Why This Book? Why Now?

The last two decades have seen a gradual erosion of confidence, at least as far as politicians and policy makers are concerned, in the capacity of university-based initial teacher education (ITE) programs to prepare the next generation of teachers. This has prompted governments to introduce wide-ranging reforms of ITE. In the US, these reforms have included significant deregulation of teacher education, promoting the establishment of independent teacher education programs that do not involve universities at all (Zeichner, 2017). In England, the contribution of universities to initial teacher education has been significantly reduced by a government directive that pre-service teachers (PSTs) undertake substantially more of their ‘teacher training’ in schools, so that they can then better focus on developing their ‘core teaching skills’ (Carter, 2015). In Australia, where the authors and editors of this book work, there has been a similar increase in mandated school-based practicum hours for PSTs. This was one of many recommendations of Action now, Classroom ready teachers, a government funded report on ITE by the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) (2014).

One key theme of Action now, Classroom ready teachers, consistent with recent international reports, is the importance of ensuring graduate teachers are ‘classroom ready’. This theme is driven by an enthusiastic belief in the power of standards and standardisation of ITE programs to improve the quality and consistency of teacher education across Australia. And yet 3 years after the publication of Action now, the notion of ‘classroom ready’ is still being hotly debated. What does ‘classroom ready’ actually mean? What does the preparation of ‘classroom ready’ teachers entail? How will the standardisation of initial teacher education programs and practices, or pre-service teachers spending more time in one school, ensure graduates are to ‘ready to teach’ in the culturally diverse classrooms of Australian schools? Additionally, White, Bloomfield and Le Cornu (2010) have asked whether a preoccupation with ‘classroom ready’ graduate teachers ignores the importance of these graduates being school and community ready.

Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education: Narratives of learning takes up these questions, and responds to calls to undertake more rigorous research into professional experience (e.g., Le Cornu, 2015), by telling authentic scholarly stories about professional experience in ITE. The stories reflexively describe and critically analyse the learning that emerges from a range of professional experience (PE) programs and initiatives in and around Monash University in association with its partner institutions and communities. Our primary focus is on the professional learning of academic and professional staff, and on school-, community- and industry-based mentors associated with pre-service teachers’ professional experience. Occasionally, this extends to the professional learning of pre-service teachers as well. Our analysis is shaped by the belief that professional experience constitutes a range of collaborative activities, relationships and partnerships involving close interaction with professional teachers and institutions (not just schools), and that it should be motivated by a set of ethical imperatives for preparing the next generation of teachers who are needed to teach all children in a culturally diverse world.

Working with this belief, the book highlights tensions in the ways policy, practice and theory understand professional experience in initial teacher education. Through presenting and analysing their experiences, the authors tease out these tensions, and discuss how professional experience in and around one Faculty of Education can contribute to the development of pre-service teachers’ identities, knowledge and skills. The ‘re-imagining’ in the book’s title refers to a shift beyond a narrow understanding of professional experience as short-term practicum (although this, too, can be improved) to one which includes a diversity of educational experiences and partnerships that assist pre-service teachers to learn to teach, to appreciate the extraordinary complexity of the profession they are about to enter, and to develop their professional identities as teachers.

It is significant that most chapters of the book focus on collaboration, partnerships and/or mentoring on and across the borders that separate schools, community ‘centres of learning’, industry and universities. Different chapters inquire into different ways that Monash University is engaging with the teaching profession, both within more traditional practicum programs and in other settings with pre-service teachers, university-based teacher educators and externally based professionals. Authors describe a range of innovative programs, arrangements and approaches that are responding to public and political concern about quality in teacher education, the role of educational partnerships in teacher preparation and the personal and professional learning gained from such opportunities. The stories they tell reveal a multiplicity of experiences, challenges, successes and insights of academics and professional staff in one university’s faculty of education (along with their educational partners) as it re-imagines professional experience in ITE.

