Exploring What It Means to Be a Professional in Partnerships: Reflecting on Teacher Educator Narratives

Abstract

School–university partnerships are complex and multivarious. Teacher educators working on the ground in this space traverse multiple settings and negotiate discourses in their attempt to meet the needs of all stakeholders spread across these settings. They are the implementers of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) recommendations around partnerships, as they deal with the reality of trying to meet the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) accreditation requirements around partnerships. Teacher educators negotiate university structures, school systems and often government and other organisational expectations of partnership outcomes. Through all of this, they also operationalise and often manage the partnership models around preservice teacher engagement with schools. This chapter utilises recently published material on partnership models (Chittleborough and Jones in School-based partnerships in teacher education: A research informed model for universities, schools and beyond. Springer Nature, Singapore, pp. 61–82, 2018; Hobbs et al. in STEPS interpretative framework. Science Teacher Education Program, 2015) to frame narrative reflections from teacher educators in the school–university space. Through narrative methodology, the stories of these teacher educators reflect the complex space they negotiate and broker, and their struggles to have their role valued, recognised and resourced. The commonality of professional relationships being developed between partnership participants, and their critical importance, was clearly reflected in each of the author’s individual narrative writing.