Co-teaching as praxis in English initial teacher education

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 awide 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.