Empowering Australian students in African music: experiential education in primary teacher training

Luckman (1996) defines experiential education as a "process through which a learner constructs knowledge, skill and value from direct experience" (p. 7). The core of such learning is practical engagement, contextualised by concepts and skills in guided experiences. This process, to be most effective, should be supported by reflection. This paper considers an experiential program in African music that is part of pre-service primary teacher education for generalist teacher trainees. As part of the Bachelor of Primary Education degree, offered by Deakin University (Australia) students can select an elective subject on African music in the final year of their four-year course. In this subject students learn African music experientially, by playing, singing and moving. These students completed a questionnaire and were interviewed at the conclusion of the unit in 2003. Data collected showed the effectiveness of using an unknown music to explore musical concepts and understandings in an Australian educational setting.

The OECD-ENSI project and its relevance for teacher training concepts in environmental education

This article presents an account of the Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI) project. The philosophical basis of the project is outlined, and case studies from within the project provided as a basis for a consideration of some current issues in the field. It is concluded that one of the distinctive features of the ENSI project is its encouragement of praxiological, action research-based to curriculum and professional development. The case studies of suggest that some of the more conventionally prescribed charcteristics such as agreed sets of goals and professional competencies might need to be revisited.

State of play in early childhood teacher training in Victoria

The study explores the varying changes in emphasis on play within early childhood teacher training. Differing interpretations as to the importance of play are identified as well as the factors impacting on the future of a play-based curriculum.

Non-formal education: Scouting, schooling and teacher training

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Physical education teacher training in fundamental movement skills makes a difference to instruction and assessment practices

The purpose of this study was to investigate instruction and assessment of fundamental movement skills (FMSs) by Physical Education (PE) teachers of Year 7 girls. Of 168 secondary school PE teachers, many had received little FMSs professional development, and although most assessed student FMSs proficiency, the quality of assessment was variable. Neither years of experience nor confidence influenced the quality of assessment tools used; however, greater FMSs training improved assessment practice regularity. Teachers more recently out of preservice were more confident in demonstrating FMSs. The results suggest that FMSs education for teachers should be a priority inclusion in both the training of preservice teachers and the ongoing professional development of in-service teachers.

The development of knowledge about language in teacher training: what works?

Efforts have been made over many years by applied linguists in a number of English-speaking countries to raise awareness of language across the primary and secondary school curriculum, with varying degrees of success (see Denham & Lobeck, 2010). Many of these countries are sites of mass migration from non-English speaking countries, creating linguistic equity issues. In Australia, the new National Curriculum mandates that teachers of all disciplines will be required to provide pedagogy responsive to the language learning needs of English as an Additional Language (EAL) students. However, policy documents do not specify how this goal should be realized, and teachers and researchers are engaged in constant debate about what views of language could inform teacher training (e.g. structural and/or functional). This paper reports on a project which aimed to identify 1) the views of teacher educators on language in the curriculum, and 2) the language-related challenges faced by teachers in training. The current paper focuses on the language awareness of trainee teachers. Ten education students were interviewed about their understandings and experiences of language and language learning. It was found that many students experienced lack of confidence and knowledge about language (KAL), but that awareness of sociocultural elements of language provided them with ways to connect with a broader understanding of language issues. Results were analyzed from the perspective of sociocultural theory and will have implications for teacher training in any educational context where students are learning an additional language in order to integrate into a national schooling system.

Contextually responsive transfer: perceptions of NNES on an ESL/EFL teacher training programme

Post-training reflections from nine overseas NNES students were recorded in relation to the extent to which they perceived potential applications of what they had learned in a Contextually Responsive Teacher Training (CRTT) programme in the learning-teaching contexts into which they were returning as English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) teachers. Pragmatic issues in home contexts concerning resources generally and textbooks particularly were seen to threaten the viability of what was learned. Significantly, all participants projected disillusion with home country context rather than with foreign country training as a personal resolution of the mismatch. Implications are drawn for preventative redesign in relation to the Australian programmes.

Characteristics of teacher training in school-based physical education interventions to improve fundamental movement skills and/or physical activity: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: Fundamental movement skill (FMS) competence is positively associated with physical activity (PA). However, levels of both FMS and PA are lower than expected. Current reviews of interventions to improve FMS and PA have shown that many school-based programs have achieved positive outcomes, yet the maintenance of these interventions is variable. Teachers play a central role in the success and longevity of school-based interventions. Despite the importance of teacher engagement, research into the nature and quality of teacher training in school-based PA and FMS interventions has received little attention.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this systematic review was to investigate the type and quantity of teacher training in school-based physical education PA and/or FMS interventions, and to identify what role teacher training had on the intervention outcome.

