Maralyn Parker

Understanding educational theory: vital or a waste of time for student teachers?

aspiring teachers, history wars, initial teacher education, Teacher education, Teacher professional development, Teacher quality, theory in teacher education, What should a 21st century teacher know?, , ,

My student teachers often question the value of educational theory in their initial teacher education. Also often early career teachers tell me that the theory they were taught at university holds no value in their day-to-day practical lives.

I understand this point of view. The first years of teaching are largely about finding our feet and working out the system. The first years are also caught up in personal priorities such as finding permanent positions and railing against the casualisation of the workforce.

But this does not mean that theory does not underpin every decision a teacher makes. Theory even underpins the curriculum we are asked to teach. As I see it, understanding educational theory is a part of knowing why we teach what we teach and how. The theories that are taught in initial teacher education are aimed at helping beginning teachers understand who they are and why they want to teach. One of my motivations for wanting to teach History is so that I could work at helping students to be empathetic in their everyday lives. History is an excellent example of how this relationship works.

The Australian Curriculum Humanities and Social Sciences ( HASS) History strand is underpinned by what the curriculum writers have termed concepts (another word for theory). In the following, I am going to tease out some of these concepts to show how they are examples of theory in practice.

Sources

The location and interpretation of sources is the primary skill of an historian. There are many different types of sources, some more useful than others. Despite what you may think, there never is really a “bad” source. The decision to use a certain source or not is contextual. It may not be FACT but it can reveal a lot about a historical context depending on how the historian interprets the source within their study. So most sources are included or discarded according to the idea of usefulness, rather than whether they are good or bad. This is a subjective practice. The selection of a source is determined through the historian’s point of view of the world – theory. Furthermore, only a minuscule amount of human history has ever made it to the page or the gallery or the archive. Much has been destroyed. Much was never even recorded. So the job of an historian is to make connections between the sources available. This is a process of logical and rigorous imagination. The conclusions drawn are based on corroboration through continuity, change, cause and effect, but it is imagination none the less and subject to the historian’s theoretical point of view.

Cause and effect, and Continuity and Change

When historians use their imagination, they are using ideas of cause and effect, and continuity and change. For example, the reason we have the society we have at the moment is the result of cause and effect. It is very easy to trace the cause and effect through a lens of war and economy, but it is also through the concept of cause and effect that we can begin to show students that the deliberate forgetting of marginalized groups is in decision making and it is a reason that governments continue along the same homogenous pathways they have for centuries.

While society seems to be moving through a time of rapid change, the continuity of certain ways of knowing and understanding history have remained the same. The world seems to be speeding up but the way it has been governed has changed very little. White wealthy males, for example, are still the most powerful leaders, industrialisation and technological advancement are still seen by governments as the most important industries, and fear of other unknown people has been used as a method of mass control for centuries. Historians realise these theories of continuity and make their imaginative decisions about what happened in the past by through them.

Significance

There are too many events in the past to include them all and many history wars have been fought over which ones to include in the History strands of the HASS Curriculum. These history wars are most often about the inclusion and placement of histories of Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islander peoples, and non-European peoples, and the theoretical lens through which those histories are taught. The choosing of significant histories can influence the civic attitudes of generations of people so is often hard fought.

Perspective

The choice of those histories is influenced by theories often called perspectives. One of the more famous media and political wars fought over which perspectives are allowed within the Australian Curriculum was a stoush between prime minister at the time, Paul Keating, and John Howard in the early 1990s when Keating was pushing for the inclusion of Australian History which showed how the nation had been built on the blood of the Indigenous and non-white immigrant/indentured labour population. This view was pitched against Howard’s view that wanted children to know and celebrate the achievements of the Australian nation. What both these perspectives denied was the voice of the people who lived the histories they were talking about including or excluding.

Empathy

A key reason for teaching History is the theory that it teaches children to have empathy which means that they will be able to more than understand other peoples’ points of view, they will know what it might be like to be another person. The theory is that students will only begin to understand historical empathy (and in turn social empathy) if they have enough exposure to differing perspectives, can interpret their own partiality, understand that their ideas may be based in modern thought, understand that there are gaps and silences in the historical record.

There are many interpretations of what it means to teach empathy in the classroom and some believe that it cannot be taught at all. But the personal theories that a teacher takes into the classroom will also influence their ability to teach students to be empathetic. For example, if a teacher’s personal viewpoint is that students do not need differentiation, it will be harder to teach students empathy because inclusiveness is based on empathetic thinking.

I hope this post opens up some clarifying statements and discussion about the usefulness of theory in Initial Teacher Education, but also educational training, qualifications, and professional development. I believe theory is a vital component but probably needs more clarity as to why and how (as I have demonstrated in this blog post). What do you think?

 

 

Naomi Barnes is an adjunct postdoctoral fellow at the Griffith Institute of Educational Research. Her key areas of research are transitions and social media in educational research.

 

This is what we need to do to boost languages learning in Australian schools

Languages learning, National Languages Policy, , ,

Our rich multicultural nation maintains a frustratingly monolingual mindset. Discussions about Languages education in Australia typically reiterate the debate between the personal and national rewards of multilingualism versus Languages as an exotic extra in the ‘crowded curriculum’.

Focusing on the economic benefits of Languages, however, is clearly not cutting through in terms of the prioritisation and funding of Language learning and student participation in Languages in Australia, so how do we move the debate forward?

Let’s start with where we are, and why we are stranded here.

A policy vacuum

While the EU language education policy speaks ‘mother tongue plus two’, Australia currently does not have any national Languages policy. Its absence testifies silently to an English-speaking monolingual mindset that continues to undermine support for Languages education. Cue the new Australian Curriculum that serves as a default Languages policy: it speaks eloquently and very clearly about what Languages education should be and mandates Languages from F– 10. Ergo, Languages is a non-negotiable learning area, so further discussion about its optional character is well and truly obsolete.

And yet … this binding endorsement can be easily ‘overlooked’ in the vastness of the Australian Curriculum, so we call for a political and pedagogical commitment to a national Languages policy. It could address many concerns around Languages education currently coursing through the media and topical in public debate. To name just a few of these concerns:

  • Critically low senior-student participation rates in Languages
  • Insufficient time allocation for Languages in schools
  • Variation in Language education across the states
  • Insufficiently differentiated course modalities in Year 12
  • Languages inequality as evidenced in ‘priority’ vs. non-priority languages, ‘elite’ or ‘academic’ vs. ‘lower-status’ community languages
  • The possibility of replacing Languages with cultural studies or the ‘more universal language’ of coding.

Successive governments have a record of starting and abandoning inadequately funded and inappropriately staffed Languages programs. A national Languages policy would provide focus and a framework for developing Languages education beyond the next election.

Dropping the F-word

Senator Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training as we write, refers to modern languages as ‘foreign’ languages. Clunk! Use of the word ‘foreign’ sets up an English-versus-Other mindset, which is obsolete and misleading in today’s global society. The word ‘foreign’ also has connotations of something alien, bizarre, extraneous, ‘not from here’—none of which are helpful when we want schools and students to commit to teaching and learning another language.

