Practical Demands

Experienced Teachers Employed in Academic Teacher Training Reflect on the Theory and Practice of Teaching at Universities

Abstract

The question of how to interconnect theory and practice never gets old in academic teacher training. In 2018, Wenzl, Wernet & Kollmer rejected the student teachers’ request for a more practical approach to teacher training in their publication Praxisparolen [Buzzwords about Practice]. As an empty buzzword, the request for more practice stands, the authors argued, for the inconvenience of student teachers struggling with their academic obligations. A more practical approach would devalue academic teacher training. In this article, we enter this discourse opposing Wenzl et al.’s point of view by reconstructing the perceptions and convictions of those who embody practical relevance in the first phase of teacher training: professionally experienced teachers working in academic teacher training. After conducting interviews with some of them, we took three sequences allowing for a secondary analysis concerning the subject of interconnecting theory and practice. These interviews were evaluated by using an objective-hermeneutical approach. Our results show that experienced teachers in academic teacher training tend to parallelize scientific theory and practical school experience. They don’t comply with the students’ request for simple practical guidelines in academic teacher training, but reintegrate the relevance of theory and scientific research from a practical perspective.