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School placement plays a critical and complex role in the professional development of student teachers. When universities and schools shut their doors and moved all teaching activities online in March 2020, initial teacher education (ITE) providers across Ireland had to implement emergency alternative practicum supports in order to ensure that students could complete their ITE programmes. Many initial teacher education providers across Ireland introduced professional online conversations as an alternative approach to professional practice supervision. It is easy to view this response to the COVID-19 crisis in purely deficit terms. For obvious reasons, no sensible teacher educator would advocate for abandoning school visits and replacing them with online professional conversations. Nonetheless, emergency measures arguably brought about affordances to the delivery of teacher education, which are deserving of consideration and may help to inform future practice. In this paper, we draw on our recent experience of ITE emergency practicum supervision to explore assumptions and tensions inherent in traditional teacher education practices. We reflect on how we enacted and experienced professional student–tutor conversations without the normally preceding classroom observations and interrogate normalised assumptions about the value and purpose of classroom observation. Our reflections are infused with ideas gleaned from philosophy and sociological theory and are underpinned by a theoretical formulation which we call “negative education”. “Negative education” refers to the learning that takes place as a consequence of deprivation. In these terms, we come to examine the negotiation of power and relationships in different learning environments. We explore the benefits of “zooming out”, to disseminate power, and show how this helps to engage with the broader aspects of teaching which are so easily overlooked by both tutors and students during “normal” school visits. Full article

Teacher education has been criticised for a lack of coherence and for not preparing student teachers for teaching. To prepare student teachers for practicum and create connections between theory and practice and between schools and university, this study explores how the practice field can be brought onto the university campus through digital resources. Four teacher educators in secondary school teacher education in Norway collaborated with a schoolteacher and tested Live Remote Classroom. The tool provides student teachers with real-life classroom experiences while they are on campus by providing access to a streamed lesson. Using an action research design, the teacher educators evaluated their facilitation of the arrangement through an interview with the involved schoolteacher, a focus group interview with student teachers and the teacher educators’ own logs. The results show that by presenting authentic practice situations, Live Remote Classroom created opportunities to prepare for teaching. However, certain conditions need to be in place for that to happen. We see it as important to support student teachers in their analysis of the observed lesson and to collaborate with a schoolteacher who is able to make her professional choices explicit. Full article

The teaching methodology in university marketing subjects has traditionally been based on “lecture classes”, which have proved to be insufficient for providing students with professional skills that can be directly applied in the workplace. This research aims to reduce this gap between the university and business by applying the active teaching methodology of work-integrated learning (WIL), which consists of providing students with knowledge and experiences directly from professionals that are invited to the classroom. We evaluated the effects of the WIL methodology on university students in a marketing degree course through self-administered questionnaires. During a semester, perceived personal, academic, and professional outcomes were assessed in two groups of students of the same module, one of which participated in the WIL program (i.e., they received lectures by professional marketing experts who were invited to the classroom and explained, through real examples, the content of the subject being taught), and the other served as a control (i.e., they learned the content only through traditional lectures from the college instructor). The results revealed that the students who took part in the WIL program experienced increased motivation, enjoyment, and interest in the subject. Furthermore, they had an increased understanding and acquisition of the concepts, as well as a greater perceived ability to manage companies and a comprehension of the economic environment. These findings constitute an advance because they identify the benefits of applying WIL in knowledge fields where the acquisition of professional skills is crucial for graduates’ entry into the labor market. Full article