The LNP was not the only offender in this case: Labor also referred to ‘foreign languages’ in its recent policy document ‘Growing Together’, an agenda for tackling inequality in Australia. And even SBS World News Radio uses the ‘F-word’ in its (otherwise insightful) report about the push by ‘foreign’-language teachers for a national languages policy to improve language-learning rates in Australia.

Moreover, common labels like ‘first’ and ‘second’ languages suggest a language hierarchy. It is simply not factual to assume that there is one, universal ‘first’ language, particularly in a multilingual society like Australia, and that this ‘first’ language is English for all students. After all, 2011 Census figures indicate almost a quarter of our population was born overseas and there are some 200 languages currently spoken in Australia. Ranking languages as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ is dismissive of the plurilingual potential of our students.

Money DOES matter

Notwithstanding the LNP’s current general support for Languages education, the actual money allocated and the strategies they describe are very modest: namely, just $1.8 million and a pilot program including only 10,000 preschool children.

Other funding stated in their policy document is not for language teaching but for the secondary-education focused Teach for Australia (TFA) program that attracts $22.4 million.

Overall, what ‘support’ for language education means in terms of concrete funding remains obscure across the policy statements of all major Australian parties. The Labor statement argues that Languages education should not be an ‘optional extra’ within school curriculum but its support for education is a general one and it provides no specific ideas about how it would support Languages education.

Time to move beyond minimalist approaches

As with the Labor party, the Greens’ support for Languages emerges from its support for education generally. Their policy statement argues its support for Languages education in lofty language, but in words that contain little substance: Languages education will open ‘new worlds’, ‘break down barriers’ and bring about a society which is ‘more open, harmonious and tolerant’.

On a positive note, the statement affirms a commitment to teaching Asian and indigenous languages. While the funding for the teaching and learning of Asian languages is important and support for indigenous language education long overdue, these aims remain narrowly described in terms of ‘appreciation and respect for the cultures, customs and history of languages education’.

Such claims invest in the notion that learning a few words and understanding cultures and histories is a pursuit equivalent to languages learning. It fails to account for the complex linguistic, performative and normative understandings that are involved in languages learning, or the behavioural and conceptual cultural notions that set out the ambit of the worldview provided by language.

Age is no barrier

The statements of all parties iterate the common misperception that there is an age-limit on language-learning capacity. This is inaccurate, and also lowers people’s expectations about the myriad ways they can enter into multilingual capability.

While it is true that it is important and useful for children to learn languages at an early age, it is not true that younger children learn languages more easily. It is just that older learners and young children enter into the languages learning process differently. As people can successfully learn languages at any age and can engage different abilities to enable them to do so, the government needs to broaden its focus (and funding) accordingly to facilitate the uptake of Languages throughout the lifelong learning process.

It’s not all about economics and productivity

The prime rationale of Languages education, as described in all policy statements, is to serve Australia’s economic development by facilitating our engagement and competitiveness in the global economy.

While languages capabilities certainly can afford business and trade opportunities, instrumentalist discussions of this kind serve to reduce the characteristics of language to simplistic skills and knowledges to do with ‘local culture and business practices’. Reducing the ‘language barrier effect’ in international trade and business might be one outcome of Languages education, but it is facile to construct Languages education (and ‘priority’ languages) in terms of the economic importance of certain countries to Australia.

Nor just about maximising exam results

A large body of scientific literature has increased general awareness of how language learning strengthens brain function, problem solving skills, literacy and cognitive development.

Once again, though, these benefits only go a small way towards describing how Languages education is useful and important. Arguments such as these reassert the notion that Languages education is important only in terms of performativity—i.e. how multilingual capability can ‘pay out’ in quantifiable terms, in trade dollars or test scores. Moreover, saying that Languages education ‘supports’ literacy suggests that language learning can somehow be extraneous to itself and reduced to serving proficiency in some ‘first’ language.

A recipe for social cohesion?

Intercultural understanding is an important dimension of Languages, but it is instrumentalist overreach to describe the reduction of fear and prejudice as a rationale for Languages education. While very real concerns, fear and prejudice are not necessarily mitigated through Languages learning. Their reduction, however, does go a long way towards enabling future language learning.

Shifting the paradigm

To transform current debates about Languages education, we need a national language policy that works from an understanding of the multilingual capability of the world. A national policy could formally predicate the centrality of Languages education in schools and the latent multilingual capacity of multicultural Australia.

A national language policy would reshape more than school timetables and trade figures. Multilingualism and Languages education are too often understood in instrumentalist terms that cannot capture the complex linguistic, performative and normative understandings that are invested in language learning. The instrumentalist paradigm is underpinned by a monolingual mindset that, by default, positions Languages as an advantageous add-on skill. Learners may (and do) opt out.

Language, however, is both an element and an engine, component and constitutive of knowledge, culture and identity. It is this relationship that embeds the learning, use and maintenance of languages in and beyond Australia. This dynamic inter-dependence provides a sustainable focus and rationale for Languages education in our schools: the authentic negotiation of understandings of culture and identities through and in languages. A multilingual lens opens up new perspectives for socially just and innovative Languages education beyond the ‘first’ and ‘foreign’.

 

Dr Michiko Weinmann teaches specialist units in Languages education and EAL at Deakin University. She directs the Master of Languages teaching, and co-directs the Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages (CTaLL), at Deakin University. Building on her multilingual capabilities, an extensive career as a languages teacher, and as Co-Director of CTaLL, she supports and promotes the teaching of languages and cultures including Indigenous, community, European and the languages of Australia’s Asian neighbours. She has researched and published widely in the areas of language, culture and identity, and is a co-editor of the journal TESOL in Context.

 

rarber

 

Dr Ruth Arber has been teaching and working in the area of English as an Additional Language pedagogy and practice for the last three decades. She currently teaches units for language pedagogy and practice at Deakin University, co-directs the Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages (CTaLL) and is a co-director of the Master of TESOL. She has researched and published extensively on identity and difference, its consequences for critical and inclusive education and for the development of innovative and inclusive languages pedagogy and practice in diverse contexts. She is co-editor of the journal TESOL in Context.

How Australian schools are teaching languages through video-conferencing: your school can do it too!

Teaching languages using video-conferencing, Teaching of languages, , , , ,

Many schools across Victoria struggle to meet the government’s  legislative requirement of providing a curriculum covering the eight key learning areas, particularly languages other than English.

This issue is more the case in non-metropolitan areas and is often the result of the physical and financial restrictions in specialist teachers attending non-metropolitan schools for short periods of time. For a remote Australian primary school, the idea of using video-conferencing to connect pupils with a distant language teacher has immediate appeal.

