Australian Journal of Teacher Education
Article Title
Working the Third Space: Reformulating Practice in the Transition from Classroom Teacher to Teacher Educator
Abstract
The working lives and identities of teacher educators remain an under-researched aspect of teacher education. This paper reports on a collaborative narrative inquiry by three early career teacher educators as they made the transition from classroom practice in schools, to teacher education in a university setting. The authors confronted technical understandings, or ‘official stories’ (Zukas & Malcolm, 2019) of what it means to prepare prospective teachers, derived from contemporary standards-based policies about teacher professionalism. The paper proposes the concept of ‘working the third space’ as a way of framing teacher educators’ efforts to draw upon classroom teaching experience while challenging reductive understandings of teachers’ work. We argue that understanding teacher education as a ‘third space’ practice speaks back to narrow discourses of teacher education that frames it as the unproblematic transfer of practice from experienced to novice practitioner.
Recommended Citation
Diamond, F., Wescott, S., & Molloy, K. (2021). Working the Third Space: Reformulating Practice in the Transition from Classroom Teacher to Teacher Educator. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 46(1). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.202v46n1.3