Through narrative analysis, we find the process of blogging noteworthy in lending itself to pre-service teachers' professional learning in at least two significant ways. Firstly, blogging can open the potential for collaboration through the discursive space that exists for student teachers as they negotiate the demands placed upon them from school-based and University-based elements of their course. Secondly, blogging appears compatible with a narrative conception of professional learning in which pre-service teachers work collaboratively towards improved synthesis and understanding of their past and present pedagogical experiences, conceptions and beliefs, personalising their passage into the profession

This paper brings together two studies which examine the nature of professionalism in education by focusing on the perspectives of two under-researched groups namely ‘teaching assistants’(TAs) and teacher educators (TEs) working ‘either side’ of the school teacher . The projects were conducted in, and framed by, the UK policy context of public sector modernization and austerity and drew upon different approaches including auto-ethnography, life history and discourse analysis. The authors examine the formation and representation of professional identity in education through TAs’ and TEs’ discourses of ‘professionalism’ in education. Three themes in the accounts are discussed; TA to teacher and teacher to TE as ‘non-standard’ professional progressions, role ambiguity, and the role of classroom experience and HE learning in the professional identities of TAs and TEs. We comment on the importance of capturing alternatives to the discourse of imposed policy, emergent in practitioners’ voices, and reflect upon the ways in which these voices contribute to the wider international debate on professionalism in education

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