Thrown into action. Learning to teach from the practicum experience

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a research which studied the practicum as a device of teacher education, with the aim of analysing the learning produced by the teaching of a discipline, as carried out by pre-service teachers of History and Social Sciences. Particularly, this paper presents the analysis of the reflective process experienced by student teachers about their learning developed in this educational modality. To do this, we  applied different types of interviews associated to class observations. To analyse the information, we followed principles from Grounded Theory and the elaboration of a Thick Description. The findings suggest that student teachers incorporate a variety of learning contents related to the teaching of the discipline and to the work as a teacher in a wider sense. These contents are acquired through diverse performances that involve action, study and reflection, and which take place in diverse settings and are influenced by different actors.