In this article, the authors--university faculty members working across college and school contexts in the United States--detail how teacher educators might address two challenges facing the teacher education field: (a) the long-standing critique of traditional teacher preparation in the United States as an isolated, questionably relevant ivory tower endeavor and (b) the community and political concerns and tensions that teachers and students are facing outside of, and increasingly within, school. They speculate that university-based teacher educators might attend to both issues by considering these as elements of the documented existential challenges facing the teacher education field and responding to these concerns by appealing to third space notions, Teacher Prep 3.0, and current clinical practice innovations with classroom-level interventions. In this conceptual article, the authors describe the theoretical bases for this reframing and detail the elements of critical, projectbased (CPB) clinical experience structures. Although, over the past decade, a range of scholars have explored CPB experiences, the authors propose that this clinical experience model might uniquely answer these teacher education critiques and community and political concerns. They illustrate their CPB efforts and discuss the issues that support and impede the implementation of such structures and roles, reflecting on how these mechanisms offer preservice teachers, veteran classroom teachers, school-based teacher educators, and university-based teacher educators a model for collaboratively, authentically engaging with some of the civic discourse concerns facing our democracy across school, university, and community contexts.