In this study, the socially constructed nature of learning to become teachers is examined by analyzing the discursive processes through which opportunities for learning are constructed in the small group seminar of a teacher preparation program by the university-based supervisor. In this study, the researcher was the supervisor of the small group seminar who was researching his developing supervisor practice. This study adopts an interactional ethnographic approach, which combines theories from cognitive anthropology, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis and literary theory, for examining the processes of the structuration of life of the supervisorial small group seminar of teachers-in-preparation and the discursive construction of perceived disjunctures as these disjunctures where turned from negatives to potential rich points for learning.

Guided by the idea that the small group seminar is constructed over time by its members, this study adopts a view of the small group seminar as a culture and text whose meanings are to be understood from the point of view of the participants. In order to support the production of this understanding, this study privileged the analysis of face-to-face interaction, written and spoken texts as the locus for identifying the rules and principles that guide participation in the group.

Through participant observation, data were collected in the form of fieldnotes, video and audio tapes and interviews during the 1999–2000 and 2000–2001 academic school years in a fifth year teacher preparation program in a university in Santa Barbara, California. Three telling cases were examined as a way of making visible the different types of disjunctures that the small group seminar participants perceived between the worlds and expectations of their university program and of their school site placement. Each of these telling cases provided a different analytical angle for examining the discursive processes of the construction of small group seminar events and actions taken by the participants in relationship to what was happening in the collective level of the small group seminar. The analysis of these cases provided a way to understand the close up situated nature of disjunctures that are made visible as teachers-in-preparation navigated the borders of their university program and their school site placement.