At a time when political and public trust in initial teacher education is faltering, we believe it is important to be sharing rigorously theorised stories of professional experience. Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education: Narratives of learning informs policymakers and other sceptics of the valuable work universities and their partners are already undertaking to enrich and improve the professional experience of pre-service teachers in ITE. The book illustrates, and presents for critical scrutiny, ways in which universities like Monash are responding to calls for a well-supported, clearly focused, research-based program of professional experience. We hope that readers might be encouraged to develop their own new understandings of professional experience, and appreciate the benefits of an expanded understanding of professional experience in their institution.

How Did This Collection Come About?

We, the three editors of this book, collaborated on a previous edited collection about initial teacher education with Springer, Narratives of learning through international professional experience. That book used narrative to explore the nature and experience of international professional experience (IPE) for pre-service teachers, as well as the Australian teacher educators and educational partners who led these experiences in different geographic settings (Fitzgerald, Parr, & Williams, 2017). Our long-term involvement in, and commitment to, IPE programs and partnerships in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, was a key driver for that collection. So, too, with this collection, where the focus expands to encompass all aspects of professional experience in ITE, including some radical developments in the field.

As teacher educators in Monash’s professional experience program, the three of us have played a number of teaching and leadership roles over the past 15 years. Judy and Ange, for instance, have held the senior leadership position of Director of Professional Experience and Partnerships, and Graham has been Director of Secondary Teacher Education courses. Also, we have visited and observed pre-service teachers on school placement; liaised with mentors or coordinators of practicum placements in schools when things were not going well; negotiated new and alternative professional experience arrangements with school leaders, within Australia and internationally; and worked with partners in school, community or industry to develop alternative conceptions of professional experience. In all of these activities, we have appreciated the centrality of professional experience in its different forms in the formation of the next generation of teachers.

Given our belief as editors in the value of narrative in representing and critically investigating aspects of professional experience, we feel it is important to share here some more information about our backgrounds, in the forms of stories of our involvement in professional experience. In the next section, we each present a brief narrative window into our past, showing how our biographies have informed our interest in, commitment to and passion for professional experience. Judy reflects upon her time as a primary school teacher supervising a student teacher when her past education lecturer from Monash University paid a visit to her classroom to observe that ‘student teacher’ in action. Graham then recalls an early memory as a teacher educator observing a pre-service teacher teach on a practicum placement, and building a professional dialogue with her about her teaching. Finally, Ange ponders (in her strategic role as Director of Professional Experience) feedback from pre-service teachers showing how much they value professional experience time in schools during their teacher education degree. We begin with Judy’s narrative.

Judy’s narrative: “You should do what I do!”

A lecturer from my alma mater (Monash University) was visiting my primary school classroom, and observing the pre-service teacher whom I had been ‘supervising’ for the past week or so. The word ‘mentoring’ wasn’t used in the late 1980s, a time when ‘student teachers’ undertook ‘teaching rounds’ to demonstrate their effectiveness as classroom teachers. This particular lecturer had been my lecturer 10 years previously. I remembered her lectures being full to overflowing, as students flocked to her classes to hear her passionately teaching about our future careers—as primary school teachers. Now, she was in my classroom, working with the next generation of beginning teachers. I cannot recall the details of our conversation, but I must have expressed an interest in the process of supervising student teachers in my classroom, and how interested I was in their learning. This might have gone beyond the usual conversations she’d had with other supervising teachers—I am not sure. But I remember this conversation leading to her exclamation that I should “do what I do”—work in a university to teach about teaching.

As it turned out, my career trajectory did lead me to doing what that lecturer was doing—working with pre-service teachers, both at university and in the field, during their professional experience placement. When I entered the academy, I was allocated teaching roles that directly supported pre-service teachers on placement, including visits to their classrooms to observe and converse about their teaching. Over the years I also taught in units that supported pre-service teachers in their journey into the teaching profession. While the teachers, principals, pre-service teachers and children working and learning in schools have always been an important part of my personal and professional identity, as my career as a teacher educator progresses, I have come to see that working with the profession doesn’t always have to involve the practicum.

The term ‘professional experience’ has grown to encompass more than merely the ‘practicum’ or ‘placement,’ and as my role at the university begins to shift away from working directly with schools, I understand that I can still be part of the essential work of teachers and teaching in other ways.

