This paper discusses the role of imagination, experience, and narrative recounting of practical events in the education of novice teachers. The narrative study of experience connects autobiography to action and intentional future; it connects these to social history and direction; and it links the pluralistic extremes of formalism to the concreteness of specific actions. This discussion rethinks curriculum and teaching in terms of a narrative inquiry which draws on classroom observation and participant observation of the practical, along with the bringing forward of personal experience in the form of stories, interviews, rules, principles, images, and metaphors. The focus of the paper is on how a narratively understood curriculum for teacher education meshes with a curriculum for the teacher's students. It is pointed out that practical knowledge is learned through apprenticeship to a master and this form of learning has some advantages over "book" learning. It is in the laboratory, combined with the best of apprenticeship, that practice is learned as a whole and experientially. To illustrate this point, a case study is presented of the experiences of an intern teacher and her cooperating teacher. The implications for teacher education programs are discussed. (JD)