 Getting the right mix of language and technology

However, the integration of technology and language learning has presented obstacles, just as it has promised innovation. In taking this route, schools face a range of challenges including accessing grants to purchase VC systems (often over $10,000); understanding how to operate video-conferencing (VC) systems both from a teaching and technological perspective; developing knowledge about how teaching through VC  requires changes to teaching practices, and the challenge in creating a sense of presence in order to motivate students when the language teacher is not in the classroom.

My colleagues and I decided to look closely at how schools successfully do this in the Australian state of Victoria.

Our research focus

Our research team focused on two networks of schools in regional and remote contexts in Victoria, showcasing innovative, sustainable language programs that have set up through video-conferencing. The first network involves one small regional school delivering a Japanese program to 12 other schools across a 20,000km2 area. Schools are able to access a series of 30 minutes lessons during the course of a week. This includes a 30 minute session undertaken directly with the language teacher, a 30 minutes extension provided by the classroom teacher offline, a 30 minute session where schools log in with the language teacher and other regional schools to work in peer groups and a 30 minute extension session which focuses on hiragana writing practice.

The school which provides the language program, Trawalla Primary School, started the program after previous efforts had failed. By finding out about other models of provision in another state, and by building on their past experiences, they realised that they had the knowledge to develop their own innovative and sustainable model of languages provision through VC.

The second network involves one language teacher who rotates between three schools. Each week the teacher is based at one school and teaches languages classes face to face for one group of students, while simultaneously teaching to two other groups of students at two other schools through the VC system.

Again this system was set up after the three schools had struggled together to fund a sustainable and quality language program, and repeatedly failed to find a language teacher in their regional context.

Our research focus was how these two networks emerged and how they operate – what decisions were made, and re-made, about how teachers, pupils, schools and video-conferencing technology could be brought together, to make a viable and effective network of primary school language education.

 The technology

Significant changes in recent years have helped overcome a number of crucial challenges with the technology needed for VC. These have included the VicSmart project (2005-2011) which has connected Victorian Government schools to an optical fibre broadband network, with the goal of supporting digital learning in schools. The Department of Education (DET) now provides a centralised, internet service to government schools, access to centralised phone support for technical issues and all such schools have regular localised technical support onsite.

Federal and State level grants have also enabled schools to receive high-quality video-conferencing systems, which at over $10,000, are beyond the budget of many small schools.

The teaching

The wonderful teachers involved in these networks argue that there is nothing that cannot be taught through a video-conferencing-based lesson. However, aside from enthusiasm, the success of such programmes is the result of building up expertise and knowledge around a broad range of issues and making modifications, as required.

The numerous areas that the language teachers need to address include:

  • building technology expertise
  • student engagement with a remote teacher
  • changes to teaching practices when teaching through technology as well as the teaching activities undertaken;
  • the integration of different types of technology (e.g. PowerPoint, iPads, websites and links; videos, etc…) and
  • differentiation in curriculum when teaching to small, whole school cohorts of students. For example, some of the small schools only had 10 students from Prep (Foundation) to Year 6 and they all study in the one class. The language teacher needs to make a range of adjustments when engaging with students of different ages.

 You can do this at your school too

The Languages Unit at the Victorian DET, has produced a range of materials based on the Trawalla Primary School model. The aim is to encourage schools in regional and remote areas to have a go at teaching or accessing languages through VC.

These materials include three digital stories from the perspective of:

  • The principal who set up the program and the benefits it has bought to the school;
  • The language teacher delivering the program, some of the points and successes of this approach;
  • The perspective of a receiving school, which is located in a remote area, and has previously struggled to provide a language program.

Examining all of the information that is needed to set up a VC program can seem overwhelming. However, the videos capture the passion and energy of the teachers, principals, parents and students and demonstrate how easily programs run. Importantly, it shows how school communities spread out across the state are working together to provide fun and engaging language lessons.

Accompanying the three films is a guidance manual, on how to set up such a network, including details of support services for digital learning, the use of video-conferencing systems and advice from the three perspectives represented in the digital stories.

The digital stories and support manual are available on the Victorian government teacher support, FUSE website.

Most importantly, the expert use of VC allows students in regional and remote areas to gain access to a key specialist area, languages education, and the Trawalla Primary School model can be replicated across rural and regional areas. Additionally, the models we looked at in our research highlight how staff and students are developing expert knowledge in technology and innovative teaching and learning practises; essential skills to take into the future.

 

SlaughterYvette Slaughter lectures in Language and Literacy Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include language policy and planning, language education (policy, methodologies and program implementation), and language and social cohesion. Yvette is currently working on research projects focusing on equitable access to languages education in the Australian context, as well as a project focused on developing a range of materials to alleviate the concerns of principals in schools with high numbers of students from EAL/D and refugee backgrounds. The materials were designed to inform schools and principals about the relationship between literacy and numeracy in English, and in languages other than English, and the educational benefits of an integrated curriculum for all students, including EAL and refugee students.

This research project Bridging the rural/urban divide: languages education through video-conferencing was supported by an interdisciplinary grant through the Melbourne Networked Society Institute (MNSI) at The University of Melbourne and awarded to Prof. John Hajek, Dr Wally Smith, Dr Yvette Slaughter, Dr Shanton Chang and Dr Suelette Dreyfus.

 

Image by Adobe Stock

It is not easy being a teacher: my story

talking about teaching, Teachers' work

I did not become a teacher the day I walked out of university. I was trained as a teacher but it took many years for me to feel like a teacher. I’m still not sure I’m there yet.

Often transition takes years. There is a lot written about how to act in the first year of a new education environment. There is a lot written about what we should know and what we should do. There are myriad competing ideas about what a good induction or orientation looks like.

What drops through the gaps is often the very challenging identity work that happens as you move from being a university student to becoming a teacher.

How do we shift into our new identities in our new environments? It takes a long time to feel like a teacher even though we might call ourselves teachers.

Negotiating the first year of teaching

A lot of the first year of teaching is learning what not to say and how not to act. Negotiating new personalities and politics within a school community can be difficult.

Soon you begin to tell yourself that permanent work comes with a certain type of behaviour or performance, and you begin to pick and choose what you talk about with colleagues and what you keep silent about.

You may hide that you don’t really know how to do something. You might be less than honest about how your Year 9 class is to teach. You might talk about the student centred activities you have facilitated and play down the amount of direct instruction you use. You might be buying things for your classes because it is easier than ordering them through the school budget.

You tell your official mentor that things are going well, but cry into your pillow at night.

We need to talk about the difficulties we continually encounter as teachers

Teaching has a massive attrition rate. The availability of secondary teaching staff is reaching a critical point. It is not that we don’t have enough teachers in Australia. We have plenty. But they are no longer in teaching. Being a teacher is not easy and it is not smooth sailing. It takes years of personal and professional struggle to decide on it as a vocation. We need to talk about it; break some silences.

I am not saying that early career teachers should break their silence. I am saying experienced teachers should. When dynamic and respected teachers say that they had a terrible second prac, it demonstrates something that cannot be taught in a pedagogy or curriculum class. It fills in some gaps.

