Initial teacher education partnership: bureaucracy, policy, and professional agency

Initial Teacher Education (ITE) partnership as an example of 'educational nexus' often signals particular responses to normative questioning. Set within the 'theory-practice' nexus, partnership is positioned as the interleaving of various pedagogic/didactic D/discourses (Gee, 2012) to realise systemic development. Since the publication of Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson, 2010) Scottish ITE has spent considerable time developing supportive local authority/HEI/school partnership arrangements. Problematically, inter-group practice has been privileged over shared theoretical debate. This chapter proposes a 'spatial heuristic' centring on the epistemological matters of 'identifying', 'knowing' and 'doing' teaching. It proposes agency '…in which the agent is clearly decentred, an approach in which the achievement of agency is not an achievement of the agent alone but of the agent-in-interaction-with-others' (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 24) as a key part of professional development and that partnership, subsequently should be reconceptualised as 'existing' in the overlaps 'between' theory and practice.