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This university mentor recognises that a strong relationship between the two
activity systems can help to ameliorate the inevitable challenges that occur on pro-
fessional experience.
The university mentor is in a strong position to act as a boundary broker for the
supervising teachers in the school as well. This can occur outside the realm of the
professional experience according to one mentor:
It should be an ongoing dynamic relationship that can be helped and nurtured by people like
me who are in the school on a frequent basis.
One of the ways that this mentor nurtured the relationship was through ad hoc
and formally organised professional learning sessions with supervising teachers:
I’ve done staff meetings or I’ve sat with teachers and helped with their planning and
programming.
In this way, the university mentor can act as a boundary broker for both preser-
vice and supervising teachers as they build a learning community that spans the two
activity systems of the school and university. Most of the university mentors were
professional learning advisors for schools. Some of them conducted a number of
professional learning workshops on teaching methods with schools. They were bro-
kers in the sense that they created a connection across the school and university
community. This assisted the teachers in the partnership schools to become familiar
with the teaching methods taught at university.
The establishment of a community of learners facilitated by the university men-
tor that can bridge the activity systems of the school and university is of great assis-
tance to preservice teachers completing their first professional experience. A
university mentor describes this community of practice in an interview:
I think that’s important and it comes back to what I was saying before about teaching being
more than a class and a teacher, it’s about a community and I think our professional experi-
ence is that too. The relationships [that] mentors build up between teachers and schools can
support the [preservice] student too.
A preservice teacher was also able to recognise the support provided by this
community of learners:
Well the school’s been very supportive, which is good. We’re student teachers but they treat
us like we’re teachers and it’s a quite good professional relationship ...
An expression of this support was the willingness of other teachers in the school
to participate in the learning of the preservice teachers; or in the words of one of the
preservice teachers:
... the cooperation of other teachers who aren’t the cooperating [supervising] teachers but
are quite happy for you to sit in their classroom and see how they teach.
This learning community is different from a traditional master-apprentice model
where the preservice teacher may only have access to the support of their supervis-
ing teacher.
In summary, the university mentors played a critical role as brokers who assisted
the learning of the supervising teachers and preservice teachers. Through the
T. Loughland and H.T.M. Nguyen