A pre-service teacher clashes with his mentor and the practicum ends badly. There is distress and a sense of failure all round. Questions get asked. Was the pre-service teacher simply unsuited to this demanding profession? Was the teacher education inadequate? Was the mentor a good fit? Were there the right kinds of support in place? Was the…

Across the world, the work of teacher educators in universities is subject to contradictory discourses of, on the one hand, globalisation and standardisation and, on the other, innovation in both teaching and research. This article is a critical account of a particular experience of an Australian teacher educator leading an international teaching…

The school-based experiences of preservice teachers are much reported in research with school placement often presented as a "high stakes" endeavour. However, there is limited research on the impact of their presence on supervising teachers. This paper highlights supervision as bringing a change to teaching that impacts on teachers' identities.…

Caught between the demands of the normative (what they believe they "ought" to be and value) and normalisation (what professional others tell them that they "should" be and value), teacher candidates often experience themselves as belated even though they are newcomers to the profession--simultaneously heirs to a history and new to it. In this…

Current reviews of teacher education pay considerable attention to problems associated with the practicum, and often claim to propose major changes in order to improve the quality of new graduates. Many of the problems they address concerning the practicum and its relation to the "theoretical" component of programs are longstanding, and…

This paper focuses on partnership between pairs of students in early childhood education during a teaching practicum in preschools and kindergartens. One hundred students enrolled in early childhood pre-service teacher education programs at a large metropolitan Australian university were paired and placed in kindergartens and preschools with host…