through their placement. Second, perceptions as to that which constituted the
placement experience among schools and academics were hampered by narrow and
prescriptive views based on‘how things had always been’. This included, for
example, perceptions that a student placement could be a burden for the supervising
school teacher, that a student of teaching should be placed with one teacher, and
that it was classroom experience alone that constituted a legitimate placement
experience. Just as Billett ( 2009 ) noted, there was a pressing need to re-imagine the
purpose of professional experience and its function:
...there are important and urgent issues associated with understanding, identifying and
utilising the educational worth of authentic experiences, and proposing how the integration
of these experiences might best proceed within university courses. (Billett 2009 , p. 828)Re-imaging professional experience led to serious questioning of: (i) the purpose of
professional experience; (ii) the choice of‘provider’with whom a‘placement’was
secured; and, (iii) the need to build reciprocal partnerships between academic and
placement partner interests based on shared expectations about the nature of the
learning experience for students of teaching. It was this approach that influenced the
strategic direction for teacher education programmes in the Faculty by placing
professional experience at the centre of the enterprise. Professional experience came
to be understood not as the aspect that was solely about a placement or practicum,
professional experience was about the integrated learning‘horizontally and verti-
cally throughout the program’(Smith et al. 2014 ,p.6)—which included extending
beyond the placement component as it purposely permeated the academic com-
ponents as well.
The repositioning of professional experience was driven by a need to broaden
understandings of that which constituted professional experience in teacher edu-
cation programmes. Its purpose was framed as building the professional readiness
of students of teaching but also to provide experiences which would allow them to
exceed a state of readiness and launch them towards their future participation as
educational professionals.
Overall, the purposes driving the repositioning of professional experience to the
centre of teacher education was in order to better prepare them to develop as
multidimensional educational professionals who could demonstrate their knowl-
edge, skills and ability in ways that highlighted their employability through artic-
ulation and demonstration of:
- professional practice and the standards which informed it;
- integration of theory and practice;
- valuing of lifelong learning;
- informed decision-making;
- collaborative approaches to work; and,
- commencement-readiness (Smith et al. 2014 , p. 6).
716 A. Clemans et al.