Providing space for teacher renewal: the role of the facilitator in school-university partnerships

This article uses the process of a teacher renewal partnership programme to explore the role of the university academic as a facilitator of change. Responses to a series of interview questions relating to change were used to explore and examine the dimensions of the facilitator's role. Facilitators report that the role is complex, often uncertain and requires an understanding of the school and its culture and schools' and teachers' previous experiences in professional development programmes. The findings from this article suggest that an effective facilitator creates, for the teachers involved, a space for discussion, reflection and challenge and that this space provides for and legitimates teacher renewal. <br />

Collaboration : integrating education and clinical practice : The Case of La Trobe University/The Alfred Clinical School of Nursing

A Clinical School of Nursing combines resources, opportunities and benefits for hospital and university staff as well as students. Collaboration is essential in the partnership between the two institutions and aspects will be explored in this paper, including antecedent conditions of organisational commitment, cooperation and trust, identification of costs, and a formal agreement. Collaboration itself is built on cooperative endeavour, willing participation, shared planning and decision making, a team approach, and shared responsibility and power. These attributes are readily identifiable in this exciting initiative. <br />

'I do lots of things that the University would not approve of'. What counts as professional knowledge in the eyes of pre-service and beginning teachers -implications of the encounter for the role of teacher educators in pre-service middle school preparati

This paper is an account of teacher educator perceptions of the take-up by beginning teachers of the values and practices advocated in pre-service education. Methodologically grounded in a critical ethnographic account, two teacher educator/researchers retell their understanding of the one-month experience as middle school classroom teachers in an allocated school. The paper examines the consequences of what counts as professional knowledge in the eyes of pre-service and beginning teachers and the implications of the encounter for the role of teacher educators in preservice preparation. The purpose of the research is to consider the well-researched issue of the rejection of academic training (to greater or lesser extents) that is experienced by very many preservice and beginning teachers at some stage after experience in schools. As an exemplary colleague teacher said to us as we negotiated our participation in the school: &quot;I do lots of things that the University would not approve of&quot;. Our argument is that teacher education needs the kind of participatory inquiry represented by the undertaking and methodology of this project. The paper is the 'primary record' (Carspecken 1996) of the research and works to open the next phase, the dialogical stage of the research process.<br />