Chad Morrison PhD

Educating students with disability rests on the precipice of significant transformation in Australia. Recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability have highlighted the need for significant change in the way in which people with disability are educated. This has triggered a wave of reviews and reforms in Australia. However, the path forward remains tangled, divided and deeply complex. This presentation explores one teacher education provider's innovative journey to re-weave their initial teacher education programs and addresses the needs of the evolving school cohorts in Western Australia, and to provide and celebrate course offerings for those seeking primary and secondary school qualifications. Utilising the qualitative methodological approach of weaving an otherwise (Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022), we approach this research design considering Before, During and After. Weaving an otherwise considers giving voice to the silenced, dehumanised or erased in our communities. We offer narrative vignettes from diverse perspectives-including teacher educators, classroom teachers and other educational leaders. who co-designed these courses. The questions we seek to explore relate to the concept of problematising the education of students with disability as well as identifying both the challenges and opportunities in the schools and teaching workforces related to inclusive education and positive reform of teacher education. Importantly, how do we gain the trust and build a community to co-create in a space that has often been forgotten or misunderstood? This requires, on some level, active resistance to the dominance of policy and practice that limits the preparation of pre-service teachers. Providing education to students of all abilities requires intentional mobilisation of resources, re-imagining of priorities and a determination to persist in the face of reform and negativity, to effect meaningful change. Join us as we discuss what comes “After”.

Professional Experience (Work Integrated Learning) within Australian initial teacher education is a mandated and essential component of learning to teach. Resources developed and employed to promote, assess and report on pre-service teachers’ professional learning are critical to the practice of high-level knowledge workers (the mentor teachers and university-based teacher educators) who support it. At a time of significant reform in initial teacher education and in the ways school-based and university-based teacher educators work across institutional boundaries to support this work, this paper reports on a project where university-based teacher educators’ perspectives were sought on enhanced assessment and reporting resources designed to strengthen practice and outcomes. To support and promote pre-service teacher professional learning and development across course trajectory, new assessment and reporting documents were developed to provide supervising mentor teachers with explicit guidance on indicators of practice. This followed previous iterative cycles of resource development involving university- and school-based teacher educators. These indicators were developed through consultation with a range of stakeholders connected to Professional Experience delivery and provided a course-level scope and sequence of development up to the Graduate Teacher Standards (pre-graduate indicators). The focus of this qualitative inquiry was to understand the application and implications of the course-level assessment scope and sequence through the perspectives of university-based teacher educators through semi-structured interview. The context in which Professional Experience is currently enacted includes (a) increasing shortages of experienced supervising mentor teachers, (b) more frequent use of inexperienced colleagues to mentor pre-service teachers, (c) reported workload pressures making it difficult to secure sufficient placements for pre-service teachers, and (d) reported increase in complexities being managed within many schools. As a result, policy setting is currently focused on minimising administrative workload for supervising mentor teachers, which is logical within this stated complexity. To date, policy responses have included intentions to produce and disseminate assessment templates to be implemented across the nation. These standardised assessment templates have been developed within the express purpose of reducing teachers’ workload. An unintended risk of this type of approach, like system-level adoption of standardised assessment practices, may include the removal of mentor teachers from the critical work of driving pre-service teacher professional learning and development. University-based teacher educators’ perspectives on the implementation and impact of innovative assessment resources offer opportunities to understand the implications of enhanced assessment resources (and teaching practice) within the schools, how this knowledge is reported back to universities and how it is then communicated for various purposes around pre-service teacher development and capacity. This project is significant as it responds to the needs of multiple stakeholders and environmental pressures to ensure mentor teachers are able to provide quality support and feedback to PSTs to enhance the future teaching workforce. Furthermore, it provides pre-service teachers with a scaffolded trajectory towards graduate teacher level.

Inclusive education rests on the precipice of significant transformation in Australia. Recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Sackville et al., 2023) have highlighted the need for significant change in the way in which people with disability are educated and this has triggered a wave of reforms in education policies in Australia (Department of Education, nd). However, the path forward remains tangled, divided and deeply complex. Utilising the metaphor of a Gordian Knot, this presentation attempts to unravel the needs, perspectives, challenges and opportunities to re-weave the education of pre-service teachers who seek to work with students with disability in Western Australian schools. This presentation offers vignettes from the different communities involved in inclusive education, where we invite participants to listen to the perspectives and reflect on the issues, standpoints and their interlacing themes. Our exploration of these will be influenced by qualitative methodological approaches of weaving an otherwise (as expressed by Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022) to observe the interconnectedness and divergence of the vignettes. The questions we seek to explore relate to the concept of problematising the education of students with disability as well as identifying both the challenges and opportunities in the schools and teaching workforces related to inclusive education. We reflect on what has been, the process undertaken to re-design and re-imagine pre-service teacher education where students with disability and the communities that support them to re-weave a different knot. Rather than problematising the knot and seeking to ‘solve it’ – we imagine it as a thing of beauty, uniqueness and as an opportunity to begin in a place to disentangle and re-weave the Gordian knot. Our journey to create pathways for pre-service teachers in both primary and secondary school contexts has been complex, creative and continues to evolve as we re-imagine inclusive teaching and schools. This requires, on some level, active resistance to the dominance of policy and practice that limits the preparation of pre-service teachers to dominant and traditional frames of reference. These inadvertently submerge the perspectives and needs of children and young people and inhibit opportunities to enact contemporary pedagogies and person-centred and responsive provisions for these students required within all learning environments. Providing inclusive education to students of all abilities requires intentional mobilisation of resources, re-imagining of priorities and determination to persist, in order to effect meaningful change. These insights highlight to us the need for cultural shift, to overcome resistance, micro-aggressions and casual ableism that makes change difficult to achieve and progress towards it slow.

