Educating Future Teachers Innovative Perspectives in Professional Experience

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Foreword

‘Practice’ and ‘Practise’: Tricky Concepts

Reflection on the words ‘practice’ and ‘practise’ immediately surfaces a number of
queries and issues. Are we concerned with practice – the noun, this practice or that
practice? Or, perhaps, practise the verb – to practise? Or practice as an adjective,
practice-teaching (but never practice-learning)? Educating Future Teachers:
Innovative Perspectives in Professional Experience is all about practice and prac-
tise: the practice of educating preservice teachers in all of its guises; practising
becoming a teacher with all of its challenges; and engagement in programs and
activities that bring the theory of teaching and learning into the classroom and what
it is that teachers and those who support them do in apprenticing those intending to
become teachers.
Bill Green (2009) in his introduction to Understanding and Researching
Professional Practice argues the case for more careful work to be undertaken with
regard to the agreements and solidarities that need to be framed, the new under-
standings that are to be negotiated and articulated and the challenges that confront
us in scholarly inquiry. He focuses, in particular, on professional practice ‘that is at
the heart of all these concerns and questions, and yet this is something that is argu-
ably still in need of clarification and elaboration, as is indeed the concept of practice
itself’ (p. 1), a challenge that is met by this important book.
Practice is theorised by Nicolini (2013) as embodying social transactions, activ-
ity, performance, work and relationships, and importantly he points to issues in
relation to power, conflict and politics. All of these and more are covered in the four
sections of the book: ‘Partnership Arrangements and New Learning Spaces’;
‘Guiding, Supporting and Mentoring’; ‘Enabling Dialogues’; and ‘Reframing
Professional Practice’.
Contributors are cognisant of the importance of context that governs the norms
and regulations of the various sites within which professional practice in initial
teacher education occurs. If we turn for a moment to the concept of ‘practice archi-
tecture’ as proposed by Kemmis et al. (2014), it is possible to unravel the various