Understanding teacher knowledge from a Cultural Psychology approach

•A theoretical discussion on the nature of teacher knowledge from Cultural Psychology.•A method for the discursive observation of teachers' situational representations.•Situational and propositional representations co-mediate teaching practice.•Implications for research and practice on teaching and teacher education.

In this paper we propose a Cultural Psychology approach to teacher knowledge which assumes that: 1) mental representations are directly observable, and 2) the relationship between different kinds of representations is co-mediational. The paper sets out such an approach, providing arguments to support these two alternative premises; outlining a methodology, based on social linguistics, for the direct observation of representations; and articulating the relationship between three types of representations: situational representations, specific propositional representations, and general propositional representations. We discuss the implications of this approach for research and practice in teacher education.