I still teach in units that directly support pre-service teachers learning about their teaching. But I now often find myself talking to and mentoring the next generation of teacher educators—novice academics, graduate research students (some of whom are teachers in schools), classroom teachers looking for a career shift into academia, professional staff supporting pre-service teachers in schools, and co-teachers straddling the boundaries of schools and universities. Involvement in the professional experience of pre-service teachers is not limited to the practicum. And while I miss being directly involved in working with teachers and children in schools, by necessity, my perspectives have broadened to encompass a range of ways in which our pre-service teachers can engage in and with the profession, to become the next generation of teaching professionals.

Graham’s narrative: The ‘luxury’ of knowing students we visit on professional experience

In my early years as an English teacher educator at Monash (after 14 years as an English teacher in secondary schools), I used to travel to 30 plus schools every year to observe ‘student teachers’ from my ‘English methods’ classes on ‘teaching rounds’. I loved that work. It was one of the privileges of being a teacher educator to be able to spend time in such a wide range of schools and classrooms. The language, the policy landscape and the institutional infrastructure for organising professional experience were very different then. The nature of my own work as a teacher educator was also very different. Like Judy, opportunities to observe pre-service teachers in schools are much rarer for me now. I make shorter and fewer visits to fewer practicum schools than I did then. I regret that.

When I first began visiting student teachers on teaching rounds in 2001, I was always observing students from my own classes at university. Also, I had the ‘luxury’ of spending time in the school to converse at some length with that student before and after the observed lesson. This meant that the feedback I wrote during the lesson could be more conversational than evaluative. My focus could be on promoting a probing professional conversation with my student about his/her teaching rather than imagining I could fly into the classroom, observe a lesson, offer an objective evaluation, and then fly out as quickly as I had flown in.

In preparing for the writing of this narrative, I found comments I wrote in 2004 for Celia (not her real name), an English student teacher on a teaching round in the second semester of her Diploma of Education. In our pre-lesson chat, Celia had shared with me her unhappy experience of revision lessons when she was a secondary student where her teacher did most of the revising and students sat around bored witless! To prevent this happening in this practicum lesson, Celia planned to divide her Year 10 students into collaborative groups, provide them with carefully chosen quotes and prompts from the literary texts they would be writing about in their upcoming exams, and invite them to compare and contrast these texts.

My commentary on Celia’s lesson began as follows:

It’s early in the day. The students are chatting happily as they spill into your classroom. You engage very naturally and sociably with them as they take their seats, greeting a few stragglers with a gentle ‘hurry up.’ They respond as you’d hope – they realise the class is about to begin. The rapport that you have developed with this group before today is evident in these initial exchanges. And yet you can easily shift into and out of a slightly more peremptory tone: ‘Anyone who hasn’t submitted this homework … I’ll see them after class.’

It was a decisive start to the lesson, although the rest of my notes suggest that what followed had its ups and downs for Celia. Nevertheless, I recall that my extended professional learning conversation with her after the lesson was rich and diverse.

Back in 2004, as an early career teacher educator, I probably took for granted the ‘luxury’ of already knowing the students (like Celia) I observed ‘on rounds’. I took for granted that I had ample time to build a conversation with them around my observations of their teaching. That would change as teacher educators were forced to become more ‘efficient’ in the way they used their time. This is a change in my work as a teacher educator that I deeply regret. On a more positive note, my awareness of other possibilities for weaving diverse professional experience/s into teacher education courses and programs has also changed—in exciting ways….

Ange’s narrative: Teacher educators in the driving seat for change

Recently, I spent a number of hours carefully reading the qualitative feedback that our initial teacher education students shared through the official university channel (Student Evaluation of Teacher and Unit—SETU) about their professional experience units. One of the joys of being the Director of Professional Experience in the Faculty! This feedback was framed around two key questions—Which aspect(s) of this unit did you find most effective?; and Would you suggest any changes to enhance this unit in the future?—and was in light of having completed a recent practicum in a centre or school. Resoundingly, regardless of course or stage of course, professional experience was the focus of their answers to both questions. Students unequivocally appreciated the opportunity to have time on placement, and they wanted more of it.

