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Co-teaching as Praxis in English Initial Teacher Education

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Re-imagining Professional Experience in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

Policymakers harbour increasing doubts about the value of university coursework in initial teacher education (ITE), but they affirm the importance of professional experience. In their continuing efforts to improve the quality of ITE, and to justify their existence as government-funded teacher education ‘providers’, Australian universities are developing a wide range of innovative partnership arrangements with schools. This chapter reports on one such partnership where an experienced teacher of secondary school English (Fleur) was seconded to work one day a week as a co-teacher and co-researcher with a team of English teacher educators (Graham and Scott) in a large faculty of education. Using reflexive autobiographical narratives, and Cavarero’s (2000) conception of ‘who’ and ‘what’ stories, we investigate the praxis dimensions of the experience largely from Fleur’s perspective. We show how co-teaching in ITE can promote alternative understandings of ‘professional experience’. It can also provide important spaces for critical inquiry into the meanings of practice in English teacher education and what it means to ‘become’ an English teacher.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We’re thinking here of programs such as: ‘Teach for America’ in the US (Teach for America, 2017); and ‘School Direct’ (Department for Education, 2017) and ‘Now Teach’ (Now Teach, 2017) in the UK. For a fuller overview of school-led professional experience programs across the world, see Ellis and Orchard (2014).

  2. 2.

    We note a steady increase in research that critiques such programs and warns about the implications for the quality of teacher education and the teaching workforce in these countries. See for example, Ellis and Orchard (2014) for an international perspective, Brown et al. (2016) and Pitzer (2014) in the US, Brewer and deMarrais (2015) in the UK, and Cobbold (2017) in Australia.

  3. 3.

    ‘Monash University … is a large, multi-campus, research intensive university. Its Faculty of Education teaches over 5000 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate teaching or education courses. …. While co-teaching at Monash, Fleur continued to teach part-time in her school, a large, independent girls’ secondary college in Melbourne, which we will call Urban Girls’ College’ (Diamond, et al., 2017, p. 272).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the English Education Praxis group and to the editors for their feedback on drafts of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Graham Parr, Fleur Diamond & Scott Bulfin

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  1. Graham Parr
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  2. Fleur Diamond
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Correspondence to Graham Parr .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood, University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, Queensland, Australia

    Ange Fitzgerald

  2. Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Graham Parr

  3. Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Judy Williams

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Parr, G., Diamond, F., Bulfin, S. (2018). Co-teaching as Praxis in English Initial Teacher Education. In: Fitzgerald, A., Parr, G., Williams, J. (eds) Re-imagining Professional Experience in Initial Teacher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0815-4_10

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