Why ‘clinical teaching’? An interdisciplinary analysis of metaphor in initial teacher preparation

The term ‘clinical’ is increasingly used to define the kind of teaching initial teacher education will produce. While affordances of this metaphor have been claimed, it has been less widely critiqued. As a teacher and a medical doctor, we bring our interdisciplinary understandings of curriculum studies and medicine to this analysis, to theorise what this discursive construct puts to work for education. In considering how ‘clinical teaching’ is used across the literatures of education and medicine, we find that claims made in relation to these affordances, such as novelty, and detachment from medical entailments, are flawed, and that instead, the word ‘clinical’ does political work as a hierarchical, gendered, normalising and de-professionalising force.