Being in a school environment was far more effective than a university setting. Fair to say I learned more in these 10 days than in a year of university (2nd year student, B.Ed. (Primary and Secondary Education))

More professional experience could never be a bad thing! (3rd year student, B.Ed. (Secondary Education))

Having the opportunity to apply what I’ve learned so far in an actual workplace setting (1st year student, M.Teach (Early Years Education))

Comments like these cause pause for thought.

It is certainly not uncommon or a new phenomenon for education students to identify that more time in schools might help combat their feelings of being underprepared for the realities of the classroom. My conversations with our students in recent years have suggested that many are opting to undertake casual relief teaching or casual education-related work initially rather than apply for permanent school or centre positions as a way of gaining more teaching experience and classroom confidence. It is interesting to consider these thoughts in relation to my recent conversations with centre and school leaders about what they are looking for in graduates. One recounted how with over 120 applicants for one graduate position at her school, they needed to have ways to narrow the field given that all have completed an initial teacher education degree with a set amount of professional experience. Voluntary experiences and casual work involving children and young people, such as swimming instructing or after school care or other forms of teaching in the community, were seen as key ways to ‘stand out from the crowd’.

In teacher education courses, it is clear that professional experience is an important aspect of learning the craft of teaching. It is obvious that hands-on opportunities to learn in situ matter. But in my current role I see that these opportunities need to be weighed up against minimum requirements for teacher registration as well as structural and financial constraints that exist within schools and faculties of education. Regardless, it has become increasingly clear to me that engagement with professional experience needs to come from more than just practicum placements. It means getting creative and capitalising on no-to-low-cost ways to connect with the profession in ways that are targeted and contextualised. And it is us—teacher educators—who are in the driving seat to instigate this kind of change. We need to embrace opportunities to bring different ways of thinking about and participating in professional experience into our practices to better support the development of future teachers.

Using Narrative to Represent, Analyse and Re-imagine Professional Experience

One of the benefits of telling our own stories as we have above is that we are able to clarify and make more explicit our otherwise blurred identities as co-authors. For a brief time, at least, we interrupt the combined voice that characterised the opening pages of this chapter to present individual voices as teacher educators, researchers and collaborating editors of this collection. This ‘interrupting’ allows us to reveal the histories and attitudes of three individual academics who are actively reflecting upon their experiences in existing professional experience programs and imagining what professional experience in ITE might look like into the future. By narratively situating our work on this book in a particular place and historical context, we can provide insights into ITE that are not present in the anonymously compiled box and whisker plots, histograms and tables of statistics in the Initial Teacher Education Data Reports, for example, published every year by AITSL (e.g. AITSL, 2017). In other words, there is much that narrative-based research can investigate and communicate that traditional quantitative studies of ITE can never achieve—such as exploring the relational work of professional experience and teasing out personal perspectives on this experience. We want to take this opportunity to state our belief that any commitment to improving professional experience in ITE, and promoting ‘‘a more informed debate about the direction of ITE in this country’’ (John Hattie, quoted in AITSL, 2017, p. 1), should pay attention to a wide range of insights and research methodologies.

Indeed, our vision as editors of this collection has placed great store in the way narrative can both represent and critically explore experiences and relationships from different perspectives (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Parr, Doecke, & Bulfin, 2015). The chapters which follow present rigorously theorised stories authored by teacher educators, mentors and professional staff whose professional experience/s are crucial in preparing the next generation of teachers to enter the teaching profession. Where other recent publications about professional experience have provided a ‘handbook’ approach, offering pre-service teachers valuable information about how to succeed in their professional experience or practicum, Narratives of learning through international professional experience eschews this option. Rather, we use narrative-based methodologies (such as critical autobiography, self-study, autoethnography and narrative inquiry) to represent and probe the challenges and opportunities of developing new and alternative approaches to professional experience in initial teacher education. We have purposely left it to authors of each chapter to articulate what particular traditions and theories of narrative in research they are drawing upon in their writing, and how narrative mediates their investigation and the knowledge they are sharing.

