48.5 The Approach
The approach taken to enacting this shift in the nature and positioning of profes-
sional experience at the centre of teacher education was through the notion of
reciprocal partnership. In so doing, the intention was to transcend the view that
higher education and school relationships commonly reinforced the essence of the
theory-practice divide, or arguments through which such conceptions competed for
legitimacy and dominance. The approach developed was therefore based on a view
that“both practice and academic settings provide[d] particular kinds of experiences
and potential contributions to students’learning...[and that] Each of these settings
affords particular potentials for the learning of occupational practice”(Billett 2009 ,
p. 835).
Both academic and workplace spaces need to be valued for the opportunities
they present for students to learn to develop knowledge and practice of teaching in
different but complementary ways. Genuine reciprocal partnerships between uni-
versities and schools matters in order to make clear that knowledge and practice of
teaching needs to be critiqued and developed within and across contexts. Doing so
is demanding but was conceptualized as being manifest on three fronts:
- Developing graduate excellence
For Australian universities to effectively engage with the graduate employability agenda...
it will involve partnerships between faculties, careers services and employers to develop
and implement programs addressing the issue of career management competence, including
career building and self-management skills. Universities must remove the division between
themselves and the demands of the world of work in order to enable graduates to adapt to
the turbulent years to come. (Bridgstock 2009 , p. 40)Placing professional experience at the heart of teacher education carries an intention
that the development of knowledge and practice of teaching should frame learning
as career-building. As recent literature makes clear, employability is increasingly a
key measure of the impact of teacher education, hence professional experience must
explicitly foster a clear focus on what that means and how it might be enacted. With
that intention in mind, the need for professional experience to be understood as
supporting the purposeful development of knowledge and practice of teaching in
ways that might better prepare students of teaching for diverse workplace envi-
ronments became a priority (rather than simply experiencing different placement
settings).
- Developing teaching and curriculum excellence
Within the curriculum and pedagogic practices of contemporary higher education it is,
therefore, important to advance approaches that can support the effective integration of
practice-based experiences. A helpful starting point is to acknowledge that both kinds of
settings make particular contributions to students’learning. (Billett 2009 , p. 838)48 University Coursework and School Experience: The Challenge... 717