This article investigates a set of initiatives on teacher education taken by the Brazilian Federal Government from 2007 to 2013. The data is based on official documents published at the Official Gazette which are related, directly or indirectly, to an Institutional Bursary Program for Initial Teacher Education that enacts the concept of partnership within educational domain as a governance strategy on teacher education practices. By means of critical discourse studies, it is argued that, once the aforementioned Program represents how teacher education has to be, it reformulates a position-practice system, opening up, on one side, the possibility for hybridity or third spaces with transformational potential, and leading; on the other, to the formulation of artificial (dis)positions, which are neither foreseen nor objectified on the practices of most educational institutions involved and, as such, with regulatory potential. It is within these tensions that criticism takes place.
Critical Discourse Analysis; Position-practice system; Teacher education; Institutional Bursary Program for Initial Teacher Education