Matti Rautiainen

Becoming interested during teacher education

Abstract In this article we examine first-year student teachers’ possibilities to become interested in professional issues in teacher education. We study the phenomenon of becoming interested among first-year student teachers via three different kinds of data. We analysed our data through John Dewey’s definition of interest, where a person has an interest if s/he is actively keen on some object that has personal meaning for her/him. According to our data, student teachers adopt an object of interest that teacher educators provide. Learners found it difficult to find the objects of interests by themselves, and it was exceptional for them to find personal meaning and an active state of interest. This is problematic because studying may be performance-oriented without the conditions of interest conceptualised by Dewey. Through our study we also discuss a theoretical approach which would help understand the mechanism behind becoming interested.