For some time in Australia, there have been concerns expressed from the political sector about the high rate of burn-out in early career teachers and the teacher shortage that currently exists in Australia. In response to political pressure regarding these concerns, Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership sought to ensure that graduate teachers were effectively prepared to manage academic and practical demands of their early teaching career, by introducing a teaching performance assessment (TPA) into the course accreditation framework. Subsequently, it was mandated for Australian teacher education programs to include a TPA as a summative, capstone assessment of students' achievement in relation to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

To date, research relating to school-based teacher educators' experiences of the TPA process has been limited. Understanding this space is significant because school-university partnerships underpin the effective preparation of pre-service teachers to manage the complexities of teaching. However, there is not always a willingness for school-based educators to process and transfer knowledge about teacher preparation across school and university boundaries. Our qualitative research explored the perceptions of school-based educators through semi-structured interviews, enabling participants to share their experiences when engaging in the delivery of the TPA. Findings identified the TPA as an influential boundary object with potential to shape school-based teacher educators' practice on either side of this boundary.

Analysis was conducted by use of constructs drawn from Carlile's work on boundary objects (2002), to examine the meaning (semantics), language (syntax) and practice (pragmatics) in relation to the movement of school-based educators across boundaries between the university and school to engage with TPA. In engaging with the assessment, participants demonstrated a willingness to transfer knowledge and action between university and school and back again and were proactive within the TPA. Implications include enhanced awareness of the influential nature of school-based teacher educators in driving initiatives within initial teacher education and strengthening the outcomes.

Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers in rural and remote locations is an ongoing issue. Extended pre-service teacher internship is one approach used to expose pre-service teachers to rural and remote career opportunities. We examine the lived experiences of Daisy, a teaching internship participant who relocated to a large regional town to undertake an extended final-year teaching internship. The research reported here, examines early career outcomes and career trajectories of participants in a 12-month final-year, pre-service teaching internship. We frame our mixed methods research project by aligning responses from 127 survey results and 8 interviews to Communities of Practice and the Early Career Teachers Resilience Framework. Using key theoretical concepts of Communities of Practice to analyse the data, we capture insight of the internship through Daisy’s voice which exemplifies the challenges and rewards of working in regional contexts. The support and structure of the program scaffolded Daisy during her internship period, and as she transitioned into her early career phase. Daisy emphasised understanding of place and context and articulated significant events and relationships that develop within the internship program. Her recollection of the impact of the internship aligned strongly with the Early Career Teachers Resilience Framework. Key outcomes from the research on internships, including Daisy’s case are identified as (a) strengthening preparation for teaching, (b) connecting pre-service teachers with teaching communities, (c) consolidating the purpose and meaning of teaching, and (d) underpinning teacher professional identity work. Further recommendations for research, include a wider study of internship programs across Australia and an exploration of the conceptual framework with a broader demographic.

Impactful initial teacher education can be characterised by significant industry engagement between stakeholders within schools and universities. School-university partnerships ensure the content of initial teacher education courses are responsive to the needs of the profession. Collaboration within these partnerships provide opportunities for knowledge generation, innovation and effective resolutions to the challenges faced by educators. As a result, these relationships enhance opportunities for pre-service teachers to learn about the profession in powerful ways. These partnerships, then, enhance the outcomes for both learning contexts. As part of our ongoing school-university partnerships,industry partners have been strategically involved in the assessment processes of the teaching performance assessment (QTPA). This paper presents the perspectives of school leaders and teachers who have participated in assessing QTPA written submissions and sitting on QTPA assessment panels. Analysis of data emphasises the voice of school-based colleagues and their important role in the preparation of graduate teachers. Drawing on interview data, participants reflect on their experiences in the QTPA process. From this, two key perspectives emerge. Firstly, school leaders’ perspectives highlight the value of school-university collaboration on the QTPA assessment for the value it has for preparing graduate teachers for future teaching contexts and roles. Secondly, leaders emphasise the value that exists for schools in adopting shared practices and language for strengthening teacher practice.