METHODS: A systematic search of eight electronic databases was conducted. Publication date restrictions were not implemented in any database, and the last search was performed on 1 March 2015. School physical education-based interventions facilitated by a school teacher, and that included a quantitative assessment of FMS competence and/or PA levels were included in the review.

RESULTS: The search identified 39 articles. Eleven of the studies measured FMS, 25 studies measured PA and three measured both FMS and PA. Nine of the studies did not report on any aspect of the teacher training conducted. Of the 30 studies that reported on teacher training, 25 reported statistically significant intervention results for FMS and/or PA. It appears that teacher training programs: are ≥ 1 day; provide comprehensive subject and pedagogy content; are framed by a theory or model; provide follow-up or ongoing support; and measure teacher satisfaction of the training, are more effective at improving student outcomes in FMS and/or PA. However, the provision of information regarding the characteristics of the teacher training was largely inadequate. Therefore, it was difficult to ascertain which teacher training characteristics were most important in relation to intervention effectiveness.

CONCLUSION: It is clear that whilst teachers are capable of making substantial improvements in student outcomes in PA and FMS, the findings of this review suggest the teacher training component of school-based PA and/or FMS interventions is not only under-reported but is under-studied, and, perhaps as a result, the value of teacher training is not widely understood. What remains unclear, due to poor reporting, is what role teacher training is having on these outcomes.

Teaching teachers : building a post-compulsory education training and employment sector through teacher education

This paper captures development of the GDAL as understood by its instigators as a platform for reform. The GDAL would respond to the challenge being put before education and training providers to prepare young people to create and engage with a learning society through their capacity for lifelong learning. These teacher education students would, ideally, bring skills and knowledge already gained in a professional career. While they would gain teacher registration they were better conceptualized as professional educators for an emerging post compulsory education, training and employment sector: it was expected that graduates would not only teach in schools but would also move readily within the network of learning spaces that young people increasingly experience in their formal education. In the process, they would be a force for change, seeding reform within secondary schools. As a 'teacher' these graduates would have the credibility to challenge the entrenched practices of other teachers. It is the story of 'what happened' as a consequence of this specific aim that I am telling today.

Cultural understanding: rethinking music teacher education in a multicultural Australia

This paper provides a multicultural perspective to music education in Australia and makes recommendations for the creation of more suitable intercultural training programs in Australian universities. It explores issues of multiculturalism in higher education institutions and argues that music education is a useful platform to address and rethink cultural diversity, where difference can be celebrated. Within Australian multicultural society, the rights and traditions of all people are recognized, respected and included. In this process, higher education institutions are challenged to prepare student teachers to meet the needs of society. This involves cultural understanding and the creation of multicultural curricula. From reflecting on current music education programs offered at Deakin University, Melbourne, it is argued that there is need to rethink current approaches to music education pedagogy. Although there are attempts to have an all inclusive approach in teacher training, the music curriculum is still trapped in the potpourri effect of trying to create culturally responsive teachers for every permutation of the multicultural classroom. When Australian society, ideally approaches true styles of multicultural music, teachers and students will celebrate the rich diversity of this nation.

An educational durian? Issues in teacher education in international collaboration

This paper looks at an international collaborative project in teacher education between Malaysian Institutes of teacher training and an Australian university from the perspectives of four of the participants. Two of the stories are from participants who are co-ordinating aspects of the collaboration, and two stories come from participants who were involved closely in the curriculum and teaching aspects of the program. These personal stories reveal that international collaborative projects are indeed like the durian: there are both good and bad aspects. Our differing roles in the program allow us to provide rich insights into such an international collaboration that we believe will be of benefit to others attempting similar projects.

Jack of all trades, master of some ...or none? Training teachers in Integrated Arts

This article reports on the integration of music with other ‘Arts’ in teacher training at a South African university where a challenge tertiary educators face is how to successfully integrate music within the Arts and Culture learning area of the school education system. The article firstly provides a brief background to the South African educational context. Secondly, it outlines current practices in the in the implementation of the integrated arts curriculum in schools and teacher training. Thirdly, it discusses pertinent issues and challenges in relation to team teaching, integration and curriculum change in teacher training. Given the constraints and opportunities that universities currently experience, this article investigates and reports on the issue of whether students should be trained as Jack of all trades and master of some…or none or Master of one trade and Jack of some with regard to integrating the Arts.

