The development and maintenance of an evolving community of practice has implications for the ways in which student teachers relate to each other. Indeed, as Dewey (1963 [1916]) recognized, the very act of participating in the community entails a certain degree of alignment in terms of communication, including thoughts, ideas, values and beliefs. Ideational and interpersonal realities are co-constructed through statements and utterances that achieve the dual discursive ends of construing social events and social actors. Once established, this alignment between the community's members and its beliefs needs to be monitored and maintained. This monitoring and maintenance work implies that the particular interpersonal relations that have been discursively constructed between the community's members also need to be maintained through the continual reiteration and reaffirmation of beliefs.

Thus the student teachers' ongoing self-definition requires considerable coherence and cohesion within the community in terms of their common purpose, beliefs and values. However, the need for a 'constitutive outside' leads to their 'us' being defined in opposition to the 'them' of the 'traditional' teaching, which they construct as characterizing UAE government schools. This is reflected in a tendency towards the discursive construction of antagonistic relations between the community of student teachers and the government school teachers. In this chapter I explore some of the ways in which this work unfolds: through the use of particular forms of interpersonal address; through statements that serve to monitor and maintain the community's beliefs and coherence; and through statements that serve to set the agenda for the community's future mission. I also discuss some examples where the evangelical sense of mission and the consequent antagonism towards the school teachers that often emerges, is tempered in the reflections of some student teachers.

Interpersonal Address

One of the most characteristic features of the student teachers' interpersonal communication is the frequent use of an introductory 'I agree with you' or an equivalent statement.