| Summary: | Education departments and teacher education programmes around the world focus on preparing reflective teachers to be able to successfully tackle the challenges and complexities associated with the practice of teaching. The concept of reflection, however, becomes a matter of debate regarding its implementation and promotion in teacher education programmes, mainly due to the fact that student teachers can find it difficult to engage in deep types of reflection. Student teachers tend to give descriptive accounts of their teaching practice, rather than looking below the surface to explore it in-depth. Among the various approaches that have been implemented to support student teachers' reflection, the role of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) has been suggested as being potentially productive. Digital journals, e-portfolios and video annotation tools have been found to enable student teachers to engage in deep types of reflection. The study reported in this thesis explored the process of reflection through the use of Videopapers in the context of Initial Teacher Education. A Videopaper is a video annotation tool that integrates and synchronises video, text, slides and hyperlinks in one cohesive document. An interpretive qualitative case study was employed, aimed at exploring the process of reflection through the use of Videopapers by student teachers studying to become English teachers. The study involved two cohorts of student teachers who engaged with the structured tasks of video-recording a lesson, reading previously created Videopapers by other student teachers, editing the video-recorded lesson and creating their own Videopaper to reflect on teaching practice. The study devised its own theoretical framework consisting of a definition of reflection and a detailed model of types of reflection and types of knowledge. Drawing on this framework, evidence of reflection was identified both in the process of engaging in the various tasks and in the content of the Videopapers the student teachers created. The findings of the study showed that the structured process of using Videopapers - in the setting of workshops with the presence of peers and a tutor - supported the student teachers to engage in deep types of reflection. One important finding was that the relationship between the text and the video in the Videopaper enabled the student teachers to engage with an in-depth exploration and analysis of their teaching practice, rather than describing and reporting teaching events. The analysis of the data also indicated that the process of using Videopapers has the potential to support student teachers to engage in knowledge about aspects of their teaching practice. In particular, the student teachers engaged in knowledge on pedagogy, instruction and curriculum. Another important finding of the study was that the setting of the workshops, which provided opportunities for collaboration and interaction between the student teachers, seems to have supported the student teachers to engage in deep types of reflection.
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