The private problem with public service: Rural teachers in educational markets

Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children’s educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.

Caught in the headlights: Designing for creative learning and teaching in higher education

This study was an exploration of the different ways that educators conceptualise and approach creative learning and teaching. The research revealed theoretical and practice-based insights, demonstrating that exemplary teachers adopt an ecological approach to designing for student creativity; this approach acknowledges and works with the complexity of the higher education environment and the dynamic relationships between students, peers and teachers. The inquiry confirmed the value of using learning design patterns to uncover hidden creative processes.

'I wonder what you know...': Teachers designing requests for factual information

The early years are significant in optimising children’s educational, emotional and social outcomes and have become a major international policy priority. Within Australia, policy levers have prioritised early childhood education, with a focus on program quality, as it is associated with lifelong success. Longitudinal studies have found that high quality teacher-child interactions are an essential element of high quality programs, and teacher questioning is one aspect of teacher-child interactions that has been attributed to affecting the quality of education, linking open ended questioning to higher cognitive achievement. Teachers, however, overwhelmingly ask more closed than open questions. In the classroom, like everyday interaction, questions in interaction require answers. They are used to request, offer, repair, challenge, seek agreement (Curl & Drew, 2008; Enfield, Stivers, & Levinson, 2010; Hayano, 2013; Schegloff, 2007). Teachers use questions to set agendas and manage lessons (McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979; Sacks, 1995), and to gauge students’ knowledge and understanding (Lerner, 1995; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979). Drawing on data from the Australian Research Council project Interacting with Knowledge: Interacting with people: Web searching in early childhood, this paper focuses on an extended sequence of talk between a teacher with two students aged between 3.5 and 5 years in a preschool classroom. The episode, drawn from a corpus of over 200 hours of video recorded data, captures how the teacher and children undertake an online search for images of lady beetles and hairy caterpillars on the Web. Ethnomethodological and conversation analysis approaches examine how the teacher asks questions, which call on the children to display their factual knowledge about the search topic. The fine grained analysis shows how teachers design their interactions to prompt children’s displays of factual knowledge, and how the design of factual questions affect a student’s response in terms of what and how they respond. In focussing on how the teacher designs factual questions and how children respond to these questions it shows that question design can close down a student’s reply; or elicit a range of answers, from one word to extended more detailed responses. Understanding how the design of teachers’ questions can influence students’ responses has pedagogic implications and may support educators to make intentional decisions regarding their own questioning techniques.

Developing knowledge and leadership in pre-service teacher education systems

Pre-service teacher education institutions are large and complex organizations, which are notoriously difficult to change. One factor is that many change efforts focus largely on individual pre-service teacher educators altering their practice. We report here on our experience using a model for effecting change, which views pre-service teacher education institutions and educators as a part of a much broader system. We identified numerous possibilities for, and constraints on, embedding change, but focus only on two in this paper: participants’ knowledge of change strategies and their leadership capacities. As a result of our study findings and researcher reflections, we argue that being a leader in an academic area within pre-service teacher education does not equate to leadership knowledge or skills to initiate and enact systems-wide change. Furthermore, such leadership capacities must be explicitly developed if education for sustainability is to become embedded in pre-service teacher education.

Professional spaces for pre-service teachers: sites of reality, imagination and resistance

Questions about the practicum within teacher education tend to focus on the amount of time allocated to it in programs. In this research, we were interested in the quality of the experience rather than assuming ‘more is better’. To understand what is going on and where, this study focussed on the school and specially the departmental office of room as a site for workplace learning. Using qualitative methods we constructed narratives from the data provided by a cohort of four-year bachelor degree pre-service teachers during and following their final major (10 week)practicum experience. Using theories of spatiality to make sense of the data, we found that the narratives revealed stories of spaces where compliance, disappointment were the key features of the practicum, and where resistance through absence (from the departmental office) was an important strategy to manage the experience. This research challenges the ‘more is better’ argument.

