Academic Discourse Meets Praxis Discourse in Group Tutoring

The aim of this study is to explore the meeting of academic and praxis discourses in group tutoring of undergraduate’s thesis. The point of departure is that the quality of the theses, at undergraduate and master level, at the teacher education programs has been questioned by The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (2006). The main critic concerns lack of academic qualities, such as failing theoretical awareness, weak analysis, normativity and lack of critical writing and thinking. The teacher education program is, however, primarily defined as a professional training program meaning that students to a large extent are focusing on the practical aspects of the profession. Two differing discourses can thus be identified, and this contradiction is explored by investigating the difference between students’ and the supervisor’s perceptions of the purpose of the thesis writing. The results from the analysis, of the transcribed extracts of verbal interaction, show that the academic code is used mainly by the tutor and the praxis code by the students. The study focuses on the meeting between these codes/discourses in relation to supervision and is inspired by the code theory of Basil Bernstein, where “codes” are used to describe regulative principles, realized through different possibilities of selection and combination (Atkinson, 1985). Language is also used as a means to understand social relationships, structures and processes. It is noticeable that, within these codes, the same expressions were used to great extent, but with different meanings and in different contexts.