How do pre-service teachers address a fieldwork activity?

The aim of this work is to find out how a group of primary preservice teachers face the problems that arise when they carry out a field trip within university gardens. The activity proposed not only consisted of identifying specimens of trees and bushes but also of identifying the problems they find as a means to reflect on their future teaching work. In order to find out what strategies the students used to solve the problems that arose during the activity, a system of categories that linked the phases of a school research process to different levels of autonomy was employed. From this, resolution sequences were extracted and analysed according to the context where the activity took place: the field and the laboratory. The results show that the problems that emerge are associated with those related to botany and not with its didactics. Although an overall increase in the level of autonomy seems to be observed, strategies such as the connection of the problem with scientific knowledge, related to delving into the problem, appear rarely. Thus, extracting the resolution sequences used, it can be seen that, in general, those more complex are observed when the teaching staff is more accessible. Two conclusions can be drawn from the results: 1) the importance of teacher’s help for students to delve into the problem and 2) the need to connect the problems detected by the teachers in training with the real problems that they could face in their future teaching work. This fact makes us rethink the way in which this type of activity is approached in initial teacher training to establish a balance between scientific content and its didactics.