Session Information
10 SES 12 A, ‘Pedagogies of Preparation’: Teacher Educators’ and Mentors’ Perspectives on Teaching for and in the Practicum
Symposium
Contribution
In keeping with international trends, the existing university-led model of pre-service teacher education in Australia has come under increased political gaze. Over the past decade, there have been calls for more alternative pathways, more emphasis on practice and more time in schools with greater attention placed on the role of the supervisor/mentor in order to improve pre-service provision. Most recently, the Australian government initiated a review into initial teacher education releasing the report titled, Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers (2014) noting “better partnerships between universities and schools are needed to deliver high quality practical experience” and requiring “highly-skilled supervising teachers’ (p.7). It is within this policy context that a two year case study (2015-2017) of a particular school-university partnership project commenced. Funded by the Victorian Department of Education and Training, the Monash University – Casey region, Teaching Academy of Professional Practice (TAPP) was established to investigate new pedagogies of preparation and supervisory or mentoring models of professional learning. A key inquiry has focused on the professional learning of mentors as they become more informed by initial teacher education research and work alongside university based teacher educators. The qualitative study uses a case study approach, drawing from interview data collected from principals, mentor teachers, teacher educators and pre-service teachers across the nine partnership schools (6 Primary and 3 Secondary). All schools have created a number of context-specific, partnership artefacts designed to best support pre-service teachers to cross the school-university boundaries more seamlessly. These artefacts are interrogated and compared across sites, to better understand emerging pedagogical preparation approaches aimed to link theory and practice. Discourse analysis of transcripts suggests an emerging partnership continuum with some schools remaining relatively fixed within traditional models and pedagogies while at the other end, schools forging new research-informed preparation pedagogical approaches. For these schools, mentor teachers have emerged as a key driving professional group, becoming more akin to ‘second order practitioners’ (Murray, 2002) through their active exploration and enactment of a range of pedagogical approaches offered as part of the TAPP project. Early findings indicate that as teachers become more aware of and engaged in teacher education research their ability to make explicit their practice to pre-service teachers’ increases. Teachers also described greater understanding of and participation in, the creation of a developmental learning approach for pre-service teachers in alignment with university based curriculum studies.
References
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