Breaking the silence demonstrates that we learn by jumping hurdles; not by pretending they don’t exist. In fact, the more hurdles we jump the better we get at it. We need a conversation that balances how difficult teaching is as a profession and why people stay in it. Honest conversations about why we come to this profession and what decisions we make that keep us there.

For those reasons I have decided to share my story.

My story

I was brought up in a conservative family and alternative school where girls rarely became something other than teachers, nurses or stay at home mothers. I realise now that this mentality was archaic for the early 1990s. I think my mother did as well, because I was half-heartedly encouraged to look at engineering, but always told it was good for a girl to have a trade. Something she can fall back on for when she had her babies.

Teaching was a trade to my family. Teaching was considered to provide flexibility of hours that ensured I could still be the primary care giver and have a career.

I resisted teaching and instead worked towards international studies because it was a good profession that incorporated my love of the social sciences, especially history. My guidance counsellor told me that no one from my school ever got their first preference. I thought I was being clever and put History teaching first, international studies second.

I got my first preference. My first preference was in Brisbane and I had a reason to escape the small town.

So I trained as a secondary teacher.

Why I stayed in teaching

I’m not sure I ever really committed to teaching because I felt uncomfortable with the teaching bit all the way through my degree and for the first five years on the job (I loved the History and Social Science bit). But I was brought up to honour my commitments. It was embedded. “You always finish what you start, Naomi.” I can still hear my father’s Protestant Work Ethic in my ear. I also couldn’t think of anything else I could do that would allow me to be paid for working with History.

One day I remember having a Year 10 class brutally destroy my love for History. I walked away from work that day at a crossroad. I stick out the profession or find a new one. If I was to stay I needed another reason to be there.

The situation in the classroom was pretty bleak but as the weeks went on, evidence came to light that the key perpetrators of my disillusionment were in a pretty bad place. In fact, one of the most difficult students was being online bullied by the other culprits. It was pretty sophisticated bullying as well. Both the police and Microsoft got involved.

Suddenly, I realised that teaching could not be about the subject I was teaching but it had to be about the students. I gave myself an ultimatum. I needed to be there for the students or leave.

I stayed for eight more years.

I am at another crossroad for teaching

Now I am on maternity leave. I will be on leave until 2018 when I will again have to make a decision. I have to weigh up teaching but this time against new variables.

Will I go back to the classroom or will I pursue education research? Who knows, but I’m sure I’ll work it out. I just don’t want to be silent on it.

What’s your story?

 

 

 

Naomi Barnes is a postdoctoral fellow at the Griffith Institute of Educational Research. Her key areas of research are transitions and social media in educational research.

 

 

Is ‘pedagogical love’ the secret to Finland’s educational success?

pedagogical love

Teachers and teacher educators in Finland are well aware that Finnish schoolchildren perform well in academic metrics such as PISA, but they seem much more concerned that their children are happy. It was something that impressed me immensely when I visited the country.

The wellbeing of children is central to Finnish society and culture and underpins their approach to education. Relationships between students, teachers, parents and even educational administrators are based on trust, which I believe is their defining motivation.

They even have a term for it: pedagogical love. It is an interesting concept that encapsulates the Finnish approach to the teaching-learning relationship.

There is much that we have already learned, and more we could learn, from the way Finland educates its children. Pedagogical love could be the most important.

What is ‘pedagogical love’ and how did it emerge as a way of teaching-learning?

Uno Cygnaeus, a nineteenth century educator who is considered to be the ‘father’ of the Finnish public school system, first mentioned this kind of love. He described ‘good teacherhood’ as not just being able to deliver content knowledge, but as being able ‘to blaze with the spirit of sacred love’. So pedagogical love is seen as a form of love that is distinct from other, perhaps more familiar forms, for example: romantic love; maternal love; love for fellow humans; or love of one’s country.

More than a century later we know that positive relationships between teachers, students and parents are central to effective teaching and learning. As I see it, the concept of pedagogical love is no different, in that it starts from the premise that human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures, and that intellect and will can often be secondary drivers of interest.

Other contemporary versions of this concept in education settings include the notion of a strengths-based approach to learning, which recognises that learners are individuals with particular strengths that can be directly addressed and enhanced in working with the active power and strength of children. Strengths can include emotional intelligence and creative imagination as well as academic ability or physical prowess. Contemporary responses to this in a curriculum sense include Play-Based learning in Early Childhood Education, and Individual Learning Plans and Personal Development goals as, for example, in senior school Certificates in Education such as SACE.

In the same way, ‘pedagogical love would rather aim at the discovery of pupils’ strengths and interests and act based on these to strengthen students’ self-esteem and self-image as active learners’.

Pedagogical love is more than learning plans or curriculum frameworks

In Finland however, pedagogical love appears to manifest at a far deeper level than just as curriculum frameworks or individual learning plans. In fact, while children and young people are valued as individuals, there appears to be a more collective approach to learning in which all children experience the same curriculum, the same opportunities and the same support from the whole community to achieve collaboratively. The greater good (or the good of the nation, the people) appears to be more highly valued than individual competitiveness and achievement.

The Finns are well known for their modest and self-effacing characteristic and this is also deeply embedded in their cultural history, which is founded in part on their hard-won independence, but also on their mythology, as exemplified by The Kalevala, the 19th Century epic poem compiled from Finnish oral history and folklore, recognised as one of the most significant works of Finnish literature. The stories and characters in The Kalevala promote certain values and morals that are respected and upheld in Finnish culture, and by association in Finnish education today. These include the idea that the way to solve problems is by the intellect rather than brute force; that all children are loved and respected; that all Finns strive to be part of a civilised nation.

It is all about trust

In the schools this can be observed in the level of trust that is apparent at all levels: teachers trusting pupils; parents trusting and respecting teachers; principals trusting teachers to do their job well without formal performance management; municipal directors trusting principals to manage their schools without formal inspectors, and so on. As mentioned in my previous blog, Should we be more like Finland? The Finnish education system explained teachers are relatively independent. They are free to teach in the way they want, but without abrogating their responsibilities for good teacherhood, which relies on establishing reciprocal relationships of trust. As educators Kaarina Määttä and Satu Uusiautti put it:

‘A teacher who is aware of pedagogical love as a way of teaching will aim for a balance between keeping pupils in constant dependency and allowing complete independence: Pedagogical love speaks to interdependence, that is the recognition and acceptance that we need others’.

This two-way relationship between teacher and learner also requires the teacher to recognise that teaching is personal and relational and dependent on their own personality, and the impact of their influence and guidance. It is referred to as the teacher having ‘pathic knowledge’, which means that the teacher maintains ‘a shared sensibility of being in the world as One and the Other’.

…and expectations

Pedagogical love therefore is not a form of sentimentalizing or watering down of standards and expectations. It is an acknowledgement of achieving well and aiming high according to the expectations of self, school and society. Where these are aligned, as in the case of Finland, ‘success for all’ is not an empty piece of rhetoric.

