Being and becoming in teacher education: student-teachers’ freedom to learn in a College of Education in Ghana

This paper focuses on how people learn to become teachers. It draws on the experiences of student-teachers and tutors at a College of Education in the south of Ghana, who engaged with an iterative data-generation process over one academic year. While increasing attention is given to the learning experiences of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, teachers’ learning experiences remain under-explored, under-documented and under-theorised. It makes an original contribution to the study of pre-service teacher education by combining a sociocultural lens on learning and becoming with an analytical framework based on the capability approach. This illustrates how student-teachers’ freedom to learn is facilitated and constrained by structured and social contexts within a pre-service programme. The paper shows how understanding different perspectives on valued ‘beings and doings’ of teaching can help re-interpret and re-imagine processes for ‘becoming’ a teacher, which has practical application at policy and institution level