Making trouble: Ethnographic designs on ruling relations for students and teachers in non-academic pathways

Since 2009, all Australian states require young people to be ‘earning or learning’ until age 17. Secondary schools and vocational colleges now accommodate students for whom the conventional academic pathways of the past were not designed. The paper reflects on a project designed to explore the moral orders in these institutional settings for managing such students in extended compulsory schooling. Originally designed as classroom ethnographies, the project involved observations over three to four weeks and interviews with teachers and students in five sites in towns experiencing high youth unemployment. The project aimed to support teachers to work productively in such classrooms with such students, under the assumption that teachers orchestrate classroom interactions. However, it became clear events in these classrooms were being shaped by relations and parties above and beyond the classroom, as much as by those present. Teachers and students were observed to both comply with, and push against, the layers of policy and institutional processes regulating their behaviours. This paper re-thinks the original project through the gaze and resources of institutional ethnography, to better account for the layers of accountabilities and documentation practices that impacted on both teacher and student behaviours. By tracing the extended webs of ‘ruling relations’, it shows both how teachers and students could make trouble for the institutional moral order, and then be held accountable for this trouble.

EFL teachers' professional dilemmas with moral curriculum reform in Indonesia

This project explored how EFL teachers working in different sectors in Indonesia experienced moral education reform. Teachers working in either state schools or Islamic private schools were interviewed and their classes were observed. The thesis indicated that systemic investment in teachers' professionalism contributed to teachers' emerging dilemmas and their resolutions. Teachers in the better resourced state sector reported more dilemmas related to the implementation of the reform and resolved these dilemmas by using professional judgement, while teachers in the less resourced sector reported dilemmas related to their context and failed to implement the curriculum.

Climate change, sustainability and science education

The world and its peoples are facing multiple, complex challenges and we cannot continue as we are (Moss, 2010). Earth‘s “natural capital” - nature‘s ability to provide essential ecosystem services to stabilize world climate systems, maintain water quality, support secure food production, supply energy needs, moderate environmental impacts, and ensure social harmony and equity – is seriously compromised (Gough, 2005; Hawkins, Lovins & Lovins, 1999). To further summarize, current rates of resource consumption by the global human population are unsustainable (Kitzes, Peller, Goldfinger & Wackernagel, 2007) for human and non-human species, and for future generations. Further, continuing growth in world population and global political commitment to growth economics compounds these demands. Despite growing recognition of the serious consequences for people and planet, little consideration is given, within most nations, to the social and environmental issues that economic growth brings. For example, Australia is recognised as one of the developed countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Yet, to date, responses (such as carbon pricing) have been small-scale, fragmented, and their worth disputed, even ridiculed. This is at a time referred to as ‘the critical decade’ (Hughes & McMichael, 2011) when the world’s peoples must make strong choices if we are to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

EFL teachers' perceptions and experiences of blended learning in a Vietnamese university

This qualitative study investigates English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' perceptions and practices of blended learning in a Vietnamese university and influencing factors. Findings revealed that teachers have limited understandings and use of blended learning due to three primary influential factors: (i) the traditional teacher-centred pedagogy, (ii) institutional management and leadership styles, and (iii) fragmented knowledge of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) for blended learning. To improve the take up and potential benefits of blended learning in EFL education in Vietnamese universities, this study proposes (i) a systematic understanding of blended learning concepts, (ii) a localised TPACK framework, and (iii) a model of teacher professional development program.

Overcoming acculturation: Physical education recruits' experiences of an alternative pedagogical approach to games teaching

Background Physical education teacher education (PETE) programmes have been identified as a critical platform to encourage the exploration of alternative teaching approaches by pre-service teachers. However, the socio-cultural constraint of acculturation or past physical education and sporting experiences results in the maintenance of the status quo of a teacher-driven, reproductive paradigm. Previous studies have reported successfully overcoming the powerful influence of acculturation, resulting in a change in PETE students’ custodial teaching beliefs and receptiveness to alternative teaching approaches. However, to date, limited information has been reported about how PETE students’ acculturation shaped their receptiveness to an alternative teaching approach. This is particularly the case for PETE recruits identified in the literature as most resistant to change. Purpose To explore the features and experiences of an alternative games teaching approach that appealed to PETE recruits’ identified as most resistant to change, requiring a specific sample of PETE recruits with strong, custodial, traditional physical education teaching beliefs, and whom are high achieving sporting products of this traditional culture. The alternative teaching approach explored in this study is the constraints-led approach (CLA), which is similar operationally to TGfU, but distinguished by a neurobiological theoretical framework (nonlinear pedagogy) that informs learning design. Participants and Setting A purposive sample of 10 Australian PETE students was recruited for the study. All participants initially had strong, custodial, traditional physical education teaching beliefs, and were successful sporting products of this teaching approach. After experiencing the CLA as learners during a games unit, participants demonstrated receptiveness to the alternative pedagogy. Data Collection and Analysis Semi-structured interviews and written reflections were sources of data collection. Each participant was interviewed separately, once prior to participation in the games unit to explore their positive physical education experiences, and then again after participation to explore the specific games unit learning experiences that influenced their receptiveness to the alternative pedagogy. Participants completed written reflections about their personal experiences after selected practical sessions. Data were qualitatively analysed using grounded theory. Findings: Thorough examination of the data resulted in establishment of two prominent themes related to the appeal of the CLA for the participants: (i) psychomotor (effective in developing skill), and (ii), inclusivity (included students of varying skill level). The efficacy of the CLA in skill development was clearly an important mediator of receptiveness for highly successful products of a traditional culture. This significant finding could be explained by three key factors: the acculturation of the participants, the motor learning theory underpinning the alternative pedagogy and the unit learning design and delivery. The inclusive nature of the CLA provided a solution to the problem of exclusion, which also made the approach attractive to participants. Conclusion PETE educators could consider these findings when introducing an alternative pedagogy aimed at challenging PETE recruits’ custodial, traditional teaching beliefs. To mediate receptiveness, it is important that the learning theory underpinning the alternative approach is operationalised in a research-informed pedagogical learning design that facilitates students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the approach through experiencing and or observing it working.

