Introduction: The purpose of this book

The purpose of this book is to engage the people who do the hard, sometimes unglamorous, but always interesting work of critical reflection about professional experience in teacher education. The authors are all university- and school-based teacher educators who rarely get the time to critically reflect on their work with colleagues, let alone write a chapter for an international audience. As higher-education institutions worldwide establish and focus on work-integrated learning (WIL), the editors thought it timely to draw attention to the predecessors of WIL—the work, and workers, of teacher education in the liminal zone of school-based professional experience. We wanted to move past the tired cliché of the theory–practice divide to examine the nature of this important work. In so doing, we wanted to give a voice to the workers in teacher education who make hope possible in what are often challenging circumstances for our pre-service teachers. rather than allowing despair to be convincing (apologies to Raymond Williams).