The dialectic relationship between theory and practicein mathematics teacher education

The study presented here is a part of ongoing research, in which 'situated knowledge' and ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ form the framework that allows us to deal with the knowledge and the learning process of pre-service elementary school teachers. Our aim is to determine how student teachers use conceptual tools provided in a mathematics methods course. The search context of this paper is the curricular analysis of the textbooks. Our research has shown the difficulty involved in using different conceptual tools to solve a proposed task. We have observed how, in situations in which the integration of conceptual tools has been achieved, the student teachers have found distinct features that lead to different decisions. This shows the professional relevance of such integration and points out the need of advancing in that research agenda.