Nexus analysis as a framework for understanding complex connections inherent in teacher education program literacy practices

Abstract

This presentation is part of a larger project that aims to gain an in-depth understanding of disciplinary literacy in primary school teacher education in Sweden, including for example teacher educators’ beliefs about literacy practices. In the presentation we will discuss the results from a sub-study of three teacher educators’ talk about literacy in relation to their teaching practice and about students’ writing in their respective discipline, namely biology, Swedish (comparative literature) and mathematics. Nexus analysis, based on mediated discourse theory (Scollon & Scollon 2004), is used as the analytic framework focusing on the concepts of ‘social action’, ‘historical body’ and ‘discourse in place’. Drawing on dialogical interviewing principles (Way et al. 2015), semi-structured interviews were conducted on Zoom at a university in the south of Sweden. Analysis revealed clashes between the historical body of the participants and the discourses in place due to the intricate web of literacies and interdisciplinary fields that teacher educators need to navigate. We argue that this type of meta-methodological perspective, in which the social actions of the participants come to the fore, can clarify the complex connections inherent in literacy practices as opposed to common procedures in the field such as think-aloud protocols and expert-novice distinctions.