Breaking from Experience in Teacher Education: When is it necessary? How is it possible?

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Abstract
The idea that breaks from experience are necessary and salutary in teacher education is a response to an enduring problem of teacher education: the fact that aspiring teachers come to their preparation with set ideas about teaching, learning and schooling that fit with the larger ideal and institutional order into which they were born. Typically, the pedagogy and school learning in which aspiring teachers are well versed is not the sort that teacher educators want them to promote, and novices’ understanding of children is limited, based on their own experiences and habitual interpretations. This paper examines the justifications for breaking with experience that centre on, first, the limitations of what teachers learn about their work through their experience of schooling and, second, on comparisons of teacher‐learning with socialisation processes in other professions. Becoming a doctor, nurse or lawyer appears to involve belief reversals and emotionally charged transformations that separate professional knowledge from common sense and pre‐professional learning. In assessing the call for breaks with experience in teacher education, problems of principle and practice are, however, entangled with one another. On the one hand, comparisons of teaching with other professions ignore the extent to which teaching is a general human activity, and thus close to common sense. On the other hand, not all that is learned through experience is without value, and neither are replacements for the lessons of experience necessarily available or, for that matter, teachable, given the limited time and resources for educating teachers.

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