The distributed knowledge base: preservice language teachers’ positioning in language–content teacher collaboration

Effective language–content teacher collaboration is beneficial when teaching content to English language learners through the medium of English. Preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) for collaboration is increasingly common, but there is still a perception that the English language teacher's role is more supportive than collaborative. In this paper, we report on research that provided English language PSTs with a more agentic, collaborative role. For data collection, we audio-recorded English language and content PSTs’ collaboration activities as part of preservice programs at an Australian university and interviewed the PSTs after they completed the collaboration activities. We used a framework of distributed knowledge base and positioning theory to analyse the data. The findings showed that English language PSTs positioned themselves and were positioned by the content PSTs as leading in the shared domains and language-related domains and as supporting in content-related domains of professional knowledge. We discuss implications for theory, research and practice in preparing language teachers for collaboration with content teachers.