Graham Bruce Parr

Leading an international teaching practicum: negotiating tensions in a site of border pedagogy

Across the world, the work of teacher educators in universities is subject to contradictory discourses of, on the one hand, globalisation and standardisation and, on the other, innovation in both teaching and research. This article is a critical account of a particular experience of an Australian teacher educator leading an international teaching practicum in South Africa. The account shows how multifarious tensions play out in the practice of a teacher educator working in transcultural spaces utilising ‘border pedagogy’.

‘Crude Thinking’ or Reclaiming Our ‘Story‐Telling Rights’. Harold Rosen's Essays on Narrative

Harold Rosen’s essays on narrative, published by NATE in 1985 under the title Stories and Meaning, affirm the centrality of story-telling in people’s lives and thereby offer a powerful rationale for reconceptualising ‘the whole school curriculum from the point of view of its narrative possibilities’ (1985, 19). Such a ‘project’, as he calls it, involves not only the transformation of curriculum and pedagogy in order to enable children to exercise their ‘story-telling rights’ (1985, 26), but also a compelling vision of professional engagement. Rosen affirms the potential of story-telling as a medium for teachers continually to review the values and beliefs that shape their dayto-day practices. He models this process himself by presenting and critically reflecting on an account of his own experiences as a school student, including ‘the usual crimes’ (p. 41) which he and his friends perpetrated ‘in defiance of’ the dull regimentation of schooling. These essays thus anticipate many of the attempts over the past two decades to argue the role that narrative might play in educational research, in contradistinction to more traditional forms of inquiry. Yet it would hardly do justice to these essays to treat them simply as a precursor to more recent attempts to affirm the importance of narrative, especially the empty claims made by Clandinin and Connelly about the potential of narrative to access ‘life’ and ‘experience’, as distinct from other types of ‘knowledge’ (Clandinin and Connelly 2000, 17). In his analysis of the policy environment at the time that he was writing, Rosen identifies many emerging features of the standards-based reforms (cf. Darling-Hammond 2004) that have since radically transformed language and literacy education in Anglophone countries. So called ‘evidence-based’ research has been used to control both the education of young people and the professional learning of teachers (Delandshere 2006). Teachers are constrained by learning continua, by centrally generated statements about what all students should know and be able to do at certain levels of schooling, rather than what they might do, given the opportunity to share their experiences and jointly explore the complexities of language and meaning. Story-telling and the imagination are now arguably under greater threat than they were when Rosen was writing (see Goodson 2003; MacLure

Stories: a common currency

This article offers an account of a series of writing workshops involving English teachers in Victoria, Australia, known as the stella2.0 project. It argues that storytelling can potentially provide a valuable counterpoint to the ‘knowledge’ underpinning standards-based reforms. The argument serves to introduce two other essays published in this issue of Changing English: ‘Storytelling and Professional Learning’, in which Brenton Doecke articulates a standpoint about storytelling that helped to shape the workshops, and ‘Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together…’, by Graham Parr and Scott Bulfin, in which they inquire into the conceptual foundations of the stella2.0 project and discuss some of the writing generated by teachers in the workshops.

Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together

Standards-based education reforms and intensified accountability regimes are now a feature of most countries’ agendas to improve the quality of their teaching workforces. One of the direct consequences of these reforms is a requirement that teachers demonstrate their ongoing participation in forms of professional development or professional learning throughout their careers. Along with this, there has been a narrowing of what is acknowledged by standards-based accountability regimes as discipline-based professional knowledge and ‘valuable’ professional development. This essay is a dialogic, reflexive account of a professional learning and writing project for English teachers and teacher educators in Australia, begun in 2013, called the stella2.0 project. The project builds on the groundbreaking work of the STELLA project in Australia from the turn of the century, and some other models of teacher writing projects across the world. Drawing on Cavarero, we critically scrutinize writing and storytelling in the dialogic professional community of the stella2.0 project, and in the process ‘speak back’ to standards-based reform policies that undermine English educators’ agency and professionalism.

On Not Becoming "a Mere Empirical Existence": Exploring "Who" and "What" Narratives in Pre-Service English Teachers' Writing.

