The Materiality of Fachkultur. Pre-service Language Teacher Beliefs About Their Classrooms and Professional Selves as Represented in Self-portraits

In this chapter we delve into L. Aronin’s conception of the materiality of multilingualism (Aronin & Ó Laoire, 2012) and expand it to describe student teachers’ representations of the materiality of Fachkultur (“professional culture”), meaning “a specific orientation of a certain group of school subjects” (Multrus, F. (2004). Fachkulturen. Begriffsbestimmung, Herleitung und Analysen. Eine empirische Untersuchung über Studierende deutscher Hochschulen. Konstanz). We make the hypothesis that pre-service language teachers’ representations of the materiality of their specific school subjects are a window into their beliefs about the modern languages and cultures they will teach, the speakers of those languages, and their own professional roles as teachers. We analyse German pre-service teachers’ representations of their future professional selves as French and Spanish teachers, focusing on their visual representations of the materiality of Fachkultur. By describing frequent features in the representation of the materiality related to the professional self, our analysis uncovers beliefs attached to teaching those two languages in the German context.