Conceptualising communities of practice through embedded professional learning in pre-service teacher education

This chapter presents a conceptual framework developed around the notion of communities of practice in the context of pre-service teacher education. Specifically, it addresses the question: In what ways can the concept of communities of practice provide a framework for investigating the embedded professional learning of pre-service teachers? In this chapter, diverse yet interrelated communities of practice are identified: (1) a university community of students and lecturers; and (2) professional practice communities of supervising teacher mentors, other teachers and staff of individual schools. In this chapter distributed learning is used as a mechanism to support shared responsibility for learning among students, practitioner experts (i.e. supervising mentor teachers) and lecturers among these two communities of practice.