This article considers the reflexive character of teacher training from two theoretical perspectives: the clinical analysis of activity and the philosophy of action. This approach provides a theoretical framework and methods for identifying: (a)?the development of professional activity during the course of training exchanges and (b)?the circumstances in which these exchanges serve as resources for the decision-making activity of preservice teachers during classroom work. The discussion provides illustrations taken from a research program based on case analyses that were used to evaluate an alternating work-study training program at a university institute of teacher training in the south of France.
The theoretical framework and methods (self-confrontation interviews after field training) provide a means (a)?to evaluate the situated development of professional rules and concepts in contexts as different as the daily situations encountered in teaching and (b)?to determine the indexing of this development to the rules and concepts constructed in training situations. This approach thus distinguishes between that which pertains to the initial learning of professional concepts and that which concerns the development of their meaning through the preservice teachers? personal use of the concepts to give meaning to their experience at work.
The results show that it is possible to evaluate training programs in terms of the potential for preservice teachers to create meaning in training situations. Although unable to truly transform preservice teachers? power of action in the classroom, training programs based on reflexive practices (e.g. ?teaching advice?) at the very least help them to understand their daily professional experience from a broader perspective. In the best cases, preservice teachers in the final year of certification are able to perceive new phenomena in their circumstances of classroom work. In this regard, the results reinforce the idea of indexing the development of painstaking activity to the development of the meaning of concepts learned during reflexive co-analysis of fieldwork carried out with the cooperating teacher.