The Role of Adaptive Expertise in Sustaining School-University Partnerships in Increasingly Complex Times

Adaptive expertise is integral to the role teacher educators play in harnessing, framing, and extending work undertaken in school-university partnerships. Adaptive expertise encompasses the ability to be responsive to changing circumstances and to reflect on and expand knowledge in flexible and innovative ways (Bransford et al. in Darling-Hammond and Bransford (eds), Preparing teachers for a changing world. Jossey-Bass, 2005). Adaptive experts balance routine and adaptive approaches so that innovation and efficiency enable problem solving (Wetzel et al. in Reflective Practice 16:546–558, 2015). The authors of this chapter are teacher educators in an Australian regional university who work within a Master of Teaching (Secondary) course that has sustained unique partnership initiatives with a cluster of regional and rural schools for 17 years. Embedded partnerships have enabled core university units to be taught on-site in schools (McGraw et al. in Nuttall et al. (eds), Teacher education policy and practice: evidence of impact, impact of evidence. Springer, 2017); a focus on dispositions associated with resilience (McGraw and McDonough in The Australian Educational Researcher 46:589–605, 2019); and classroom intensives that involve pre-service teachers closely observing and interrogating classroom interactions (McGraw et al. in Brandenburg et al. (eds), Teacher education: innovations, interventions and impact. Springer, 2016). In this chapter the authors use narrative inquiry to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and workforce shortages in schools on school-university partnership initiatives. They aim to illustrate the complexity of contemporary partnership work and to reflect upon the personal demands of being responsive to change.