Sociocultural ways of conceptualizing professional vision to support and study novice science teachers’ learning

Professional Vision (PV) has been used in teacher education to interpret novice teachers’ learning in various educational contexts. To date, research has conceptualized this framework largely from a cognitive perspective of learning, overlooking the affordances of taking a sociocultural perspective. This theoretical paper aims to articulate the affordances of conceptualizing novice science teachers’ PV from a sociocultural perspective of learning, specifically drawing from its foundation (Goodwin, 1994). Four central affordances are considered: (a) teacher education pedagogies as supports for novices to develop their PV, (b) discourses as sources of evidence, (c) discursive practices as analytical lenses to study novices’ PV development, and (d) material representations as both learning and research objects. We ground our articulation of these affordances in examples of our work with novice science teachers when learning to plan modelling-based investigations (MBIs). We provide new insights into the design and study of learning environments that effectively sustain novice science teachers’ professional learning through practice.