THRESHOLD CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES IN TEACHER EDUCATION: PROFESSIONAL, EDUCATOR AND STUDENT PERSPECTIVES

The metaphor of a programme of professional education as a portal or threshold to a profession is a very apt and powerful one. Professional education programmes are both the gatekeepers of a profession and its door stewards facilitating entry and initiation. The concepts and practices, or ways of thinking and acting, of a profession provide the structure and path for the passageway from novice to initiate within the profession. This paper explores the path to initiation in the teaching profession from the perspective of three actors in this process, the student teacher, the teacher educator and the in-career teacher. Through analysis of interviews with the three groups, the aim is to explore the troublesome and transformative nature of the integration process which is at the heart of student teachers’ developing identity as teachers. Our findings would suggest that it is the development of a student teacher's identity as a professional which is of prime importance in negotiating the liminal space of the novice teacher, rather than solely the cumulative acquisition of concrete technical and organisational skills associated with effective classroom teaching.