

It would appear that the policy of streaming pupils in class governed the school system and this tradition could be said to be a source of contradiction. The student teachers were expected to follow the school class structures even though this did not fit in their agenda of

teaching practice. In this respect, the school system expected student teachers to be “teachers” and operate within the ‘dictates’ of the school system. This seems to agree with an earlier observation (see Chapter Eight) that the school system tended to dominate and thin down the student teachers’ system with a view of (the school system) reproducing itself. The student teacher system did not appear to have any influence on the structure of classrooms. The student teachers’ system became subservient to the school system.

I observed (see Chapter Eight) that the college system did not have any special influence on the assignment of tasks to student teachers and appeared to have no influence on the way school systems operated. This apparent lack of influence implied that student teachers were left to the ‘whims’ of the school system to determine the allocation of tasks. Inevitably, the primary objectives of the school which centred on pupil learning became the primary objective of student teachers at the expense of student teacher professional development. Another student teacher remarked that even though the number of periods was within manageable range, the sequencing of periods on day-to-day basis presented some source of tension. This was similar to the findings from student teachers in Chapter Eight. A student teacher complained:

I have 16 periods per week and this is very reasonable. This number was stipulated in the syllabus. The periods are manageable except on one day of the week where I have to teach two periods in each form. The teaching itself has nothing like a problem but the problem involves preparing for work of two classes in a day (student teacher).

The remarks from a student teacher implied that the tension that the student teacher experienced had to do with requiring student teachers to teach the same subject to two classes on particular days. Importantly, it suggested that student teachers were capable of carrying out preparation for their lessons to a certain extent if teaching practice was going to be a source of productive learning experiences. Too much lesson preparation caused tensions and implied incompatibility with the objective of teaching practice. The school system, however, required student teachers to “teach”, and this implied that they follow the school timetable just like the other teachers.

Some student teachers were assigned tasks which they viewed as within reasonable ranges of promoting the objective during teaching practice. However, even with such reasonable tasks, student teachers’ source of tension shifted to lack or resources in achieving the immediate object of teaching practice. A student teacher commented:

I have 13 periods per week and these are reasonable. Unfortunately, there is limited number of teaching resources available for me to use (student teacher).

The tension caused by the general lack of teaching and learning tools in the school has been discussed in an earlier section (see Section 9.1). The setting of the school was marked by a general lack of teaching and learning artifacts/tools. The implications were that student teachers struggled to experience an ‘educative practicum’ (Zeichner, 1996) in settings that were viewed as inappropriate environment. Based on these cases relating to tasks of student teachers here, it would appear that the sources of tensions and contradictions were ‘endlessly multifaceted, mobile, and rich in variation of content and form’ (Engeström, 1999: 20).