How Is Professional Experience Re-imagined in This Book? Three Key Themes

In the usual parlance of teacher education literature, the term ‘professional experience’ refers to the compulsory practicum placements or field experience of an initial teacher education program. In Australia, this currently involves a minimum of 80 days for undergraduate courses (usually 4 years, full time study) and 60 days for graduate courses (1.5–2 years, full time study). For the days when pre-service teachers are located in schools, early childhood settings or other educational centres (usually in Australia, but sometimes overseas), they are mentored or supervised by experienced teachers or industry professionals. These mentors are required to provide a report on and evaluation of the pre-service teacher’s ‘performance’ in the classroom (or other setting), which becomes part of the university’s final judgement of whether a pre-service teacher is ‘ready to teach’ at the conclusion of their degree. These are the accredited requirements set down for professional experience offered by Australian teacher education providers (AITSL, 2015), and in most chapters of this book they are the starting point for re-imagining professional experience. For example, some authors’ re-imagining involves consideration of what can be improved in more traditional practicum arrangements (such as in the area of school-based mentoring, and mentoring which is genuinely shared between school and university-based educators). Others illustrate what is possible when a faculty of education reaches out to and collaborates with a wider range of settings and partners for pre-service teachers to undertake their professional experience fieldwork—such as in the community or in industry. Still others re-conceptualise professional experience that does not rely on students travelling to a professional experience, as it were, but rather the professional experience is deeply embedded within a campus-based teacher education programs (for instance in co-teaching arrangements).

Across these different approaches, a number of key themes can be seen emerging and playing out in particular and sometimes similar ways. Three of the most frequently addressed themes are often referred to as forms of work—(i) boundary work; (ii) relational work; and (iii) identity work. We offer, here, a brief introduction to these interrelated themes and their significance to the book overall, before going on to summarise the chapters that follow, and their connection with these themes.

  1. i.

    Boundary work

Darling-Hammond (2009) and Zeichner (2010) have poetically (and now famously) described the disconnect between academic coursework and ‘fieldwork experiences’ as the Achilles heel of initial teacher education. And they have advocated for ‘new hybrid spaces’ that ‘more closely connect’ these dimensions of pre-service teacher education (Zeichner, 2010, p. 89). Many of the chapters in this book can be read as positive responses to this advocacy. We see authors thinking differently about, and often re-conceptualising, what they frame as professional experience. Much of their ‘thinking differently’ involves working on and across traditionally assumed ‘boundaries’ between campus-based learning and ‘professional experience’ (usually assumed to be in schools). Each chapter is enlivened with examples of how this different thinking can be implemented in practice. The carefully theorised research stories shared in this collection bring to life what might be achieved in terms of engaging and rigorous teacher education practice. And yet the authors do not shy away from identifying the challenges of this boundary work, such as when the required innovative work does not fit neatly into the bounded existing roles of teacher, teacher educator or pre-service teacher.

Some chapter authors have highlighted that they now see their role as teacher educator as a negotiator between different stakeholders, and they describe how they have had to negotiate between competing demands in an unfamiliar environment. They find themselves ducking and weaving through options of who they might be and how they might be in this previously uncharted space. Zeichner (2010) captures this sense of being ‘neither here nor there’ in contemporary teacher education through imagining what he and others have called the ‘third space’. In this collection, the notion of the third space signals a rejection of clear cut binaries (such as between theory and practice, or between practitioner knowledge and academic knowledge) and opts for a shift from an either/or perspective to an integration of a both/also view. Zeichner challenges those of us involved in initial teacher education to throw off the shackles that confine us to more conventional teacher education spaces that we might feel obliged to work in—these might be in academic coursework or in professional experience placements or both—and to embrace more hybrid roles as leaders and facilitators in pre-service teacher education.

