Tony Loughland

Bernstein Revisited: The Recontextualisation of Equity in Contemporary Australian School Education.

This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of ‘recontextualisation’ and the ‘pedagogic device’ provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government’s public dissemination of school achievement data through the MySchool website. The analysis illustrates the ways in which the logics of economic rationalism not only have become ubiquitous in Australian education policy, but have come to recontextualise – or reshape – discourses of social and educational equity through new norms of competition, standardisation and commensurability. In doing so, the paper highlights the value of a Bernsteinian approach to understanding the vernacular character of neoliberalism in contemporary educational policy.

Pre-Service Teachers' Construction of Professional Identity through Peer Collaboration during Professional Experience: A Case Study in Australia.

Abstract Much research in the area of pre-service teacher (PST) identity formation has focused on the mentoring relationship between PSTs and their supervising teachers. While this is important to identity formation, interaction with peers is another area that needs to be examined. Using Wenger’s matrix as a theoretical framework, this study aimed to explore how PSTs’ identities are formed during the process of paired placement during the professional experience. Two pairs of PSTs were followed during the four-week professional experience. Data were collected from interviews with the PSTs before, during and after the professional experience. It is clear from this case study that the identity formation of PSTs is enhanced during a paired placement on their first professional experience. This finding has implications for teacher educators who are seeking evidence of the effectiveness of paired placements on the identity formation of PSTs during professional experience.

Boundary Objects and Brokers in Professional Experience: An Activity Theory Analysis

Professional experience (PE) is a key element in the preparation of future teachers. However, a growing number of researchers have raised concerns about the need to enhance the effectiveness of the professional experience in teacher education programs and have called for innovations that will enhance the current school-based experiences within these programs. In response to this call, there have been many innovations which have been implemented worldwide. Most of the innovations place emphasis on bridging the gap between theory and practice by enhancing the quality of school-based experiences, including the one we describe in this chapter. Within the scope of this chapter, we report the findings of a case study that explored the learning experiences of preservice teachers through professional experience. The focus of this chapter is to examine the boundary objects and brokers that assisted the preservice teachers’ boundary crossing between the university and school context. The innovation in this chapter is the novel use of activity theory to examine preservice teacher learning in professional experience.

Using the Instructional Core to Implement a Professional Learning Programme for Primary Science Teachers in Australia: Teacher Learning and Student Skill Outcomes.

There has been a call for effective professional learning to improve the quality of the science teaching of primary teachers in Australia. It seems from the literature that teaching science effectively is a challenging endeavour for primary teachers. Professional learning based on the instructional core framework is an emerging approach that has been utilised sparingly in teacher professional learning in Australia. This paper reports on a case study that investigated the outcomes of one instance of a professional learning programme for primary science teachers based on the instructional core. Using a case study methodology, the current study collected data from multiple sources, including video-taped lesson observations, teacher interviews, field notes and transcripts of the teacher learning sessions. The study shows a number of positive outcomes with reference to the three areas of the instructional core framework: content, pedagogy and student skill outcomes. The findings of the paper are especially relevant to teacher educators, coaches and mentors who are interested in professional learning approaches that achieve positive outcomes in student learning.