Teacher wellbeing is important, not least for the role teachers play in supporting students’ social, emotional, physical, and academic wellbeing. Effective teachers need to be physically and mentally healthy however much of the research about this focuses on burnout or stress and the deficits these create, rather than what keeps teachers well. This research examined how teachers conceptualise positive wellbeing. We refer to influential ecological influences that support and sustain teachers as the bridge building necessary to support long-term, sustainable teacher wellbeing, as opposed to stop-gap band-aid fixes. A scoping review identified 52 studies from the extant literature identified ecological factors (individual, relational and contextual) that impact teacher wellbeing. Three interrelated themes provide a basis to examine first, influential individual factors shaping teachers’ wellbeing; second, relational factors characterising teachers’ work; and third, contemporary contextual factors associated with enhancing or eroding teacher wellbeing. Analysis shows enhanced teacher wellbeing as a dynamic interplay and interconnectedness of influential factors that promote, support and it (bridge building), where all weight-bearing components (influential factors) are essential to integrity of the overall structure (teacher wellbeing). In the absence of positive influential factors other components become weak and vulnerable and weaken the entire structure (impacting negatively on overall wellbeing). A focus on distinct factors of wellbeing, viewed in isolation or without regard for its broader ecology emphasise what we refer to as band-aid responses. These are characteristically short-term solutions that initially provide relief but have limited long-term efficacy or sustainability. This review contributes to enhanced understanding of contextual factors influencing teacher wellbeing and what fosters and supports meaningful, long-term, systematic wellbeing initiatives.

Assuring pre-service teachers’ professional readiness has been a long-standing issue in Initial Teacher Education. Not only does the issue rely on questions of the kinds of attributes, skills, and knowledges a ‘classroom ready’ graduate teacher should possess, but also how these can be reliably assessed within authentic contexts of teaching and learning that capture the complexity of the ways in which teaching practices can strengthen student learning. The introduction of a final year teaching performance assessment, has from 2016, been a mandated inclusion for Australian initial teacher education programs as a condition for graduation. Its introduction, akin to a “bar exam” for the profession, is reflective of similar policy moves globally. Given that this is a recent policy measure, there is to date scant research in the Australian context exploring the perspectives of graduate teachers who have undertaken the teaching performance assessment on its effectiveness as both an assessment of professional readiness and as an educative experience. The lived experiences of these graduate teachers are important in a number of ways. Drawing on teacher self-efficacy theory and teacher well-being literature, the project reported on here examines graduates’ valuable and distinctive insights into the ways pre-service teachers negotiate the tensions between discourses of professional learning along with initial teacher education program development, amid broader discourses of accountability and licensure. Data were gathered through a survey of graduate teachers who had previously completed a teaching performance assessment within one of two Australian universities. The survey instrument was developed using items from the long form of the Teacher Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale, the Teacher Well-Being Scale, items exploring pre-service teacher and teacher educator perceptions of the edTPA, and demographic information about participants’ current teaching roles and contexts. These data are important to the ways initial teacher education providers continue to develop and refine teaching performance assessments to enhance course curriculum, pedagogy and outcomes, particularly in relation to what graduate teachers identify as central to their effective transition into the workforce.

Academic writing has been difficult to prioritise over the past three years due to the increased disruption of COVID-19. Workload pressures of early career researchers and higher degree research students within the Education discipline have increased. Prioritising academic writing, along with the need to create new writing opportunities led to a small but focused group of committed participants to create a communities of practice approach to academic writing. In this presentation, we share early findings from our collaborative approach, including key success factors for higher research degree students and academic writers seeking to establish a collaborative writing practice. The importance of the community in supporting and nurturing members to become more productive has been a key result as each participant held different expectations and pursued personally significant outcomes.

Professional Experience is an essential component of Australian initial teacher education, where pre-service teachers develop in response to the support and guidance of their experienced mentor teachers. The participation and engagement of mentor teachers is often voluntary and relies heavily on their good will, yet this involvement is fundamental to a range of outcomes associated with teacher education. The voluntary nature of participation emphasises the need for integrated and coherent systems to operate between universities, schools and systems, often framed around partnerships. Various legislative and funding arrangements have created ambiguity and complexity in relation to partnerships and inhibit system-wide approaches to effectively and efficiently create aligned systems of practice and collaboration. Research also highlights that there is great variability in the experience, perspectives and training undertaken by mentor teachers. The system relies on high quality mentoring from highly accomplished and experienced teachers who draw on expertise and have engaged in targeted training for this work. The disruption and impact caused by COVID-19 is reshaping the teaching workforce and has implications for who is putting their hands up to mentor pre-service teachers. This study analyses system-generated data of participation of mentor teachers to identify patterns of regularity of mentor teacher engagement, clusters of repeated mentoring by school, district, sector and system. These data have implications for initial teacher education providers seeking to meet the professional learning needs of this workforce as they pursue high quality experiences for their students in a rapidly changing context.