ABSTRACT
This chapter presents teacher education within the broader terrain of education for the professions, asking what insights might be gleaned from studies of professional education in other fields. The central argument is that contemporary studies of professional education present a compelling basis for judging preparation for practice to be a worthy object of both pedagogical and scholarly attention. The framework introduced by Grossman et al for the description and analysis of teaching in programmes of professional education has stimulated various efforts to apply and extend it in the context of teacher education. First, the affordances and limitations of cross-field comparisons depend in important ways on the nature of the professional work to be done. Second, cross-field studies useful to the extent that they illuminate and investigate the structures, pedagogies, and experiences of professional education. The cross-field studies should be examined for what they signal regarding the social and institutional place, configuration, and evolution of the respective professional fields.