Standards-based reforms of education favour narrow forms of teacher professional learning tied to generic standards and pre-determined, measurable outcomes. In high-stakes accountability-driven environments, in schools and initial teacher education programs, educators are rarely encouraged to inquire into their work and professional identities through narrative writing. This article describes and analyses an assessment task in a pre-service teacher education course wherein students explore dialogic forms of critical autobiographical writing as part of an ongoing process of examining and clarifying their views and values about English teaching. Drawing on Cavarero, we argue that the writing these preservice teachers do provides a space for them to negotiate ‘what’ and ‘who’ narratives as they journey to become English teachers. Their writing productively grapples with generic ‘what’ stories such as what standards documents attempt to tell about English teaching, and the ‘unrepeatable uniqueness’ of ‘who’ stories developed out of their individual cultural, educational and linguistic difference.

Exploring the Nature of Teachers’ Professional Learning

In recent times, the distinction between traditional Professional Development (PD) and Professional Learning (PL) is becoming increasingly apparent. The shift associated with the intent and the language between PD and PL is evident in the report by Wei et al. (2009). The distinction between PD and PL is also captured by Mockler (2005) who characterized PD as something delivered in a ‘spray-on’ manner in which teachers attend a ‘PD day’ then return to their schools with the expectation that they will implement the workshop ideas in their own practice. What is clear is that the professional learning of teachers has become increasingly recognised as important in enhancing not only the quality of teaching in schools but also for developing the teaching profession more generally (Berry, Clemans, & Kostogriz, 2007). PL approaches tend to emphasize practices that are: sustained over time; responsive to the specifics of school and classroom contexts; underpinned by research and practice-based evidence; and, supported by professional learning communities and collaboration (Hayes, Mills, Christie, & Lingard, 2006; Hoban, 2002). In short, PD could be viewed as doing things to teachers so that they apply them in their practice while PL is about working with teachers to help them develop their skills, knowledge and abilities in ways that are responsive to their (pedagogical) needs, issues and concerns.

Identity work in a dialogic international teaching practicum

Since the 1970s, international fieldwork has provided opportunities for small numbers of pre-service teachers to teach and learn in a culture different from their own. Research into this fieldwork suggests that pre-service teachers are positive about their experiences, although questions remain about the ethics underpinning some of these programs. This article reports on a dialogic model of international practicum, involving Australian pre-service students and two mentors (authors of the essay) on a 22-day placement in South Africa. The authors begin with a traditional qualitative case study of the practicum program, identifying benefits for some students. They then proceed to use more reflexive ethnographic methods to tease out the complex identity work undertaken by pre-service teachers and their mentors as they negotiate cultural, pedagogical, and ethical challenges.

Literacy Teacher Education and New Technologies

Systematization comes upon the scene during an age which feels itself in command with a ready-made and handed down body of authoritative thought. A creative age must first have passed; then and only then does the business of formalistic systematizing begin – an undertaking typical of heirs and epigones who feel themselves in possession of someone else’s now voiceless word.

Re-imagining Professional Experience in Initial Teacher Education

This opening chapter is written by the book’s editors. They set out the historical, cultural, policy and research contexts for Re-imagining professional experience in initial teacher education: Narratives of learning, and present a rationale for the collection at a time when teacher education in Australia, as elsewhere, is attempting to deal with significant policy pressures. The chapter offers a definition of professional experience that underpins all of the chapters that follow, and proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for engaging with those chapters. Each of the editors contributes a short autobiographical narrative to convey some of their personal and academic backgrounds as teacher educators and to illustrate some of the powerful ways narrative can be used to represent and inquire into professional experience. The chapter concludes with brief summaries of all other 11 chapters of the collection.

Monash University International Professional Experience Program

This collection presents a variety of perspectives and experiences of learning about teaching and learning during International Professional Experience (IPE), in a range of global contexts. As such programs are becoming increasingly popular in many universities, it is timely to explore this dimension of teacher education, and the personal and professional learning gained by pre-service teachers, their university and school-based mentors and host communities. In this chapter, the editors provide an overview of the IPExperience program presented in the book, including policy and institutional contexts, the development of the IPE program, discussion of key concepts and a summary of each chapter.