Redefining Boundaries in Initial Teacher Education: Creating a Collective Vision and Approach to Preparing High-Quality Graduate Teachers

Professional experience represents a critical intersection between the academic programme and practice contexts as key elements within initial teacher education. It allows preservice teachers to engage in the roles and responsibilities of teaching while significantly enhancing their perspectives, knowledge and practices. These experiences represent sites of critical boundary crossings, where stakeholders associated with initial teacher education often pursue disparate priorities, perspectives and practices. Because of this, effective boundary crossings are critical to this work, but are also inherently challenging. This chapter reports on the redefining of boundaries between one university and its stakeholders for the purpose of developing a collective vision and common objectives. The introduction of a teaching performance assessment within Australian initial teacher education provided the impetus for reform. In response, a strategic, relational approach was developed to redefine how stakeholders reimagined shared practices. Importantly, this approach was strengthened through membership to what was referred to as the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) Collective. The consequences of this included enhanced relationships, informed perspectives, new and shared language and practices and more regular and productive boundary crossings for those associated with this work.