Whereas books for L2 teacher educators range from prescriptive to highly theoretical, Johnson and Golombek’s (2016) volume, Mindful L2 Teacher Education. A Sociocultural Perspective on Cultivating Teachers’ Professional Development, provides a means of examining the work of teacher education programs and teacher educators through a sociocultural lens. More specifically, it elucidates how pre-service teachers reflect upon and perform their teaching practice within the sociocultural environments of teaching. The audience for this book is both veteran and novice teacher educators.

In the preface of the book, the authors begin by clearly stating their sociocultural perspective on teacher education, which they do through the introduction of the term: responsive mediation (p. xii). They define this term as a means of “enabling L2 teachersto internalize new psychological tools that support the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise” (p. xii). The full explanation of how the term fits within teacher education is further expanded in Chapter 2, where the role of mediation is explained through a Vygotskyan lens.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I (chapters 1 & 2) explicates theoretical foundation for the authors’ own pedagogy. Chapter 1 begins with an explanation of a sociocultural perspective on teacher education based on Vygotskyan claims on development. It continues to discuss teacher knowledge and the development of teacher identity, along with the authors’ view of teacher education pedagogy. It concludes with an explanation the power of narrative activity in teacher education. Chapter 2 introduces Vygotskyan or sociocultural (SCT) theory of learning and development. Beginning with mediation, the chapter continues with an explanation of ‘basic’ SCT terms that are applied to teacher education in the Chapters 5-9.

Part II (chapters 3 & 4) provides an explanation for the Vygotskyan terms that will be used throughout the book. Chapter 3 commences with a description of two Vygotskyan terms: obuchenie; which differentiates between teaching and learning and perezhivanie, defined as emotional experience. The authors continue to illustrate how these two terms along with McNeill’s (2000, 2005) concept of growth points create the potential for the development of L2 teacher expertise in pre-service teachers. Chapter 4 adds two additional SCT concepts that mediate the work of teacher educators with L2 teachers. The authors cite interthinking and the intermental development zone as terms based on the work of Mercer and his colleagues (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer, Littleton & Wegerif, 2004), which are applicable to L2 teacher education. In addition, Johnson and Golombek mention sociocultural discourse analysis as an additional tool for examining the psychological process that emerges through teacher practice.

Part III (chapters 5 – 9) applies the Vygotskyan terms as the theoretical underpinnings for five instances of teacher practice that the authors have designed, repeated Chapters 5-9 provide specific instances how sociocultural discourse analysis can be applied to narratives of teacher reflective practice. Based on data that the authors have collected in their own L2 teacher education programs, sociocultural theoretical concepts are applied to the analysis of their teacher-learners’ developmental process and data they collected in in their own teacher practice.

The culminating section, Part IV (chapter 10), summarizes the application of the sociocultural lens to teacher education. Chapter 10 offers insight into how the authors conceptualized the idea of responsive mediation as a means of mediating of the “social conditions for development” (p.164). This chapter finalizes with an invitation for L2 teacher educators to integrate particular Vygotskyan concepts to their practice.

This book offers a sociocultural framework for analysis of research data from interviews between teacher educators and their students. Socio-historical background information on the students is provided to further understand the developmental processes of the L2 teacher. As a result, the authentic data analysis offers insight into the use of sociocultural concepts as a basis for discourse analysis of teacher development. In this author’s estimation, another of the book’s strongest contribution to the field of teacher education is the suggestion that teacher educators’ own professional knowledge grows and develops as they mediate their students’ learning process. Johnson and Golombek are specific in mentioning their own developmental processes as they engage in the meditational processes with their own students.