In a similar vein to the construct of the third space, Aikenhead (1996) and Giroux (2005) have referred to a paradigmatic shift in exploring the notion of border crossing or working in border spaces. This work also involves negotiation. Giroux (2005) made reference to the notions of ‘mingling (and) clashing’ (p. 2) as a way of making sense of the encounters that happen as individuals and/or groups move across boundaries that traditionally demarcated the different teacher education spaces. Examples of mingling and clashing are evident across many of the chapters here, as authors describe the efforts of teacher educators and others to negotiate their way to deeper learning in these hybrid spaces and to new emerging identities. As we have identified previously (Williams et al., 2017), ‘the process of mingling (and making sense of that mingling) and clashing (and seeking to resolve these clashes) is a crucial part of … professional learning and development’ (p. 8). We believe an appreciation of the positive outcomes of boundary crossing is crucial in any attempt to re-imagine professional experience in ITE.

  1. ii.

    Relational work

Being a teacher educator in a university environment involves a diverse range of work. We must undertake research, administration/service, and for most teacher educators, teach pre-service teachers. Much of this teaching takes place in university classrooms and lecture theatres, but for many, teaching involves reaching out beyond the university walls to engage with the teaching profession, schools and other educational providers, parents and communities, all with the aim of educating pre-service teachers about what it means to be a teacher, and not just how to do teaching. The difference between doing and being is one of the more important themes emerging from these chapters. While professional experience can be seen in terms of its organization, artefacts, practices, programs and graduate outcomes, the chapters in this collection highlight just how important relationships are in the process of learning to become a teacher. The relationships include, but are not restricted to, the following: relationships between pre-service teachers and teacher educators; relationships between pre-service teachers and professional staff; between school-based mentors and university-based teacher educators; between teacher educators and their university colleagues; and between the university and schools and other community partners.

Kitchen (2005a, b) described ‘relational teacher education’ as ‘a reciprocal approach to enabling teacher growth that builds from the realisation that we know in relationship to others’ (2005a, p. 17). Further, he believed that his own relationships with pre-service teachers helped him to understand who he was as a teacher educator. He stressed the importance of relational work in teacher educators understanding and improving their own practice; understanding the landscape of teacher education; displaying respect and empathy to all involved in teacher education; helping pre-service teachers face and manage their own challenges; and, critically, being receptive to ‘growing in relationship’ (Kitchen, 2005a, p. 18). All the chapters in this collection have elements of this relational work in them, and in their various ways underscore the importance of relationships in the work of professional experience. Mentoring, partnerships, collaboration and collegiality, and community involvement—all of these facets of professional experience are built on notions of respectful relationships, trust and some degree of informed risk-taking. As in any relationship, there is no guarantee of success, and participants need to trust themselves and each other when facing the inherent challenges that relational work involves. Each narrative in this book explores the challenges in, and the learning arising from, professional experience relationships. They take the notion of relational work in professional experience beyond the practicum and the constraints that this sometimes involves, to a deeper understanding of the professional and pedagogical relationships that underpin the learning of all involved. When the relational dimensions of professional experience are fully understood and appreciated, arrangements are more likely to be created or organised so as to optimise reciprocal learning experiences that can only flourish where respectful relationships exist—which is, after all, what teaching is all about.

  1. iii.

    Identity work

It is widely recognised in the literature that initial teacher education is a journey of ‘becoming’ during which the pre-service teacher’s beliefs and identity are radically transformed. The journey begins—as Feiman-Nemser (2001) and Britzman (2003) observe—well before a pre-service teacher enrols in a teaching degree: all experiences in school and other education spaces leading up to a teacher education degree have contributed to the pre-service teacher’s emerging sense of him/herself as a potential educator. All being well, this identity continues to emerge and become throughout a teacher education course and indeed through a teacher’s career or a teacher educator’s career. But in the period when students are enrolled in an initial teacher education course, and especially when they are connected with some element of professional experience (in a school, university, community or industry setting), that transformation can be particularly intense.