Community school teacher education and the construction of pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea

Pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea (PNG) community schooling is mediated by a western styles education. The daily administration and organisation of school activity, graded teaching and learning, subject selection, content boundaries, teaching and assessment methods are all patterned after western schooling. This educational settlement is part of a legacy of German, British and Australian government and non-government colonialism that officially came to an end in 1975. Given the colonial heritage of schooling in PNG, this study is interested in exploring particular aspects of the degree of mutuality between local discourses and the discourses of a western styled pedagogy in post-colonial times, for the purpose of better informing community school teacher education practices. This research takes place at and in the vicinity of Madang Teachers College, a pre-service community school teachers college on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The research was carried out in the context of the researcher’s employment as a contract lecturer in the English language Department between 1991-1993. As an in-situ study it was influenced by the roles of different participants and the circumstances in which data was gathered and constituted, data which was compatible with participants commitments to community school teacher education and community school teaching and learning. In the exploration of specific pedagogic practices different qualitative research approaches and perspectives were brought to bear in ways best suited to the circumstances of the practice. In this way analytical foci were more dictated by circumstances rather by design. The analytical approach is both a hermeneutic one where participants’ activities are ‘read like texts’, where what is said or written is interpreted against the background of other informing contexts and texts, to better understand how understandings and meanings are produced and circulated; and also a phenomenological one where participants’ perspectives are sought to better understand how pedagogical discursive formations are assimilated with the ‘self’. The effect of shifting between these approaches throughout the study is to build up a sense of co-authorship between researcher and participants in relation to particular aspects of the research. The research explores particular sites where pedagogic discourse is produced, re-produced, distributed, articulated, consumed and contested, and in doing so seeks to better understand what counts as pedagogical discourse. These are sites that are largely unexplored in these terms, in the academic literature on teacher education and community schooling in PNG. As such, they represent gaps in what is documented and understood about the nature of post-colonial pedagogy and teacher training. The first site is a grade two community school class involved in the teaching and early learning of English as the ‘official’ language of instruction. Here local discourses of solidarity and agreement are seen to be mobilised to make meaningful, what are for the teacher and children moments in their construction as post-colonial subjects. What in instructional terms may be seen as an English language lesson becomes, in the light of the research perspectives used, an exercise in the structuring of new social identities, relations and knowings, problematising autonomous views of teaching and learning. The second site explores this issue of autonomous (decontextualised) teaching and learning through an investigation of student teachers’ epistemological contextualisations of knowledge, teaching and learning. What is examined is the way such orientations are constructed in terms of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ epistemological and pedagogical alignments, and, in terms of differently conceived notions of community, in a problematisation of the notion of community schooling. The third and fourth sites examine reflective accounts of student teachers’ pedagogic practices, understandings and subjectivities as they confront the moral and political economies and cultural politics of schooling in School Experiences and Practicum contexts, and show how dominant behaviourist and ‘rational/autonomous’ conceptions of what counts as teaching and learning are problematised in the way some students teachers draw upon wider social discourses to construct a dialogue with learners. The final site is a return to the community school where the discourse of school reports through which teachers, children and parents are constructed as particular subjects of schooling, are explored. Here teachers report children’s progress over a four year period and parents write back in conforming, confronting and contesting ways, in the midst of the ongoing enculturation of their children. In this milieu, schooling is shown to be a provider of differentiated social qualifications rather than a socially just and relevant education. Each of the above-mentioned studies form part of a research and pedagogic interest in understanding the ‘disciplining’ effects of schooling upon teacher education, the particular consequences of those effects, what is embraces, resisted and hidden. Each of the above sites is informed by various ‘intertexts’. The use of intertexts is designed to provide a multiplicity of views, actions and voices while enhancing the process of cross-cultural reading through contextualising the studies in ways that reveal knowledges and practices which are often excluded in more conventional accounts of teaching and learning. This research represents a journey, but not an aimless one. It is one which reads the ideological messages of coherence, impartiality and moral soundness of western pedagogical discourse against the school experiences of student-teachers, teachers, children and parents, in post-colonial Papua New Guinea, and finds them lacking.

Workplace education and training : are TAFE teachers prepared for their evolving roles?

The implications of the research are that many TAFE teachers are ill-equipped to perform the roles, that, in the future, may well be expected of them. The reasons for teachers not being competent in a number of areas appear to include a lack of investment in human capital, a lack of adequate teacher training and a lack of relevant staff development contributing to many having neither the knowledge nor the skills to fulfil their evolving roles.