Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education

This opening chapter is written by the book’s editors. They set out the historical, cultural, policy and research contexts for Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education: Narratives of learning, and present a rationale for the collection at a time when teacher education in Australia, as elsewhere, is attempting to deal with significant policy pressures. The chapter offers a definition of professional experience that underpins all of the chapters that follow, and proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for engaging with those chapters. Each of the editors contributes a short autobiographical narrative to convey some of their personal and academic backgrounds as teacher educators and to illustrate some of the powerful ways narrative can be used to represent and inquire into professional experience. The chapter concludes with brief summaries of all other 11 chapters of the collection.