Language is the key

Finally, the unique Finnish language holds another key to understanding Finnish culture, schooling and society. No other country or culture speaks or reads this language or any language quite similar, and it brings the Finns together as a nation in a way that English speaking countries may not fully be able to understand. The fact that teaching the Finnish language is referred to in the school curriculum as ‘the Mother Tongue’ demonstrates how deeply embedded it is in the Finnish national psyche and imbued with a personification of unconditional love and care.

How pedagogical love works in practice

By age 16 many Finnish high school students are living independently while studying, supported by a living allowance from the state. This is not uncommon in Nordic countries, and underpins the approach to senior school in which students are treated and respected as young adults rather than adolescents, and given responsibilities that they must honour.

For example, Taidelukio School in Savonlinna is a specialist art and music high school with fully equipped music and art studios. On enrolment, all students are given a key to the school by the principal, who trusts them to come and go after school and on weekends to be able to access the facilities. No teachers are required to supervise and there has never been a problem in the ten years that this practice has occurred. Students sign a contract and know that if anything happens this entitlement will be taken away. Trust is the key to making this work.

Similarly, trust extends to all visitors to the schools. At no time was I asked to sign in or show that I had criminal history clearance, as happens now in our country under our severe compliance policies that have understandably arisen from a history of unfortunate treatment of children by adults.

In all the schools I visited, behaviour management did not appear to be a major issue. Teachers were addressed by their first name and the relationship between student and teacher appears to be much closer than the more formal approach adopted in many countries.

Significance of the free school lunch in Finland

A significant factor in developing and maintaining this relationship is the daily school lunch, where students and teachers sit and eat together in the school canteen. I observed this in every school, even the kindergartens, as I was always invited to partake in lunch.

I firmly believe that the simple fact of eating and socialising together every day has a number of significant educational benefits: the children learn appropriate social manners and rituals related to eating and putting away their dishes; they have a healthy and nutritious meal every day (and I believe this is linked to improved behaviours); they learn to mix freely and socially with each other as well as teaching staff and other adults; teachers can observe social behaviours and peer groupings and whether particular children are eating alone or not mixing with their peers; and parents do not have to worry about packing school lunches! Of course, providing free meals is a big expense, but the Finnish education budget covers this as well.

Despite the cost of introducing a free meal scheme, if there was one thing I would recommend adopting in Australian schools, it would be this, as I believe the benefits would outweigh the costs in the long term. We know that in South Australia for example many children come to school hungry and do not eat well, and if they do eat are often consuming unhealthy processed foods containing sugar and preservatives. These hype up behaviour and cause problems for teachers and other students, as well as learning difficulties for the child. The increasing use of medication to deal with behavioural problems often blamed on medical diagnoses such as autism and ADHD for example, could be a case of treating the symptom rather than the cause. The Australian Autism ADHD Foundation for example, cites research suggesting that ‘these disorders are associated with genetic predispositions triggered by environmental factors…such as a “Western style” diet, consisting of too many nutrient-poor refined foods, additives, preservatives and colourings, and other chemicals’.

Could we do pedagogical love in our schools?

All of this provides ‘food for thought’ for educators in other countries, such as Australia. To what extent could we apply the principle of pedagogical love in our schools, given our country has vastly different history, climate, culture and language as well as educational, teacher training and school funding systems?

Could we become a nation which is child-centred and in which every family respects the child and considers education the foundation to national prosperity, as well as personal wellbeing?

Many Australian parents have a view of schools that has been coloured by their own experiences, often negative, so this would require a massive cultural shift in mindset.

Could we ask Australian teachers to accept a lower salary and invest the funding balance into subsidised school meals instead? If we want to learn from the Finns, these are some of the questions that would need to be addressed at a macro level.

At a micro level however, I would like to think that we could still encourage and develop good teacherhood in Australia through practising pedagogical love in the classroom.

 

TOMDr Tom Stehlik is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. His research interests include adult learning, student engagement, school governance and communities of practice. He has had a long association with Steiner Education as a parent, educator, researcher, consultant and board member of a Waldorf School. In July 2014 Dr Stehlik took up an Endeavour Executive Fellowship to study teacher education and schooling in Finland.

Pearson’s insidious plan to profit from poor families in developing countries

Edu-business, future of public education, Pearsonisation of schools, Pearsonization, schools for profit, standardised testing

Global education business, Pearson, continues to find new ways to make a profit from the education of children around the world. As its influence and profit growth stagnates in many economically developed countries, where it has made billions of dollars from providing standardised testing regimes and associated services, it has turned its attention to economically developing countries.

Pearson is growing its business in counties in Africa, South America and Asia, including India, where nations struggle to provide national systems of schooling. I believe what it is doing in these developing nations is perhaps even more insidious than the way it profited from helping impose a testing mentality to almost every major schooling authority in almost every developed democratic country.

Why Pearson is losing influence in economically developed democracies

Pearson is a big provider of textbooks, learning resources, assessment services, online learning needs and teacher professional development. Providing these services to economically developed countries such as the USA, UK and Australia has proved lucrative for Pearson over the past decade. Just last year it made over $5 billion in global sales and over $1 billion in adjusted operating profit. While these figures are comparatively strong, since 2012, Pearson hasn’t experienced any significant overall growth as a company. In fact, last year Pearson suffered a 40% drop in share price performance and has recently announced the need to cut 10 per cent of its global work force or 4,000 jobs.

This performance can be explained by a number of factors to do with the stabilisation and even reduction in sales in Pearson’s core markets. For example, let’s consider Pearson’s assessment business. At the turn of the 21st century standardised testing could be found at the core of many education systems, and the mandate for annual testing worked to open the space for commercial education providers to prosper.

Against this backdrop, the education market was reinvented around test development and preparation, data analysis and management and the related provision of online curricular and remedial services in an attempt to improve students’ performance outcomes.

Yet, the weight of evidence suggests that standardised testing has failed to improve education outcomes. Instead, standardised testing has been blamed for a narrowing and simplifying of curriculum that has undermined both teaching and learning. Given this, policy has started to change. The passage of the Every Student Succeed Acts (ESSA) in the USA (a reform to the No Child Left Behind policy) has given power to the States to decide how they test their students.

To put this in context in Australia, the USA has effectively scrapped their NAPLAN type tests and allowed their states and territories to decide how, when and what they will assess their students on. This move has obvious consequences for Pearson. Without nationally defined standards many of the large-scale tests developed by Pearson for national use are no longer required. This means that the testing market has been opened up to competition from lower cost alternatives, confirming Pearson no longer has the monopoly it once did.

Pearson’s ‘growth’ plan for developing nations

However, the answer to some of Pearson’s testing woes in economically developed countries has presented itself in economically developing countries.

Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund (PALF) has made an $80 million investment in low-fee private school chains in Southern Africa, Asia and India. Pearson’s rationale for investing in low-fee private schools is based on the charitable notion that it is delivering an education to students in countries where access to public education is limited or nonexistent.

