Search

Graduate teachers in Australia are expected to engage with their peers to expand their professional learning. Learning to use protocols--or structured professional conversations--provides pre-service teachers with opportunities to achieve this expectation. In this paper we explain how pre-service teachers during an extended practicum used protocols to participate in synchronous online discussions using the Blackboard Collaborate learning platform. The pre-service teachers were surveyed about aspects of the protocols and the platform on which the interactions occurred. Protocols appear to be well-suited to assisting synchronous discussions using Web 2 technologies as they ensure everyone has equal time to discuss, present and receive feedback about their work in respectful and efficient ways. This preliminary research provides opportunities for further investigation of pedagogical approaches to use with pre-service teachers when they are required to utilise online platforms when they are away from the university for extended periods of time. (Contains 2 tables.)

Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management--and each other--about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural "micro-physics" of power, the poststructuralist "politics of reinscription", and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack.

While educators in many parts of the world grapple with what creativity means in practice, discussions about creative pedagogy usually include the elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity and creative learning. This article stems from a research project that occurred at a Preparatory to Year 9 school in Australia where we worked with staff to explore their understandings of creativity and creative learning in the Arts. We found that while students' creative learning is a fundamental element in a creative pedagogy framework, the notion of creative learning of teachers is largely overlooked in discourses of teachers' professional learning. Given the important role teachers play in student learning, we argue that teachers need to be informed not only about how to teach creatively and for creativity, but also how to consider possibilities and understand things in new ways, thereby making a case that a teacher's own creative learning is crucial.

There is an inherent expectation that educators will work towards continuously improving their practice and quality of teaching. Underpinning this expectation is an assumption that educators also engage in the process of reflection. In this article, we begin by outlining the current tensions in the field of education that relate to managerialist concerns of the measurement and monitoring of quality teaching and effectiveness. We then contextualise our particular circumstances and provide an account of a collaborative action research project we initiated to examine our team-teaching practices in a graduate entry pre-service teacher education programme. In the project, we initially focused on how we might provide for pre-service teachers' learning while they were undertaking an internship in the final semester of their programme. Factors that required consideration included the use of face-to-face and synchronous online forms of interaction. Having experienced the powerful influence of using protocols to structure professional learning conversations with the pre-service teachers with whom we were working, we also decided to extend the conversations we were having with each other to conversations with our colleagues. Taken together, the action research framework and the processes afforded by protocols provided a structured approach for our inquiry. Conversing with the pre-service teachers involved in the programme, with each other and with our peers at a faculty-level seminar and an international conference were the main sources of data gathered during the research project. The collegial conversations that occurred when using protocols also provided a way to move to the level of critical reflection. Rather than discuss the outcomes of our project in the remainder of the article, we elected to scrutinise and theorise the significant elements that were germane to our project--the three Cs: collegiality, conversation and critical reflection. We conclude by realising that to learn about ourselves as teachers and as learners, we need to move beyond routine and technical aspects of reflection, to a level that is critical and transformative, and that this can be achieved through the use of protocols in purposeful and collaborative conversations with others.

