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effects or they may diminish opportunities for reflection if the tasks are not well-
designed (Greenblatt & O’Hara, 2015 ). What form the Australian TPA tool will
take, and what impact this will have on program and graduate quality, remains to be
seen. No doubt this will generate a new level of interest and scrutiny within the
professional experience component of initial teacher education. How this knowl-
edge and practice can be demonstrated, evidenced and assessed within initial teacher
education programs, particularly in terms of impact on student learning, raises the
important question of how best to make consistent judgements or assessments of
what graduate teachers know and can do to demonstrate classroom readiness
(Buchanan & Schuck, 2016 ; Mayer, 2015 ). This volume provides evidence that
many teacher educators and initial teacher education providers are well positioned
to generate new programs and in what we see “as a natural evolution....[where]
those responsible for professional learning are creating their own arrangements to
meet the needs or constraints of their context” (Rorrison, Hennissen, Bonanno &
Männikkö Barbutiu, 2016 , p. 125).
Conclusion
This volume extends the growing literature in this area by offering insights into
professional experience and by providing a point of departure for constructing alter-
native conceptions. Along with perspectives offered by scholars from a range of
institutions, these approaches provide opportunities to explore the value of integrat-
ing field-based learning and academic-based learning. The findings in Educating
Future Teachers provide teacher educators and policymakers with insights of what
is possible in the context of a strongly regulated, accountability-driven teacher edu-
cation landscape. We conclude with a call to reimagine ‘the prac’ and to challenge
university-based teacher educators and school-based teacher educators to work
together to strategically create a system to ensure that all preservice teachers receive
quality opportunities to learn in and through their placements in the field, interlaced
with their coursework studies. We see a greater need for people who work across
sites. We also see a greater need for codesigned curriculum and joint assessment and
a shift away from mindsets such as ‘us and them’ and ‘here and there’.
Together we have engaged critically in reconsidering what might be stronger or
more productive ways of thinking about professional experience. We have sought to
provide a flexible and supportive space for scholarship. We have achieved this by
working collectively and collaboratively with a range of teacher educators open to
new ways of preparing prospective teachers and who were optimistically innovating
in their research. Our focus shifted from considering aspects of professional experi-
ence as a stand-alone component of teacher education to considering, in their local
contexts, the joint work between schools and universities and between teacher edu-
cators and teachers (Ure, 2010 ; Zeichner, 2010 ).
Joint work matters. By enacting this in professional experience, and in teacher
education more widely, we prepare future teachers who understand that they have
A. Ambrosetti et al.