Ribbon Panel ( 2010 ) recommended a restructuring of teacher education around
clinical practice and partnerships as a way to improve the quality of teacher
preparation and teacher effectiveness. Similarly, the UK’s recent Carter Review of
Initial Teacher Education ( 2015 ) reinforced the importance of effective
school-based experiences and the value of robust school-provider partnerships, but
also pointed to the need to increase mentoring capability through a more rigorous
process of identification, selection, training and resourcing of mentor teachers.
Notwithstanding thefindings from recent reviews of ITE, universities have for a
number of years attempted to address the theory-practice‘gap’by developing
partnerships with schools. While some argue that collaboration between universities
and schools in teacher preparation programmes enhances the relationship between
theory and practice and provides benefits to all concerned: student teachers, mentor
teachers and teacher educators (e.g. Allen et al. 2013 ), others claim that collabo-
rative relationships between schools and universities are weak and ineffective
(Zeichner 2010 ). A number of studies have identified difficulties associated with
developing and maintaining strong school-university partnerships. For example,
Bloomfield ( 2009 ) points to the time and resource pressures experienced by both
school and university staff while Allen ( 2011 ) notes that typically there is very
limited communication between providers and schools which can increase the
disconnect student teachers face between the practicum and on-campus components
of their programme. Allen argued that such limited communication can result in
lack of clarity regarding the roles and responsibilities of university and school staff
in terms of supporting student teachers on practicum.
There has also been criticism of the power relationships involved in
school-university partnerships. According to McIntyre ( 2009 ) much of the research
suggests that the principles of collaboration, equity and respect that often frame
such partnerships are often more visible in rhetoric rather than in reality. McIntyre
contended that in most cases university knowledge is privileged over practising
teacher expertise, and that the emphasis is on ensuring that student teacher practice
is aligned with what is taught on campus rather than offering anything funda-
mentally innovative in school-university partnerships.
To address such power imbalances, some scholars have argued for a transfor-
mative change in school-university relationships. Zeichner ( 2010 ), for example,
believed that practicum roles, relationships and sites needed to be radically
rethought. He asserted that schools, not classrooms, should be the sites for pro-
fessional learning and that university and school staff should be co-learners, along
with the student teachers, in the practicum partnership. According to Ziechner, a
non-hierarchical interplay between academic, practitioner and community expertise
would create expanded learning opportunities for prospective teachers that would
better prepare them to be successful in enacting complex teaching practices.
Bringing practitioner and academic knowledge together has the potential to create,
“a transformative space where the potential for an expanded form of learning and
the development of new knowledge are heightened”(Gutiérrez 2008 , p. 152). Such
views are in stark contrast to the way practicum has traditionally been structured,
that is, around hierarchical relationships between university staff, school
224 B. Cooper and L. Grudnoff