Legitimation in teacher education: a need to shift focus from assessment to teaching
Increasing demands are put on teacher training education to highlight digital perspectives in school practices. In this paper I discuss the way discourses construct legitimation for students in teacher training program. Specifically, while teacher students plan teaching for learning with digital resources for pupils in vocational program at upper secondary school. The language of legitimation is analysed from the framework of van Leeuwen (2007). Data consist of 25 students’ lesson plans, altogether 228 pages. The students are given freedom to decide the extent and content in the lesson plans; the assignment requirement is to plan for digitalization as a living element. Students get two advice: to familiarize themselves with assessment criteria, as well as to study general guidelines as formulated in the document for planning and implementation of teaching from the Swedish National Agency for Education. The results show pupils face a wide range of opportunities through modes and media, and attention is on how teachers can assess pupils’ multimodal texts. The digital element is about usages of resources. How the digital resources will contribute to development in learning is not prominent. In the student plans, the pupils’ writing instead consist mostly of documentation on task templates and evaluations. Thus, the construction of legitimation face reflection on problems for education training perspectives. Multimodal teaching is challenging for teacher students. Furthermore, it seems students plan their teaching for a practice in a strong discourse of assessment and less of teaching for learning.