Australian school–university partnerships: the (dis)integrated work of teacher educators

The Australian government now mandates initial teacher education (ITE) providers to form partnerships with schools in order to maintain accreditation. The emphasis on partnerships as the crucial means of improving ITE is not new, and a body of literature from the Australian context describes a vast number of partnerships that have been enacted over the past few decades. In this literature, however, the specific work arrangements and practices of teacher educators are generally overlooked. And yet, it is the work of teacher educators that is critical in initiating and sustaining these partnerships. This paper seeks to address this disparity by employing the theoretical framework of practice architecture to consider the role of the teacher educator in partnership work. We have found that the ways in which the work of teacher educators is constrained in cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political domains significantly impact the possibility of “enduring” partnerships with schools.