This thesis comprises three separate studies that together explore how Swedish student teachers construct or produce professional identity in interaction while navigating different institutional and professional instances of teacher education. As a discourse analytical contribution to research on teacher identity, the main theoretical framework is mediated discourse theory (e.g. Scollon 2001a). For data construction and analysis in the studies, different parts of the two related methodologies of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris 2011) are employed. Constructed through an ethnographic approach, the interactional data consist of audio and video recordings of interaction in instances from three different components of a Swedish teacher education program: a rhetoric course, a bachelor thesis course in history and teaching placement. Furthermore, the data include observational field notes and interviews, as well as resources used by the participants, primarily written texts. 

Taking place early on in teacher education, Study I focuses on student teachers performing oral presentations under the fictitious presumption that they are speaking as teachers. Employing the notion of communicative project (Linell 1998), the empirical aim of the study is to shed light on how student teachers manage institutional affordances and constraints affecting interactional role shifts from student teacher to teacher. In Study II, three student teachers are writing their bachelor theses in the subject of history, and the study focuses on the interactional production of teacher identity of one of the students during seminars. While partly being a methodological study, Study II empirically explores how student teachers interactionally relate to their future profession in an academic disciplinary setting, highlighting which actors and institutions are involved in the production of professional identity. Finally, Study III concentrates on a student teacher during his final teaching placement. Focusing on previous experiences resemiotized as stories, Study III highlights how discourse re-emerging from the historical body (Nishida 1958) can be used in interaction in producing identity. 

The results suggest that the production of teacher identity by the student teachers is a co-operative and communicative task, where previous experiences as well as an anticipatory perspective on the teaching profession are important features. The three studies identify different resources that can be used and adapted by students to suit different purposes in professional identity production, described as textual resources, embodied resources, and narrative resources. In turn, the different uses of such resources motivate the need for studying identity in interaction with an approach where ethnographic and sociocultural knowledge is part of the analysis. The creative use of resources in identity production highlights that students use knowledge and experience linked to academic and professional as well as everyday discourse in producing professional identity. Presuming an interest in opportunities for student teachers to develop professional identity during their education, it appears fruitful to reflect upon how potential resources are designed and implemented in teacher education, and how institutional affordances and constraints affect the possibilities of using them.

Focusing on Swedish student teachers’ oral presentations in a rhetoric class, this article studies interactional role shift as a multimodal practice. The role shifts under scrutiny concern shifting from student teacher to teacher, thus anticipating the students’ future profession. A central feature of the article is a discussion of how role shift may be conceptualised as a communicative project, thus highlighting the different modes of communication used by the students, and consequently to examine its potential as a facilitator of students’ professional and academic development. The data was collected using an ethnographical approach, resulting in a collection of 21 video-recorded oral presentations, together with other relevant semiotic resources. The data is analysed by the employment of concepts from nexus analysis and the notion of communicative projects. Through a discourse analytical approach to social action in interaction, the analysis shows how role shifts are constructed of patterns of smaller actions that add up to three primary actions: setting the scene, changing perspective, and performing the new role. These primary actions are multimodally chained together, and the results demonstrate how social actors use instructional texts in combination with multimodal recourses in order to perform their role shifts.

By testing a model for analysing identity in interaction, the present article explores how a history student teacher produces social identity in relation to his future profession as a teacher, with an important point of departure being the relationship between the academic and professional aspects of teacher education. This is addressed through an empirical analysis of a student teacher’s identity production in a specific academic setting: a bachelor thesis course. The main body of data consists of audio recordings and video recordings from a group of three student teachers giving feedback on each other’s theses. With respect to methodology, the article employs a model from multimodal (inter)action analysis that focuses on the concept of vertical identity – the notion that identity in interaction is produced in three layers of discourse simultaneously. The results show that the main participant produces the identity of history teacher in an academic setting where such identity production is not encouraged, e.g. by resemiotisising curricula: thus, policy documents can work as a tool when producing teacher identity. This production of identity is done by employing strong agency, which consequently points to the need of a more elaborated discussion on agency in the tested model. 

One of the most important points of contact that student teachers have with the teaching profession occurs during placement. Thus, teaching placement may be regarded as an important arena for the development of teacher identity. In this article, a mediated discourse theoretical perspective (Scollon 2001a) is employed to observe and analyze the performance of a student teacher during his final teaching placement, with the aim of exploring how the previous experiences of student teachers expressed as stories can be interactionally used in the production of professional identity. The data consist of interactional data from three video recorded oral presentations, two video recorded sessions in a classroom, interview data and observational field notes. Due to its potential for historical analysis and mapping experience in discourse, nexus analysis is employed as the method for analysis. By analyzing a student teacher’s experiences resemiotized as stories linked to their historical body, the study shows how different affinity-identities in cooperation or in contrast with pupils are used in identity production. In turn, this identity production appears to function as a tool for managing the interaction order in the classroom, an activity that, by extension, may be linked to student teachers in their development of teacher identity.