The aim of this paper is to understand how ideas about teaching and learning to teach are structured and regulated in the student teaching component in university teacher education, and how these ideas are linked to the constructed identities of the student--and the collaborating teacher. I use critical discourse analysis to unpack the everyday language of collaborating teachers. I argue that, through the continued citation of assumptions about experience, the student teacher and collaborating teacher are constructed within prefigured and recognizable categories. This process sanctions and forecloses particular practices. I argue that this mechanism makes way for the reproduction of pre-established teaching practices, which uphold systems of power.