It's a Horror Movie Right There on My Computer Screen: The Beautiful Risk of Work-Integrated Learning

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has focussed the attention of teacher educators on the real and immediate risks of their work-integrated learning (WIL) programs. Many WIL experiences were postponed due to the pandemic, and the ongoing oper-ation of this fundamental branch of initial teacher education has been subject to a stomach-churning uncertainty for all stakeholders involved. Biesta (2015a, 2015b) portrays the beautiful risk of education as the inherent and necessary uncertainty about its outcomes. Biesta's affirmative advocacy of uncertainty is succour to experi-enced professional experience coordinators who have learned to embrace the inherent risk of WIL as an opportunity rather than a challenge. In this chapter, two of these hardened coordinators represent their COVID-19 WIL experience in the style of an At the Movies review in this chapter before they argue in the discussion that they survived only when they learned to view the inherent risk of professional experience as a thriller instead of a horror movie. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023, corrected publication 2023.