Abstract:

Over the last decade, the discussion around the Bologna Process has brought with it new ways of understanding education and learning. The Bologna Declaration (1999) created the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in order to meet the current demands imposed by various changes and technology. Therefore, the EHEA focuses on the mobility of students and graduates, and employability and competitiveness for a knowledge economy based Europe.
The University of Aveiro in Portugal, namely the Department of Education, has been adapting to this reality through the creation of new degrees. Among them there are pre-service teacher training degrees focused on the development of skills that are vital for a society under constant change (Sá, 2010). They are supposed to provide the graduates with a good understanding of the responsibility each teacher shares with his/her peers, with whom they should discuss the use of equipment and materials adequate to each learning situation (Shulman, 2004; Westheimer, 2008). We acknowledge the importance of encouraging teacher collaboration in pre-service teacher training, as a way of sharing and justifying their options, adapting the syllabus to the students’ needs and thus improving the quality of Education (Hargreaves, 1998).
Social web tools have been used to promote collaborative learning (Arvaja, Salovaara, Hakkinen, & Jarvela, 2007). Students use them in different contexts and with different purposes (Redecker, 2009) to communicate and to work, beyond the university campus. Therefore, they may be used for the promotion of collaborative work right from the outset of pre-service training. Collaborative learning enables students to interact and collaborate with their peers (Persico, Pozzi, & Sarti, 2010) and once they acknowledge its importance in pre-service training they can use it in their future professions.
With this in mind, a project was developed involving two groups of students undergoing a 6-month pre-service teacher training programme. The students participated in a forum, in which they discussed issues about the teaching/learning of spelling, and collaboratively constructed didactic strategies/activities for developing spelling skills included in a lesson plan. Our main goal was to characterize the contribution of collaborative work for the co-construction of didactic strategies/activities, and of discussion forums for the development of collaborative work and didactic knowledge co-construction. The results analyzed hitherto allowed us to verify that most of the collaboration took place outside the forum, although it concerned the topics proposed for discussion and the activities the students were supposed to plan. We intend to further discuss these results.

Keywords:

Collaborative work, discussion forums, pre-service teacher training.