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Introduction to the Guest-Edited Issue

We believe few events in future teachers’ education are more important than their early field experiences, a belief supported by numerous professional associations’ and policymakers’ calls for the integration of enhanced clinical experiences into teacher preparation programs (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2012; Association of Teacher Educators, 2016; Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation [CAEP], 2013). Clinical and practicum experiences are so foundational to preservice teachers’ learning because these are where prospective educators typically engage with PreK–12 students for the first time, from the perspectives of their future roles as classroom teachers. It is also in these field experiences that teacher candidates first have the opportunity to apply and refine the ideas and strategies—the pedagogies and possibilities—they have learned in their university classes. This guest-edited issue represents an effort to describe an important innovation in teacher preparation, one that responds to current professional association, practitioner, and policymaker calls for enhanced clinical experiences for future teachers. Critical, project-based (CPB) experiences are clinical experiences that are intentionally designed to create partnerships among university faculty, veteran teachers, teacher candidates, and K–12 students. These clinical field experiences are collaborative, short-term, and explicitly rooted in notions of social justice. Although CPB experiences are implemented to meet the goals of the constituents involved and therefore vary depending on context, these field experiences are guided by the following tenets: