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Feedback sessions as mediation spaces: empowering teacher candidates to deepen instructional knowledge and engage in the construction and transformation of theory in practice

ABSTRACT The process of engaging in classroom research provides teacher candidates with opportunities to enter into the kind of deep, self-reflective work that we believe is an important capacity to build in teachers as they begin to engage in the construction and transformation of theory and knowledge within their own unique contexts. Our Action Research (AR) process involves multiple opportunities throughout their coursework, advising, and feedback sessions to try to promote the development of this capacity. These opportunities serve as a holding space where candidates are both supported and challenged through interactions with their research advisors, other faculty members, their peers, and panelists consisting of educators from the field. In this paper, we present what we believe to be important elements of AR that emerged from our final feedback sessions with 13 teacher candidates in our program as they prepared for the professional presentations. We found that considering these feedback sessions as mediation spaces (1) empowers teacher candidates to externalize and deepen personal understandings of their research through dialogical discourse with expert others, and (2) negotiate their power and emerging practitioner researcher identities.