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.

Professional Experience placements provide invaluable opportunities for pre-service teachers to connect their expanding knowledge to teaching practice. When done well, these experiences are underpinned by purposeful and continuous guidance from experienced mentor teachers. Significantly, the participation and engagement of Australian mentor teachers in this process is voluntary in nature, meaning the system relies on teachers ‘opting-in’ to mentoring. This research examines mentor teacher participation within Secondary-level initial teacher education courses and highlights issues relating to overall mentor teacher (and host school) engagement. Analysis of placement data over a five-year period to 2021 illustrates a significant change in participation with a dwindling number of mentor teachers participating in placement activity. Other insights include a declining rate of school and mentor teacher participation and an over-reliance on a portion of the teaching workforce to sustain these preparatory experiences. These findings highlight structural and systematic gaps negatively impacting on the delivery and quality of initial teacher education, which in turn have broad implications for the current national workforce shortage in Secondary teaching.

Within initial teacher education (ITE), there is a complex and dynamic relationship between the theoretical content delivered within university settings and the practical components experienced within schools. Strengthening the nexus between the two represents the ongoing work of teacher educators and an ongoing challenge for pre-service teachers. Extended teaching internships (e.g., of 12 months duration) provide opportunities to develop pre-service teachers’ knowledge through classroom application. These extended professional experience components are justified through how they facilitate entry into the profession and support graduate teachers’ traction within the early career phase – an outcome commonly referred to in Australian policy and public discourse as being ‘classroom-ready’. This mixed-methods research presents findings from an examination of a year-long internship. Through surveys and interviews, graduates shared their experiences and perspectives of what they gained from their involvement. Drawing on conceptual tools of community of practice and pillars of the Framework of Conditions Supporting Early Career Teacher Resilience, the analysis identified participants’ sense of belonging and employability as regular and significant outcomes of the internship. Participants reported feeling a sense of belonging to their internship school colleagues and to teaching, explaining this as an influential factor to graduate employment, early career traction and pathways that carried them beyond the early career phase. These findings have implications for the priorities and outcomes pursued through extended internships, especially during a time where employment-based internships are burgeoning. Further long-term research is needed to understand the extent of impact of extended internships on career trajectories and continuity.

Australian teacher education programs must include a summative, capstone assessment of students' achievement against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (a teaching performance assessment). This program accreditation requirement seeks to ensure graduate teachers are adequately prepared for the academic and practical demands of career entry. Research has examined a range of issues related to these assessments however examination of school-based teacher educators' contributions to this process is limited. School-based teacher educators work across school and university settings with pre-service teachers, drawing on their knowledge of both settings to enhance teacher preparation. This research explored the perceptions of these teacher educators as trained panellists involved in the assessment of one teaching performance assessment. Using constructs drawn from Carlile's work on boundary objects (2002), researchers analysed the meaning (knowledge), language (syntax) and pragmatics (practice) emerging from their movement between the intersecting worlds of university and school. Findings highlight the teaching performance assessment acted as an influential boundary object which reshaped par-ticipants' practice, on both sides of this boundary. Participants reported expanded knowledge of university and school practices for preparing pre-service teachers. The implications of this include enhanced practice, increased knowledge of conducive conditions for preparing pre-service teachers and improved assessment enactment. These findings illustrate the benefits of expanded engagement of these educators and their effective transfer of inherent knowledge back and forth across the threshold between their intersecting teaching contexts.

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.

Early career teacher retention and progression are complex issues which inform discourse about and review of pre-service teacher preparation. Debate about how to best connect pre-service teachers’ theoretical learning about teaching to practical application and reflection within the classroom (praxis) is ever-present within this dialogue. Extended teaching internship is identified as effective for connecting these elements of learning to teach, through sustained placement activity situated within supportive school environments. These extended experiences are located within communities of practice and facilitate ongoing reflection on transitions from pre-service to early career teaching. The mixed methods research reported here focused on participants’ retrospective views of an extended internship and highlighted key elements that connected practice with developing understandings of what it means to be a teacher. Participants’ perspectives emphasised how their experiences established vital connections between them and the profession. Analysis of these data underpinned the development of a conceptual framework (Teacher Development and Progression Framework) that illustrates the complex nature of learning to teach and how interdependent factors support momentum and traction into and beyond the early career phase.

Australian universities are mandated to implement non-academic on-entry evaluations for all initial teacher education candidates. Universities have introduced interviews, written applications, psychometric tests, and more recently, simulation. This research sought to determine if simulation as an evaluation tool had utility as a measure of teaching dispositions and its utility in measuring candidates’ pre-existing dispositions such as self-confidence, resilience, and conscientiousness during and after a classroom simulation evaluation session. The mixed method design explored students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the simulation tool and evaluation of their own on-entry performance. The findings showed that the utility, fairness and validity of on-entry assessments of this entry requirement were justified and candidates’ self-confidence as a distal measure of classroom preparedness was affirmed. The implications of these data and findings include the refinement of processes and tools for assessing non-academic teaching dispositions and an expanded evidence base for assessing the suitability of candidates for initial teacher education.

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.