ABSTRACT
In many important respects, initial teacher education has, of course, always been school-based; students have learned to teach in classrooms with pupils and they have been supported in doing so, albeit frequently informally, by teachers in placement schools (Alexander 1984; Bell 1981; Gardner 1993). In this sense, the use of the term ‘school-based teacher education’ to describe the enhancement of the roles of teachers and schools in initial or pre-service teacher education is a misnomer, which tends to focus excessively on the proportions of time spent by students in classrooms, or school, rather than on the reconceptualisation and clarification of roles in initial teacher education which lies at the heart of current models of competency-based or schoolfocused teacher education (Booth 1993; Zeichner 1990). There is, in consequence, no clear consensus about the nature of school-based teacher education, and recent research and knowledge on the nature of school-based teacher education would support a variety of models (McIntyre 1987; Furlong et al. 1988; Lawlor 1990). In some versions, ‘school-based’ teacher education is used in general terms to describe higher-education based models which make particular and extensive use of particular relationships with schools; in others it is used in an ideologically-driven way to describe models which exclude the participation of higher education (Lawlor 1990; O’Heare 1988); and in yet other versions, it is used to describe ‘school-led’ models of training which describe a market relationship between schools and higher education (Beardon et al. 1992). For this reason, many teacher educators eschew the phrase ‘school-based teacher education’, as lacking precision, clarity and utility, using instead concepts such as
‘internship’ (Oxford), or ‘partnership-based teacher education’ (East Anglia).
