73Since the publication of the Kruger et al. review in 2009, there have been some
federal government initiatives to establish school-university partnerships under the
Smarter Schools National Partnerships project. Unfortunately they were not the
product of conjoint policy development, as state government departments of educa-
tion received the federal funding and shaped the agenda in their respective jurisdic-
tions. However, there was a requirement to engage with teacher education faculties.
One such example was a Partnership in Teaching Excellence (PiTE) centre of excel-
lence partnership program in the state of Tasmania.
The PiTE was established between the Tasmanian Department of Education and
the University of Tasmania. The goal of the project was to build a team and inquiry-
based orientation in graduates of a teacher education program. Master of Teaching
students were selected through a competitive application process and were placed in
low socio-economic schools (SES) for both their mandatory professional experi-
ences and spending two weeks at the beginning of the school year, a day a week
during semester one and two days a week in semester two. The factors that sustained
this effective partnership, according to the authors, were ‘coherence and alignment
between schools and the university’; ‘communication, logistics and systemic con-
siderations’; and ‘equity issues’ (Allen et al., 2013 , p. 99). Similar initiatives to
establish hub schools for school-university partnerships were implemented in New
South Wales (NSW) from 2015 onwards.
The school-university partnership innovation for professional experience exam-
ined in this chapter originated the year before the publication of the Kruger et al.
( 2009 ) report. The innovation did not evolve through any conjoint policy develop-
ment with government departments. It was more in the vein of ‘determined efforts
by key individuals’ as the directors of professional experience sought to enhance the
first professional experience of all undergraduate and graduate teacher education
students in a large faculty of education. In this chapter, we describe the changes
implemented in the professional experience and employ activity theory as an inno-
vative frame from which to explore the objects and brokers that assisted preservice
teachers to do the boundary crossing between school and university.
Theoretical Framework of the Project
Historically, the majority of the research on school-university partnerships in pro-
fessional experience has been exploratory and descriptive. The research has in the
main focussed on issues arising from implementation of discreet initiatives with-
out the application of explicit theoretical frameworks (Edwards et al., 2009 ). There
is an opportunity, therefore, for the application of theoretical frameworks to aid in
the understanding of the complexity of interactions that occur in the context of
school- university partnerships in professional experience. Activity theory is one
such framework that has been employed in a small number of studies of school-
university partnerships in a number of different contexts (Edwards & Mutton,
2007 ; Edwards & Protheroe, 2004 ; Roth & Tobin, 2002 ; Wilson, 2004 ). The data
5 Boundary Objects and Brokers in Professional Experience