Teacher education as lived experience -an inquiry into complexity This paper builds on the assumption of teacher education as a complex phenomenon. My point of departure is the meaning of teacher education as it emerges in student teachers' and teachers' descriptions of lived experience. As a result, complexity takes shape in three in-betweens: between actor and institutional setting, between actor and task, and between actor and actor. In other words, the meaning of teacher education unfolds from different points of view depending on who you are (student teacher or teacher), where you are (in school or at the university) and who you relate to (student teacher or teacher). In the paper I argue that inquiries into teacher education as a complex phenomenon put into play prevailing, recurrent and shared meanings of teacher education. This means to risk gender neutral labels like teacher and student teacher. It also directs attention to an nterplay between reproduction and transformation, as well as opens for a point of view where a "traditional" teacher education is challenged by a possible teacher education. In this sense, complexity turns into a question of expressing uniqueness and difference, patterns and deviances and familiarity and strangeness.

To empirically inquire into lived experience a hermeneutical phenomenological perspective is developed. This means a phenomenological understanding of the life-world as an intentional, lived and social world, and a hermeneutical openness to put repeated and confirmed experience into play to open for new experience. The choice of participant observation and conversational interviewing as researchy methods made it necessary to develop a methodological strategy involving a flexible posittion as well as a wakeful position.

The results of the empirical study are presented in three in-betweens. Each of them focuses on a certain aspect of the live-world as it emerges from the research question posed. The themes of unifying, role-modelling and market orientation explore the meaning of teacher education as it comes forth between actor and institutional setting. Between actor and task, the meaning of teacher education takes shape in the lived situations of teachers and teacher students in school and on campus. When the meaning of the phenomenon teacher education unforlds between actor and actor, it is formed in the encounter with the other.