These low fee private schools are about making a private profit at the expense of poor families and poor economies

While such schools might be low fee, they constitute a high percentage of the disposable income of poor families, often resulting in gender discrimination where boys’ education is given priority over girls’ education in the same family. Moreover, low-fee private schools that will generate profit is economically dependent upon the employment of un- and under-qualified and very lowly paid, non-union organised teachers often using scripted pedagogies. These schools have few physical resources (e.g. computers, science labs, sporting facilities), large class sizes and there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of low-fee private schools.

This business strategy is based on the growth ‘markets’ that exist in countries of the developing world. Pearson says there is a ‘unique opportunity to capitalize on the emerging middle class’of almost 3 billion people who now earn enough money to invest in education to either improve their own or their children’s lives.

The Pearson plan undermines the development of quality public school systems

The outcome of this investment by Pearson challenges the aspiration that a free, high-quality public education for all is central to democracy and a socially just society. Through PALF, Pearson is working to replace or negate the responsibilities of governments to develop a public education system that affords the right of every child to access a free education. Many of these countries do not have strong legislature around for-profit schooling and even welcome the ‘solution’ that low-fee private school chains offer. Thus, Pearson has a new market to flourish in.

As I see it educators need to call out the significance of Pearson’s actions. The social, political and economic fallout for the countries where low-fee private schooling is growing are inevitable and may well have global consequences.

 

Anna-Hogan4Anna Hogan is a lecturer in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Queensland. Anna has been researching the role of global edu-business on education policy and practice. She is currently working on projects that investigate the privatisation of Australian public schooling, the effects of curriculum outsourcing on teachers’ work and the commercialisation of student health and wellbeing. Anna has recent publications in the Australian Educational Researcher, Journal of Education Policy and Critical Studies in Education.

Teaching literacy is more than teaching simple reading skills: it can’t be done in five easy steps

learning to read, teaching literacy, teaching reading, ,

If we truly care about all Australian children and young people becoming literate I believe it is vital we understand and define the complexity of literacy.

The conflation of different terms like reading instruction and literacy is not very useful. While reading is part of literacy, literacy is a much bigger concept which is continually changing due to the ever-increasing forms of literacy that are developing.

Educators who specialise in literacy are currently working with the Australian Curriculum definition (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) which defines literacy as encompassing:

…listening to, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating oral, print, visual and digital texts, and using and modifying language for different purposes in a range of contexts.

Literacy encompasses the knowledge and skills students need to access, understand, analyse and evaluate information, make meaning, express thoughts and emotions, present ideas and opinions, interact with others and participate in activities at school and in their lives beyond school….

Becoming literate is not simply about knowledge and skills. Certain behaviours and dispositions assist students to become effective learners who are confident and motivated to use their literacy skills broadly.

For example, the Australian curriculum’s definition of literacy thus far exceeds the ‘key skills’ addressed in the recently launched FIVE from FIVE project proposed by the Centre for Independent Studies. FIVE from FIVE is being touted, with much fanfare, as some all-encompassing way of teaching children to read. Evidence-based methods of how to teach reading differ markedly from such simplistic ‘solutions’.

Each one of the ‘five key skills’ (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) listed by the FIVE from FIVE project is indeed an important skill. This is why they are already embedded in most teachers’ reading programs. In my experience there are few literacy educators who would deny the importance of phonics and phonemic awareness (identifying, thinking about, and working with the individual sounds in words) as needed when becoming literate.

However, these are not the only skills needed in helping a child learn to read. Any child being taught to read in a way that focuses solely on these skills will be short-changed. I believe that asserting that such a program is sufficient could be damaging to many children as it could lead to them disengaging from the literacy learning process.

Stop telling teachers there is a simplistic way to teach reading

Like many educators, I am fed up with the suggestion that teachers and principals, parents and policymakers are unaware of the importance of teaching these skills. Competent, experienced readers sample just enough visual information to feel satisfied that they have grasped the meaning so far of whatever text they are reading. They also bring their past experiences and knowledge of language to the information in a specific text and use prediction and questioning strategies to test and re‐test that they have understood the author’s purpose in a particular context. An over‐emphasis on letter‐sound relationships can be very confusing for children learning to read.

Australian teachers, principals, parents and policymakers already have a deep understanding of the repertoire of strategies and approaches that need to be chosen to suit the intellectual and learning needs of individual children. They know how important it is to make sure that all children learn to read for meaning and to enjoy the process.

Let’s talk about what is important

I agree with eminent Australian literacy educators and educational researchers Emmitt, Hornsby and Wilson who explain that the:

Three important sources of information in text are meaning, grammar and letter‐sound relationships – often referred to as semantics, syntax and graphophonic relationships respectively. Emmitt, Hornsby and Wilson (2013, p.3)

These sources, or cueing systems, work together simultaneously. Over‐emphasis on any one cueing system when learning to read is not effective.

Also, as teachers know, a rich vocabulary and fluency are significant but children need to be able to go beyond simple literal ‘comprehension’ of a text. They need to be able to make inferences and evaluate the importance of words within a text.

Teachers of reading today share rich authentic literary texts with their students. They know extensive research has demonstrated the importance of prediction and questioning strategies in learning to be literate.

One of the best ways for children to excel in reading comprehension tasks is for them to have the opportunity to interact widely with a wide range of books, selected by them, for enjoyment.

Children not only need to learn how to make meaning from text to carefully analyse the arguments or assertions in a text, to evaluate texts, but also how to create their own with confidence and creative flair.

There is no single recipe for literacy learning. The FIVE from FIVE project is yet another implicit criticism of the Australian teaching profession; and a good example of what we should not be doing by reducing the teaching of reading to five skills.

Instead we should be investing in more teachers to work with the children who need more intensive support. Our public schools should be appropriately funded to provide rich authentic resources and ongoing teacher professional learning. These are the things that will make a difference.

 

EwingRobyn Ewing is Professor of Teacher Education and the Arts at the University of Sydney. She teaches in the areas of curriculum, English and drama, language and early literacy development. She works with both undergraduate and postgraduate pre-service and inservice teachers. Robyn’s research has particularly focused on the use of educational or process drama with authentic literary texts to develop students’ imaginations and critical literacies. She has been published widely in this area. Her current research interests also include teacher education, especially the experiences of early-career teachers and the role of mentoring; sustaining curriculum innovation; and evaluation, inquiry and case-based learning.

 Robyn was president of the Primary English Teachers Association from 2001-2006 and is immediate past president of the Australian Literacy Educators Association (ALEA) and former vice president of Sydney Story Factory.  She is also a council member of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), an Honorary Associate with Sydney Theatre Company, Board member of West Words and Visiting Scholar at Barking Gecko Children’s Theatre. She enjoys working collaboratively with classroom teachers interested in innovative curriculum practices. 

