INTRODUCTION

Among the disciplinary challenges of L2 teacher education programs at the undergraduate and graduate level, few seem more difficult to meet than the systematic integration of school-based experience. Although it has received continued attention since the 1990s, and although it is claimed to be an integral part of many programs, current practice often lacks consistent and convincing models; school-based experience not only appears to be incompatible with academic curricula, but also seems difficult to implement in view of institutional constraints and cross-institutional incompatibility. The notion of the importance of school-based experience is grounded in a growing awareness that although the core components of traditional teacher education programs (such as literary and cultural studies, applied linguistics, research in second language acquisition, and teaching methodology) contribute to the knowledge base for teaching, they must not be confused with the activity of language teaching itself (Freeman 1989; Freeman and Johnson 1989). As a consequence, any academic subject matter in applied linguistics and language learning pedagogy has to be understood “against the backdrop of teachers’ professional lives, within the settings where they work, and under the circumstances of that work” (Freeman and Johnson 1989: 405). This is why school-based experience must be an integral part of teacher education.

In this chapter, referring to relevant research, we will briefly discuss the rationale behind this assumption and elaborate on three design principles for teacher education, which have emerged from a continuous critique of established practice. An illustration of different ways of integrating school-based experiences into teacher education programs will conclude the chapter.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

RATIONALE FOR INTEGRATING SCHOOL-BASED EXPERIENCE

FOCUS ON THE PERSON WHO TEACHES

Various learning-to-teach studies have demonstrated that student-teachers begin their education with images of teaching that they have acquired during their own (language) learning experience as students (Appel 2000; Kagan 1992; Johnson 1994; Kennedy and Kennedy 1996; Kennedy 1998). Lortie (1975) has termed this process “the apprenticeship of observation.” This apprenticeship shapes both student-teachers’ views on what they consider to be appropriate teaching and their disposition to act in the classroom (see Farrell, Chapter 18) with no regard to whatever they may have learned from studying the relevant disciplinary knowledge.