Rachel Regina Forgasz

Supporting mentoring and assessment in practicum settings: A new professional development approach for school-based teacher educators

This chapter examines the professional development of an emerging occupational group in the Australian context—a group we call ‘school-based teacher educators’—acknowledging and focusing on their learning about the complex work of teacher education, mentoring, supervising, and assessing pre-service teachers.

Rethinking the Observation Placement: A Community/Cohort Approach to Early Professional Experiences

This chapter focuses on an innovative school-university partnership model designed to bridge the theory-practice gap in initial teacher education through better integrated Professional Experience partnerships. Specifically, this school-university partnership aimed to improve the quality of early “observation-focused” Professional Experiences through the development of a structured Community/Cohort Professional Experience model in which a community of mentors would collaboratively mentor a cohort of pre-service teachers in their second year of a Bachelor of Education program. The chapter reports on the effectiveness of that model from the perspectives of the mentors who delivered it.

Response to the themed issue: Environmentalism

This response does not seek to review the special Environmentalism themed issue of RiDE. Rather, I hope to share some observations about how various articles in this issue have challenged my thinking about my role as a Drama teacher educator.

Becoming Ourselves as Teacher Educators: Trespassing, Transgression and Transformation

This chapter documents the ‘processes of becoming’ of two teacher educators, Rachel and Mandi, by exploring our personal-professional learning from our ongoing experiences in the role. We come from different disciplinary backgrounds, entered teacher education at different times and through different pathways, yet despite our differences, we come together as researchers and teacher educators with shared common concerns to investigate and better understand what it means to teach teachers, (both personally, and collectively, as a profession), to examine our own roles in the learning-to-teach process and to develop our pedagogy of teacher education. Inspired by the work of Connelly and Clandinin (Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes: Secret, sacred, and cover stories. In D. J. Clandinin & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 3–15). New York: Teachers College Press, 1995) about teachers’ “Secret” and “sacred” stories of their professional knowledge and becoming, we interpret our experiences through three main themes of trespassing, transgression and transformation. We begin our exploration of each theme with an illustrative vignette from each of our personal-professional histories. We then go on to consider our vignettes, elaborating these shared themes and our responses to them by engaging in a dialogic process with each other. At the same time, while we have identified shared themes, we also recognise particular individual themes that have emerged from, and guided, our becoming as teacher educators.

Bringing the Physical into Self-Study Research

This chapter provides a consideration of what embodiment, corporeality and physical culture might bring to self-study as a field already rich with teacher education conversations. Drawing on research into the rationale for, and application of, non-rational reflective processes, I propose that the body in performance provides a largely untapped site for reflection on the affective dimensions of our experiences. In this sense, embodiment is proposed as a unique approach to reflection and catalyst to self-study research. I propose the way in which ideas, experiences, and emotions that are often difficult to capture in words can find expression through the language of embodiment, thereby providing self-study researchers with access to otherwise elusive aspects of their experiences and perspectives.

Seeing Teacher Education Differently through Self-Study of Professional Practice

I welcome this special issue of self-studies of teacher educators’ relationships with the professional experience dimension of initial teacher education. It is my view that the professional experience is a signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005) of initial teacher education, one that is, and has historically been, as fraught as the entire enterprise of teacher education itself (see Vick, 2006). Of signature pedagogies, Shulman (2005) makes a deliberately contradictory pair of claims:

Reframing ‘The Rainbow of Desire’ as embodied self-reflexivity in initial teacher education

This is a photographic and textual account of research that reframes the Boalian technique ‘The Rainbow of Desire’ (TRoD) as a form of embodied self-reflexivity within initial teacher education. In particular, TRoD is applied as an embodied reflective process to provoke reflection on the emotional dimensions of learning to teach. The application of TRoD in this research subverts the traditional privileging of logical–rational knowledge forms and processes within higher education. As such, this research produces a new, politicised purpose for TRoD itself, which has traditionally been categorised as a therapeutic applied theatre practice.

Theorising the third space of professional experience partnerships

Across the international research literature, references to the problematic ‘theory-practice gap’ in initial teacher education abound. Essentially, this refers to the dialectical positioning of university-based learning about teaching as abstracted theory in opposition to situated school-based learning about teaching through practice. This perceived theory-practice gap is exacerbated by the fact that the distinction between university-based and school-based learning is not only figurative but also literal, resulting in confusion amongst preservice teachers who often perceive an irreconcilable tension between the theories learned at the university and the practices observed during their professional experience in schools.

Reimagining the role of mentor teachers in professional experience: moving to I as fellow teacher educator

ABSTRACT New accreditation requirements for Australian initial teacher education programs require that universities and schools establish quality partnerships to ensure strong links between pre-service teachers’ university-based learning and school-based professional learning experiences. This paper focuses on the shifts of identity, thinking and practice that occurred for five school-based mentor teachers as they co-created new professional experience practices alongside university-based teacher educators in a Teaching Academies of Professional Practice (TAPP) project. Interview data was analysed through the theoretical framework of Dialogical Self Theory to examine how the repositioning of mentor teachers as fellow teacher educators allowed for expansion in the understanding and enactment of their role. The findings of this study suggest that partnerships between schools and universities can enhance learning opportunities for all participants when commitments are made to creating collaborative and dialogical spaces to support new approaches to teacher education.

“Struck by the way our bodies conveyed so much": A collaborative self-study of our developing understanding of embodied pedagogies

Abstract Embodied pedagogies offer methodological and pedagogical possibilities for exploring and understanding the emotional and embodied dimensions of teaching and learning to teach. In this paper we present a collaborative self-study that examines what we have learned about the nature, value and facilitation of embodied pedagogies through our experiences as both facilitators and participants. Through engaging in this self-study we have deepened our understanding of three aspects of embodied pedagogies: the nature of embodiment as a process of learning and coming to know, the challenges associated with engaging learners in embodied pedagogies, and some of the factors that contribute to skilful facilitation of embodied pedagogies. Articulating these understandings offers insight for ourselves and for other teacher educators looking to engage preservice teachers in embodied explorations and understandings of teaching and learning.