Private interests shaping public education: let’s not follow the US example

American education policymaking, Private think tanks, public schooling in Australia, think tanks, , , ,

Private interests are playing an increasingly prominent role in public education. It is a global trend that is already evident in Australia, as we can see from previous posts on this blog.

I believe we can learn a lot from what is happening in American education policymaking. In particular, strategies are evident around efforts by private interests in the US, such as philanthropies, to influence education policy using what we call “idea orchestration” — arranging all the pieces in the policymaking process by aligning the efforts of think tanks and other intermediaries in ways that essentially privatize public policymaking.

Few would argue against a need for substantial reform in American education. There is widespread concern with the country’s performance on international measures as well as with its notable achievement gaps between rich and poor or minority students. While chronic concerns with the education system have sparked generations of education reform, (as I show in a new analysis with Jameson Brewer and Priya Goel La Londe in the Australian Educational Researcher) recent policies are driven by private interests and reflect a particular focus on private sector models.

Most notably, these interests are re-shaping education policymaking not through traditional democratic channels, but through business investment-style strategies manifested in education policy as “idea orchestration.”

In some ways, private interests penetrating public policymaking in the US is not new. For generations, the for-profit business sector has advanced its vision of a low-cost system producing employable graduates, while non-profit philanthropies like the Carnegie or Ford Foundations have had their own initiatives in areas such as improving the quality of teaching, or addressing poverty.

The New Edu-Philanthropy

However, the recent wave of what has been called “corporate education reform” features a central role for the private sector that is different in at least three ways.

First, the scale of private resources directed at influencing education policy is unprecedented, as evident by the sheer size of some of the primary movers and shakers. For instance, the Walton family, by far the wealthiest in America, directs a foundation with a primary focus on reforming public education. The Gates Foundation, which combines the wealth of two of the world’s three richest people, has assets of almost $45 billion (USD). Especially in an era of tight budgets and increasing economic inequality, the resources these individuals can dangle in front of policymakers and organizations can be an irresistible enticement for embracing their agendas.

Secondly, the non-profit and for-profit elements of the private sector are in remarkable alignment in terms of their agendas for education. Earlier efforts to reform education often saw philanthropies and businesses taking contrasting, if not conflicting, approaches. For instance, the Henry Ford II famously lamented the perceived anti-capitalist direction of his family’s namesake foundation. Now, all of the “big six” philanthropies active in education reform leverage the wealth accumulated relatively recently by their business-person founders: the Gates fortune from Microsoft, the Walton wealth from the Wal-Mart chain of discount stores (the largest private-sector employer in the US), for instance. Thus, it can be expected that the efforts of the foundations are aligned with, or at least not opposed to, the business interests of the companies that made their founders wealthy.

Third, the business sensibilities these individuals used in amassing their fortunes are being directly applied in how they manage their philanthropic efforts as well as how they expect the recipients of their largess to manage their own efforts. In fact, there is a remarkable confluence of interest and objectives amongst these leading philanthropies in supporting competition among individuals and organizations, with the implications that schools should be run in the same way that these philanthropists have accumulated and managed their own wealth: through business strategies. Hence they are throwing their support largely behind policies that promote consumer choice, competition between schools, and greater autonomy for schools.

Thought Tanks

In contrast to previous generations of private influence on public policy, current patterns of philanthropic activity are different, focusing not only on giving, but on managing and orchestrating efforts. A defining feature of this new business-based education philanthropy is not simply its endorsement of a private-sector model for schools, but a business-style strategy to bring this vision to fruition. Instead of simply throwing money at an issue, funding a study, a project, or an organization, these business-based philanthropists treat their efforts as comprehensive investments. As with the rise of their own business empires, any investment is buttressed with related efforts around policy, politics, and public image. Rather than just channeling funding at a problem, they take care to align adequate political support, have a policy infrastructure in place, and arrange appropriate media and intellectual resources.

In these efforts, so-called “think tanks” play a crucial role in legitimizing and organizing the concerted efforts of like-minded people and organisations. Funded by these philanthropies, think tanks provide the analyses, evidence and intellectual credibility crucial to their funders’ agendas, but at the same time play a critical role in convening key players in public and private sectors, supplying useful data and talking-points to allied media outlets, and identifying and attacking potential opposition.

For instance, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University receives funding from the Gates, Walton, Koch, and Friedman Foundations, and produces research generally aligned with the agendas of those funders, even when that may conflict with a consensus in the independent research community. PEPG also possesses substantial media acumen, and has been successful in placing its associates in key positions in the public and private sector.

However, rather than simply producing ideas (as their label would suggest), many think tanks — even university-based ones such as PEPG — might be more accurately labeled as “thought tanks” to reflect the fact that their efforts generally revolve around one idea: increasing markets in education. That is, rather than developing and analyzing new policy ideas, the primary contribution of groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network, has been in terms of developing strategies to advance free market, low cost policies, rather than developing additional, much less alternative, policies.

While there may be something laudable about philanthropists wielding their vast fortunes to improve schools, the emerging patterns of how they are doing this may also point to some reasons for concern. Their reliance on business-style strategies to push ideas (or an idea) orchestrated through think tanks highlights the marginalization of democratic channels and the rise of privatized public-policymaking.

 

from left: Joel Malin, curriculum specialist at the Pathways Resource Center and Chris Lubienski, professor of educationChristopher Lubienski is professor of education policy at the University of Illinois and Sir Walter Murdoch Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University. His research focuses on education policy and reform, with a particular concern for issues of equity and access, and on the political economy of education policymaking. His co-authors on the paper on which this blog entry is based, Jameson Brewer and Priya Goel La Londe, are advanced doctoral candidates in education policy at the University of Illinois.

‘Click bait’ hijacks the real story about technology in Australian schools

click bait, Digital Education Revolution, Educational Technology, Innovation in education, , , ,

A recent education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said, among many other things, young people first “need to be equipped with basic literacy and numeracy skills so they can participate fully in the hyper-connected, digitized society of the 21st Century”. It went on to make tenuous links between too much technology and falling literacy and numeracy, but first warned, quite early in the report, that “the findings must not lead to despair”.

That was all it took. What followed was a media frenzy, here and overseas, which produced a range of very negative stories. For example: “Are iPads a waste of money? OECD report says yes” stated The Age; in the Huffington Post in the United States: “Putting more technology in schools may not make kids smarter: OECD Report”; and in the United Kingdom the title of a BBC News story “Computers ‘do not improve pupils results says OECD”.

If you look closely at the report Students, Computers and Learning, which uses results from the 2012 PISA computer-based assessment of ICT literacy of students aged 15 in 31 countries across the globe, it is saying there is much good news. The leaps of logic in the interpretation and application of findings in the report picked up by various media outlets are considerable and unfortunate.

The examples I gave are just three of at least twelve damaging stories I read after the report’s release. They show how complex education issues in schools, and for principals, teachers, students and jurisdictions are increasingly reduced to the ‘education sound bite’. This kind of reportage serves as click bait for online readers.