At one level, the transformation involves a dynamic shuttling between the pre-service teacher’s identity as a student studying in a university and his/her identity as a teacher learner and classroom practitioner, with professional and ethical responsibilities for the young and impressionable school-aged students in his/her care. At another level the pre-service teacher is working out how to operate in different roles in different educational spaces, sectors, institutions and communities, each with its own distinct histories, cultures, practices and discourses, and yet with some things in common. He/she is moving back and across multiple boundaries that provisionally demarcate these spaces, sectors, institutions and communities, working out who to be and how to be in them. In time, he/she must find a way to bring together sometimes disparate selves: a home self and a university self; a university self and a school self; a self as teacher of one discipline (or even one class) and a self as teacher of another discipline (or class); a self who can work with one professional mentor and with another very different mentor; and a self that can be differently in different educational settings. The dynamic movement between these selves—what many authors in this collection refer to as ‘identity work’—can reinforce or disrupt or destabilise a sense of one’s identity. This collection argues that such movement is a crucial dimension to one’s learning and development in the professional experience dimensions of a teacher education course.

The chapters that follow illustrate how university-based academics and professional staff, and school-, community- and industry-based mentors, all of whom seek to support and enable pre-service teachers in their professional experience and learning, are obliged to know and appreciate the complexity and nuances of pre-service teachers’ identity work. Importantly, the book argues that these teacher educators and education professionals are themselves engaged in complex identity work, shuttling between, combining and creating different identities, moving across boundaries, negotiating contrasting cultures, spaces and communities. It is challenging, often under-appreciated work, which requires particular expertise, as the stories in this collection testify.

Gee (2000) offers a helpful hermeneutic to make sense of this identity work. He argues that identity is both an individual and a social construct; that it is created and negotiated, rather than being discovered or freely chosen; and it is always provisional, in the process of becoming. Identity, for Gee, is mediated with respect to the following influences or perspectives: (i) one’s biology/genes; (ii) the institutions in which one has worked; (iii) the discourse communities within which one has operated; and (iv) the practices one has engaged in with particular ‘affinity’ groups (Gee, 2000). The stories told by authors in this collection, whether they explicitly invoke Gee or the discourse of identity work, nevertheless illustrate how these influences play out in their identity work. This identity work has never been more important than now, when standards-based reforms increasingly seek to determine not just what teachers should do but how they should be. More than 10 years ago, Bauman (2004) described the world of liquid modernity, where some individuals find their identity work can be acutely restricted, to the point where they feel ‘burdened with identities enforced and imposed [on them] by others’ (2004, p. 38). Many authors in the past decade have alerted us to the danger of this in educational spaces. This book strongly articulates authors’ concerns with the trend in standards-based reforms to impose standardised identities on teachers and teacher educators. However, the following chapters are distinctive in their commitment also to exploring the ways in which teacher educators, pre-service teachers, school-based mentors and university-based professional staff are positively responding to this trend.

Outline of the Book

Our division of the other 11 chapters of this collection into three parts is prompted by our firm belief in the salience of the above three themes in any proposed re-imagining of initial teacher education. However, we want to make clear that the themes should be read as richly interconnected, not as clearly delineated categories. We have grouped each chapter in one of the three parts depending on which theme it spoke to most directly, but we acknowledge that all chapters demonstrate some connections with all three themes.

  • Part 1. Professional experience as boundary work

Part 1 opens with an investigation into the professional learning of a team of teacher educators, in an innovative partnership program, called the ‘Monash Casey Teaching Academy of Professional Practice’ (TAPP). In ‘Stories from the third space: Teacher educators’ professional learning in a school/university partnership’, Judy Williams, Simone White, Rachel Forgasz and Helen Grimmett use narrative cases and third space theory to analyse moments that triggered deep reflection and learning about what it is to be a teacher educator involved in a collaborative university-school partnership.

Reporting on a different form of partnership, this time with industry, Jane Kirkby, Kelly Carabott and Deborah Corrigan tell the story of how pre-service teachers and their teacher educator mentors collaborated in a partnership with a professional football club. Their chapter, ‘Beyond classroom walls: How industry partnerships can strengthen pre-service literacy teachers’ identities’, investigates how the ‘Read like a Demon’ program provided the pre-service teacher volunteers with experiences that strengthened their understanding and practices as teachers of literacy.

