In Swedish teacher education, student teachers commonly work with assignments in small groups. To enable student teachers to grow, both personally and professionally, they need to reflect both individually and collectively with their teacher educators and fellow student teachers. However, research shows that there is a risk in teacher education to narrow reflection into a tool for teacher learning, and not recognizing it as an activity that challenges thought. To avoid this risk, the approach to video-stimulated reflection (VSR) explored in this study, considers not only the notion of reflection, but also the reflective process itself, and its potential for growing student teachers to create a reflective space collaboratively. Three groups of student teachers participated in the VSR on a field practice at a local science center. Two of the groups were preparing for teaching science in lower and upper primary school. The third group was preparing for teaching science in secondary school. A reflective cycle analysis was applied to detect reflection in the VSR interviews. The results demonstrate that the approach to VSR enabled a reflective process in all three groups. The affordances and constraints of the VSR and the role of the facilitator are discussed.

The present study aimed to examine the affordances and constraints of small-group discussions in relation to student teachers' learning of science. By drawing on variation theory, this study focused explicitly on the student teachers themselves as the primary agents for providing opportunities for their own learning of science. The results show that student teachers were more likely to arrive at a common understanding of the object of learning when they adopted explorative talk, which included asking questions, testing ideas, and presenting differing views. Furthermore, explorative talk indicated a higher density in patterns of variation within and between relevant dimensions of variation. These results have implications for facilitating small-group discussions as part of student teachers learning process.

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This study aimed to examine student teachers’ challenges addressed by science didactics in a fieldwork assignment at a science centre. From a teacher educator perspective, it is central to understand how student teachers’ theoretical understanding of science didactics comes into play in practice. The empirical material consists of video-stimulated reflections on teaching science at the science centre. By using a didactic model, the influence of artefacts as representations emerges as the most prominent challenge with science didactics at the science centre. This, together with the identified challenges: knowledge about school students’ science understanding, making science content accessible, and the complexity of asking questions, indicates that the didactic model becomes a valuable analytical tool. To create didactical situations in teaching practice, the didactic model provides a powerful ‘thinking tool’ for student teachers – as well as teacher educators in their practice.