experience matters; such learning can be not be mandated or prescribed. Munby and
Russell ( 1994 ) captured the essence of this issue through the distinction between the
authority of position and the authority of experience.
The authority familiar to students entering teacher education is the authority they have been
subjected to, the authority that has told them what to do and what to believe. The authority
these same individuals expect to experience when they become teachers is the authority
they have seen their teachers wield. In this light, teacher education looks like a transition
from being under authority to being in authority. (Munby and Russell 1994 , p. 92)If teaching truly is a profession, and if expertise is encapsulated in an unstated but
observable knowledge-in-action (Schön 1983 ), then learning to teach carries
demands and challenges that must be recognized—not just in rhetoric but also in
reality. If learning to teach is about recognizing and responding to the dilemmas of
practice that emerge in experience, then embracing the uncertainty of practice and
beginning to conceptualize teaching as problematic lies at the heart of what it means
to develop knowledge-in practice. In order for teacher education to be a collabo-
rative and supportive enterprise, it must weave coursework and school experience
together in purposeful and connected ways.
Perhaps it is in coming to see teaching as a complex and sophisticated endeavour
(Loughran 2013 ) that Professional Experience can genuinely be placed at the centre
of teacher education programmes. In so doing, professional experience might act as
a catalyst for the generation of knowledge about practice and thus challenge notions
of a theory-practice divide. However, such a view is predicated on professional
experience being something very different from that of the more traditional,
long-standing approach to a school practicum; an approach that has perhaps been
more akin to an apprenticeship model of‘teacher training’, or socialization into
teaching which reinforces, rather than challenges, the status-quo.
As numerous reviews and reports consistently suggest teacher education changes
dramatically when professional experience is seen as the centre of learning about
teaching. Thus, locating professional experience at the centre of learning to teach is
a positive and productive way of developing quality in teacher education.
48.4 Putting Professional Experience at the Centre
Within the teacher education programme in which we are involved, crafting a
model to broaden out the positioning of professional experience arose as a con-
sequence of a set of adverse conditions. First, in the midst of a growing competitive
higher education landscape, a shortage of opportunities to secure professional
placements for students of teaching created an increasingly stressful and frustrating
situation. It meant that successful placements were secured on the basis of timing
rather than intention, that is, success lay with the university that got in earliest to
secure a placement. Under such conditions, there was little consideration of
intentionality about the learning experience envisaged for students of teaching
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