Pre-packaging preschool literacy: What drives early childhood teachers to use commercially produced phonics programs in prior to school settings

Language-rich environments are key to overall quality in early childhood settings, including frequent child–staff interactions around picture books and dramatic play. In a language-rich environment, explicit teaching of literacy concepts, such as phonics, is embedded in authentic and meaningful situations where alphabet letters and sounds are taught in a context meaningful to the child. Recent research, however, suggests that the use of commercial pre-packaged phonics programs (such as Letterland and Jolly Phonics) is widespread in prior to school settings in Sydney, Australia. Little is known about why early childhood teachers choose to use such programs with children aged five and under. In the present study, thematic analysis of data from interviews with five early childhood teachers using commercial phonics programs found that their reasons were pragmatic rather than pedagogical. Motivations included the idea that the programs reduced their workload, provided tangible evidence to parents of their child’s ‘school readiness’, and served as a marketing tool to attract parents. Further analysis found that the teachers were unable to articulate what phonics and phonological awareness are and how they are learnt in early childhood.

Teachers-as-writers: Writing information texts in English and vernacular

Our contribution to this volume is not on the work of the teacher who inspires the child writer, but the teacher as the writer and illustrator of multilingual texts for classroom use that inspires the child reader. This chapter focuses on a first time teacher writer from Fiji, Bereta , who participated in a two day writing workshop known as the Information Text Awareness Project (hereafter ITAP). This chapter commences with an overview of the ITAP which was conducted in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012 with Bereta and 17 teachers from urban, semi-urban and rural contexts within the Nadi educational district. The politics of presenting Western ways of knowing to teachers from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts via a Western pedagogical approach is explored in the second section. We believe that this work involves a moral dimension that needs careful consideration. The third section outlines the eight stages of ITAP where teacher writers such as Bereta produced an English and a vernacular information text for use in their classrooms. The outline of the eight stages of ITAP is justified with links to the research literature. The final section recounts Bereta’s interview data where she talks about using the newly created English and vernacular information texts in the classroom and the community’s response to her inaugural publications. The findings may be of interest to those seeking to establish an adult writing cooperative to produce English and vernacular information texts for classroom use.

Engaging students (and their teachers) in STEM through robotics

Robotics@QUT is a university outreach program aimed at building pre- and in-service teacher capacity to encourage interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects with school children from low socio-economic status areas. Currently over 35 schools are involved in the outreach program. Professional Development workshops are provided to teachers to build their knowledge in implementing robotics-based STEM activities in their classrooms, robotics loan kits are provided, and pre-service teacher visits arranged to provide the teachers with on-going support. The program also provides opportunities for school students to engage in robotics-based on-campus activities and competitions and is seen as a way to build aspirations for university. This paper presents an interim evaluation that examines the value of the Robotics@QUT program for the teachers, pre-service teachers and school students participating in the program. Surveys were administered to determine the participants’ perceived benefits of being involved and their perceptions of the program. The data gathered from the teachers showed that they had gained knowledge and confidence and felt that the Robotics@QUT program had assisted them to deliver engaging robotics-based STEM activities in their classrooms. The pre-service teachers’ responses focused on benefits for themselves, for their future teaching careers and for the school students involved. The school students’ responses focused on their increased knowledge and confidence to pursue future STEM studies and careers.