Education at all levels is awash with the language of the need for partnerships, and this extends to universities although teacher educators in universities, by way of example, are seen as 'borderlanders' (Jasman, Payne, Grundy & Del Borrello, 1998) or 'living in ivory towers'. University educators are often considered to be apart from the communities in which they are physically situated and this perception sometimes creates tensions between them and other community practitioners. A one-day conference was organised by La Trobe University's Albury-Wodonga Campus in conjunction with Victoria's Cultural Development Network and a number of local government and educational agencies to provide a space for those involved - to not only hear how creative partnerships were already working in North-East Victoria (Australia), but also provide opportunities to develop new partnerships. The conference had a practical focus and enabled participants from a broad cross-section of agencies - schools; adult education; higher education; local government; and state-wide agencies - to learn about creative partnerships from across sectors. This negotiated arrangement between the University and the Cultural Development Network built on our established networks and knowledge of partnerships in the local community. Those attending were provided with current research and government policy relating to creative partnerships. Following this the participants became the experts and demonstrated how they had shaped communities and partnership arrangements within their respective contexts. In this paper we outline the role that we, as educators in a university setting, played to enable this event to occur; and a consideration of the types of creative partnerships discussed on the day. The major emphasis is on the potential that exists for university-community partnerships and we conclude with a reflection of how these types of arrangements have the potential to reposition our university's role in the local community beyond university-school partnerships, and how university educators might reduce the perception that they are either 'ivory towers' or 'borderlanders'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, Victoria's Department of Education and Early Childhood Development has encouraged educational institutions and systems to respond to the global movement of personalising learning in ways - both pedagogically and organisationally - that support the diverse personal aspirations of learners. An evaluation of the leadership structure of a large, regional independent school came at a time when the school was initiating some ideas in relation to personalising learning; ideas that also coincided with innovations that the school had already made with its middle years students. Focus group discussions took place to identify issues and a Web-based survey was utilised to explore the ideas further with all staff. Staff members highlighted the challenges and tensions arising from the seemingly constant introduction of innovations without any parallel processes to ensure organisational and curriculum coherency across the school. In this paper, the research design is described and the responses from staff are discussed as they relate to the concept of personalised learning. The focus of the paper is upon the organisational and curriculum issues confronting the school's leadership in order for the school to become the vibrant learning community to which it aspires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Personalised learning' as a term has been in use for slightly less than ten years. It appears to have first been used in the USA and was subsequently expanded and deepened through work in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Personalised learning has become embedded in a wider argument for reformed public services that respond more directly to the diverse needs of individuals rather than impose uniform solutions on all people. The rationale of these principles is clear: to raise standards by focusing teaching and learning on the aptitudes and interests of pupils and by removing any barriers to learning. The operationalisation of personalised learning is still in its embryonic stages so that there is little evidence of its overall success. Nevertheless, there is substantial evidence that many of the components of personalised learning approaches have been successful in a variety of contexts around the world. The major challenges for governments and systems are recognised to different extents in various governments' policy statements - some shallow; some deep. The challenge will be for governments and their departments to create a financial, professional and operational environment so that all the aspects of deeper personalised approaches can be implemented in order to avoid the dangers of simply implementing shallower and incomplete 'cherry picking' of 'easy to implement' elements. In this paper, the authors argue that unless deep views of personalised learning are implemented, hopes of attending to the diversity of all students will be a chimera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global shifts in education mean that learning involves more than teaching knowledge and beginning teachers, in turn, need to appreciate the multiple realities and cultural understandings of all those in their care. In this paper the authors report on a unique pre-service teacher education program in rural Victoria, Australia. Students undertake a 12 month program after completing their undergraduate qualification, which enables them to teach all levels in primary and postprimary schools. During this time, lecturers in the program utilise a combination of lectures, tutorials, specialist seminar days, electives, fieldwork and teaching practice, to assist the students to develop a disposition that is both socially just and theoretically informed. Whereas it is impossible to prepare students for each and every situation they will encounter upon graduation, educating teachers to teach in a changing global environment requires approaches that attempt to deal with diversity in all its forms in sensitive, respectful and inclusive ways. Powerful elements of the program are the seminar days conducted throughout the year in which outside speakers - themselves practitioner specialists in their own fields with whom lecturers have developed partnerships over time - work with the students on issues associated with sexualities, Indigenous education, mental health and global education. Utilising outside professionals to provide specialist knowledge allows the students to experience multiple perspectives and to develop a range of viewpoints. Through a process of critically reflective practice developed in the 12-month program, these experiences legitimise, challenge, clarify, confirm and generally 'make real' the issues related to diversity that are raised in other parts of the course. These strong partnerships, the teaching team and the overall character and philosophy of the course provide an environment in which the students can develop an ability to work with diversity in their teaching environments, rather than merely tolerate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]