Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2024, 60(4): 415-439 | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2023.035

The Whole Class First and Individuals Second? The Ethnography of Pre-Service Teachers’ Learning to Address Student Diversity during Their Practicum

Jana Obrovská ORCID..., Petr Svojanovský ORCID...
Pedagogická fakulta, Masarykova univerzita, Brno

Social inequalities can be reproduced or levelled through education. Czech schools tend to increase social inequalities, which is why discussion has increasingly turned to approaches that address the individual educational needs of every student. Such approaches include the concept of differentiated instruction. However, differentiation in teaching can be a professional challenge, especially for pre-service teachers, who during their practicum in lower-secondary schools need the support of mentors when learning to address student diversity. The aim of this study is to discover how pre-service teachers learn to work with student diversity during their practicum and how they are supported by their mentors, to which end we analyse a rich corpus of data collected using ethnographic methodology. The results of the analysis show that while pre-service teachers are taught by their mentors to take all students’ individual needs into account by means of implicit modelling, they are led by the advice they receive from their mentors to approach the class rather as a homogeneous whole. The primary mechanism by which pre-service teachers learn is by following their mentors’ advice and by applying a modelled approach to student diversity. However, this pattern of reproductive learning is disrupted at the level of mentor-modelled behaviour. We conclude that mentors lead pre-service teachers first to work with the class as a whole and only then to address the needs of individuals, and we discuss the implications this kind of mentoring has for educational inequalities.

Keywords: student diversity, differentiated instruction, social inequalities, student teachers, mentor teachers, ethnography

Received: June 19, 2022; Revised: May 30, 2023; Accepted: May 31, 2023; Prepublished online: June 2, 2023; Published: September 5, 2024  Show citation

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Obrovská, J., & Svojanovský, P. (2024). The Whole Class First and Individuals Second? The Ethnography of Pre-Service Teachers’ Learning to Address Student Diversity during Their Practicum. Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 60(4), 415-439. doi: 10.13060/csr.2023.035
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