Greg Neal

Creating frames of practice for teacher education

Conceptualising teacher learning as being immersed in and arising from the totality of professional practice, this paper reports experiences and insights from practice-based teacher education. Initial data are drawn from two sites of seven involved in the federally funded School Centres for Teaching Excellence programme conducted in the state of Victoria, Australia. This programme is arranged as a partnership between the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and various school clusters and universities. Each university is working with a cluster of primary and secondary schools and with large numbers (20–100) of pre-service teachers allocated to schools across each cluster. In general, PSTs in Victoria University’s two clusters are placed at each school for 2 days per week with some block time throughout the year. Some university units of study are taught on-site by visiting lecturers with a strong emphasis being placed on the mentoring of PSTs by classroom teachers. Interviews with mentors/mentees and teachers, PSTs and principals indicate a particular understanding or approach to an issue of learning or relationship that provides a frame/scaffold of practice. Further practice begins to detail the frame for continuing application. We are considering the notion of frame as a conceptual skeleton of understanding that arises from school and classroom practice and is formatted in practice. Cases of practice have been reported in the paper below that indicate preliminary understandings and engagement with this concept for the learning of teachers.

Immersing Pre-Service Teachers in Site-Based Teacher School-University Partnerships

This paper describes a teaching initiative where the traditional school-university relationship is significantly challenged. It involves one university working with a cluster of schools in a low socio-economic status (SES) community of a metropolitan city, where large cohorts of pre-service teachers are immersed in primary and secondary schools, with the express intention of improving the integration of practice and theory.

Home Access: Providing Computers to Families via a National Strategy

In this paper we discuss the role of new technologies, and computers in particular, in lives of families in Australia. We report on part of a project that provided children families with computers and connection to the Internet. There is an increasing awareness that living in the 21st century involves using and interacting with a range of new technologies, also referred to as information and communications technologies (ICT). However, for many children and their families this is not possible because they do not have the capacity to purchase them. The Tech Packs Project (The Smith Family, 2007) grew out of the Computer for Every Child Project which was an attempt to start to bridge the ‘digital divide’ by providing computers so that a group of families in the targeted locations of large metropolitan cities could participate in the Information Age. The families involved were those whose personal resources did not afford them the opportunity to purchase new technologies, especially computers We surveyed the families members to determine the extent of their use of any technologies before and after receiving the computer and initiated focus groups to find out the ways in which having a computer created contexts for them to become more proficient in the use of ICT In this paper we will present the findings from both the survey and focus group data that we have collected.