Sarah Hopkins and Penny Round’s chapter, ‘Building stronger teacher-education programs to prepare inclusive teachers’, describes an innovative professional experience program with a very different industry partner. The authors present three narrative-based studies of pre-service teachers, who were differentiating their teaching of literacy to young adults with intellectual disabilities at Wallara (a disability service provider), under the mentorship of the teacher educator authors.

The last chapter in Part 1 sees Jennifer Rennie reporting on a newly designed Indigenous professional experience placement in the Northern Territory of Australia. She draws on the autobiographical writing of four pre-service teachers, to show the importance of building positive respectful relationships at every level between Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders in the placement. ‘Going remote: Narratives of learning on an Indigenous professional experience placement’ additionally shows how this Indigenous placement was designed and experienced as part of the larger reconciliation project in Australia.

  • Part 2. Professional experience as relational work

This section of the book consists of three chapters. It opens with ‘Mentoring practices and relationships during the EAL practicum in Australia: Contrasting narratives’, which explores the stories of pre-service teachers of English as an Alternative Language who experienced their practicums in very different ways. Teacher educators Minh Nguyen and Graham Parr highlight the complexity of the intellectual and relational work enacted by two mentors with their allocated pre-service teachers. And they argue for the importance of mentors valuing the experiences and knowledge that pre-service teachers bring to their professional experience.

Next, John Pardy and Kristin Reimer report on an innovative initial teacher education program in which retired teachers mentored pre-service teachers, not only about teaching as a practice, but also as a career and a profession. ‘Generations of learning: A professional learning experience’ shows how these intergenerational mentoring conversations and interactions can be mutually beneficial learning for mentor and pre-service teachers now and into the future.

Finally, in ‘What is finger knitting? Chinese pre-service teachers’ initial professional experience in Australian Early Childhood Education,’ Haoran Zhang, Anne Keary and Julie Faulkner explore professional experience from the perspective of an international pre-service teacher. In this narrative-based chapter, Sue, a student from China studying early childhood education, comes to appreciate the complexity of experiencing the classroom as a teacher for the first time in an entirely unfamiliar social and educational context.

  • Part 3. Professional experience as identity work

The third part of the collection begins with ‘Bringing the profession into university classrooms: Narratives of learning from co-teaching primary mathematics’, co-authored by Sharon Livy, Johnson Alagappan, Tracey Muir and Ann Downton. Drawing on a series of written and oral narratives, and the perspectives of two critical friends, the authors explore the co-teaching experiences of a Monash-based teacher educator and a school-based primary teacher. They unpack the benefits and challenges of bringing practitioners from school classrooms into university classrooms to co-teach in a pre-service program.

A companion to Livy et al.’s work is Graham Parr, Fleur Diamond and Scott Bulfin’s chapter, ‘Co-teaching as praxis in English initial teacher education’. In this chapter, the authors use extended autobiographical narratives to explore their innovative approach to school-university partnerships. Their team-based approach promotes an alternative conception of professional experience, one that challenges the conventional positioning of a secondary school teacher in a co-teaching program. One innovative feature of the program was its research agenda, where the team inquired into the influence of standards-based education reforms on their co-teaching.

In ‘Back to the future: A journey of becoming a Professional Practice Consultant,’ Ondine Bradbury reflects on her first year in the newly created role of Professional Practice Consultant for initial teacher education placements. Using miniature poems she wrote during that year, Ondine traces back to her earlier experiences as a pre-service teacher and then a mentor of pre-service teachers, to show the complex dimensions of her work in this new role and their shaping effects on her identity as a professional staff member and educator.

Rounding off the collection, Ange Fitzgerald’s autobiographical narrative, ‘(Re)navigating the classroom as a teacher educator’, traces the growth in her professional identity as she transitioned from a school teacher to become a teacher educator, and then returned to the primary school classroom as a facilitator in a pre-service teaching program. Ange’s transition reveals her challenges in teaching a science education unit in a school rather than on-campus in a university. She goes on to explain how this experience helped her to see her identity as a science teacher educator in new ways.