Communities of practice and German language teacher education projects - convergences and dissonances

Abstract

The central issue of this study is the need for a greater link between theory and practice, focusing on the initial education of German language teachers. Considering two university Third Mission projects, in which such articulation is at its core, the article sheds light on one of the practices developed in these projects: the weekly pedagogical mentoring meetings. In this sense, formation is seen as a stage in the construction of learning, understood as a collective and social process. In this way, we bring up the concept of communities of practice and, based on the students’ perception taking part in the projects, we try to understand the contributions of this concept to projects of this nature, identifying commonalities and dissonances between the projects described and communities of practice, according to the literature reviewed. Although our corpus pointed to some divergent aspects between the projects and some of the characteristics attributed to communities of practice, we saw that, to a large extent, the convergent points stand out, such as the predominance of a perception of trust between the participants, as well as the appreciation of orientation meetings as spaces for the collective construction of knowledge from a decentralized and horizontal perspective.

Keywords
German teacher education; university outreach projects; communities of practice