Four Danish and four Swedish students were asked to write teaching logs covering topics they felt had importance for their development as teachers, e.g. cooperation with teacher trainers from campus, mentoring, feedback from fellow students, their own life histories and the influence of social networks.

Afterwards they were interviewed in order to reach a more profound understanding of their own development in particular with regard to their pedagogical capital. They were asked to reflect on their personal educational experiences as students, how these had influenced their studies and how the course of education had changed their way of handling everyday life in school:

collaboration with staff and students

problem solving situations

how they experienced the contributions from their course of education on campus and at the teaching practice school.

The logs and the interviews will serve as background material for further examination. Being four researchers, we have emphasised the use of our different perspectives in the analysis. We intend to analyse the students' contributions on their pedagogical capital from a didactic perspective, a personal perspective, life-historical perspective and a professional perspective.

The project is on going. We hope to develop the concept of pedagogical capital as a Swedish-Danish tool to understand the novice student entering into the teaching profession and as a bridge to connect theories of teaching with students' school experiences in order to develop courses and training activities to improve their programme of education.

The project is funded by the EU's Interreg IIIA programme.