The Public Space of Schools – a World Signified in Self-Other Relations

Abstract

In this paper we discuss culture in the public space of schools based on essays by pre-service student teachers in a Portuguese Language and Literature Teaching Credential Program.  In these essays, the pre-service student teachers form representations of self-other relations while practicing their student teaching in supervised internships. We questioned whether these pre-service student teachers, in the practice of their field experience, in decisive moments of ethical practice in dialogue with the aesthetics of the profession, experience themselves as actual teaching subjects, through the primacy of individuality/otherness in the encounter between the physical world of life experience (the world of life), and the professional world of social experience (the world of culture). This discussion is based on the Dialogical Theory of Bakhtin and his Circle.