ABSTRACT
In this opening chapter, the authors contend that teacher education scholars and practitioners might answer current critiques of traditional teacher preparation efforts by operating as hybrid teacher educators and working across university and school contexts to develop new models of clinical experiences for teacher candidates. The authors offer a vision for such fieldwork, introducing the notion and structure of “critical, project-based (CPB) clinical experiences,” defining and describing the elements of these experiences. Zenkov and Pytash illustrate how these structures offer new, boundary-spanning roles for all our schools’ constituents. Ultimately, such CPB structures might also bridge the historical disconnect between university-based courses and the clinical realities preservice teachers encounter, resulting in novice teachers who are better prepared for their new professional roles and in teacher preparation programs that honor veteran teachers as the school-based teacher educators they are.
