Hesitantly into the arena: An account of trainee teachers' and sixth form students' preliminary attempts to enter into dialogue through email

Teacher training is increasingly accountable to central government. Trainees – the word itself is significant – are expected to demonstrate competence in a wide range of professional standards if they are to achieve qualified teacher status. Training partnership schools, understandably, impose their own conditions for entry into their 'communities of practice'. In these circumstances, trainees – and their trainers – have increasingly fewer opportunities for risk taking or for exploring new configurations of the teacher pupil relationship.
This paper describes an attempt to exploit the potential of email as a means of granting access to a 'pedagogical arena' in which trainees and students might attempt to negotiate their own ways of working together. It concludes by suggesting that both groups found this a challenging task and by noting that the trainers involved decided that, if the project were to run again, a certain amount of autonomy would need to be sacrificed to direction.