Politicians may then take what reporters say as ‘gospel’. However, far more insidious, is the harmful effect such headlines have on teacher morale and the public’s view of education and schools more generally.

The real story about technology in Australian schools

In 2015 teachers’ work in technology-enhanced learning in classrooms in NSW is exciting. I have carried out research in a number of Australian primary and high schools since 2011 and my research shows there is good progress with technology enhanced learning and the pace is hastening. This research is ongoing.

Students are doing tech well in many Australian schools. They are stepping up to embrace the challenges that learning effectively with technologies demands. Results in student assessment in these schools show this. However connectivity in many schools is still far from ideal and even within major cities it is variable.

I agree with the OECD report where it states, “young people do want to be taught how to search more effectively”. My recent research indicates that. It also demonstrates that in some high schools in particular classrooms, students want teachers to leave behind the industrial model of “talking at them”, using “mindless work sheets” and “copying endless notes off the board”. Students desire many more opportunities to problem solve, work in teams, carry out long-term real-world projects, create films/animations, and use inquiry and project-based learning. The OECD report says this too.

I know from first hand experience that technology inequities exist in our schools and the “digital divide” is real. I also understand most schools make provisions for providing computers and other mobile devices to students who cannot afford them.

Something that has not been reported widely is that groundbreaking programs like the Digital Education Revolution (DER) meant for the first time every student from Year 9 onwards in an Australian public school had access to a small technological device. The program was not perfect but what it did do effectively (and there are evaluations that show this) is it placed technology in the hands of students who could not normally afford it. DER served to ‘whet the appetite’ of technological things to come, like educational apps, augmented reality, 3D printing, maker labs, geo spatial technologies, code and digital games. It enabled tech-savvy ‘early adopter teachers’ to play with technology, to see how it changed core concepts and how learning inside classrooms could be more engaging and motivating for young people, whose ‘digital bedrooms’ at home were a parallel universe to their lives at school.

Technology hardware and software is expensive. Governments must replace outdated equipment. Provide more time for professional development. This is vital investment that will allow teachers, as the OECD report contends, to become “active agents of change”.

I am about to start teaching a digital technologies course in a doctoral program for teachers in the School of Education at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in the United States. This is relevant because yesterday the school received a $5.6M gift from an alumnus. The donor, who wanted to remain anonymous, hopes the philanthropic commitment will inspire others. “Without properly trained teachers, our country would not have an educated population. Teachers are critical if we want a strong and vibrant society,” said the donor.

We need the Australian public and politicians to understand, and actively support, what is going on in our schools and in teacher education in universities, but how can we do this when complex issues are reduced to the lowest common denominator in the media? We are doing all educators a disservice when stories about technology in schools are hijacked as ‘click bait’.

 

Jane Photo copyDr Jane Hunter teaches pre-service teachers in curriculum, pedagogy and technology enhanced learning in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. She is a researcher in the Centre for Educational Research at the same institution. Jane is the author of Technology integration and High Possibility Classrooms: Building from TPACK, New York: Routledge published earlier this year. In March 2016 she is a keynote speaker at the Future Schools Conference in Sydney.

 

Do Australian teachers have poor literacy skills? Let’s look at the evidence

Literacy teaching, Teacher education, Teacher literacy skills, Teacher quality, teacher selection,

Australians have been sold the idea that our primary school teachers today have poor literacy standards, not only by popular media but often by politicians and sometimes even by the universities that train our teachers. So how true is it? What evidence is there to support these claims? My colleagues* and I decided to find out.

This blog post is a report on our ongoing research. We haven’t finished yet. Our starting point is a survey of what the profession itself thinks (if you are a primary school teacher you might like to join in). We made a few surprising discoveries just to get to this point.

The neverending story

As Professor Bill Louden pointed out a few years and a few reports ago, there have been over 100 reports on teacher education in the last 40 years.

The latest instalment in the neverending story about what is wrong with the preparation of Australian classroom teachers was released earlier this year. It is the Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers Report

As a direct result literacy and numeracy testing of preservice teachers ( student teachers) is being rolled out across Australia.

Who is telling the story?

We are particularly interested in the construction of preservice and graduate teachers as lacking in literacy capabilities.

The view from popular media commentators is clear. Here are a few memorable ones

Can’t write can’t spell

Teachers have a lot to learn

Lament over standards as aspiring teachers flop literacy

It is not surprising that these comments are not supported with evidence. What we did find surprising is how little evidence has been used to support recommendations in government reports.

Tracing back the story

So we began to trace the empirical evidence behind the claim that our primary school teacher education students and graduate teachers lack literacy abilities

We examined academic papers and research reports, government reports and submissions to inquiries, and media commentary.

Those outside Queensland may not be aware that the ‘new’ literacy and numeracy testing was first recommended as part of a review in Queensland in back in 2009. And this was in direct response to a claim from the review that:

Concerns were raised about the adequacy of some primary teachers’ levels of content knowledge. ….These concerns echo concerns raised with the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy about the literacy skills of pre-service teachers. The Inquiry noted ‘some scepticism among practising teachers about the personal literacy standards of new graduates’

Ok so we have some concerns raised, and these concerns reflect findings from a previous Inquiry. This earlier one was the National Inquiry into the teaching of Literacy which resulted in the report Teaching Reading

So let’s go back to that report. The data quoted as evidence are provided through a description of “issues raised” in focus group discussions by participants.

The literacy competency of student teachers was raised as an issue in all focus group discussions. Participants reported that many pre-service teachers lacked the literacy skills required to be effective teachers of reading.

Surely the evidence provided was not just a group of teachers complaining about the quality of pre-service teachers?

Well not entirely. The report also drew on other reports, as well as some small scale studies involving the testing of pre-service teachers’ knowledge of aspects of language use.

One of these sources that is often cited is the Australian Government Report Prepared to Teach.

Yet the lead author of this report, one William Louden, also argued there is a need to investigate the different factors influencing the quality of our preservice teachers.

So after following the trail back to here, we decided to take up Louden’s suggestion and look closely at the different areas discussed around the literacy standards of primary school teachers.

Four dimensions identified to carry out further research

We believe that the factors that influence the quality of pre-service and graduate teachers can be grouped together into four dimensions.

Personal literacy

The first dimension relates to the personal literacy capabilities of preservice teachers. Can preservice teachers spell? Can they write? Is it true that “Graduating pre-service teachers’ levels of personal literacy should be equivalent to the top 30 per cent of the population”?

Knowledge of the curriculum

The second dimension relates to preservice and graduate teachers’ knowledge of the English curriculum. They don’t know enough about literature, they don’t know how to assess writing, they don’t know what to include and exclude from their classroom teaching. Hence the increase in packages and programs such as Soundwaves a spelling program that proudly claims, “you don’t need to be a phonemic expert”.

Quality of teaching

The third dimension relates to preservice and graduate teachers ability to teach, or their pedagogical knowledge about English and literacy. That is, if you don’t know how to teach spelling you can’t teach literacy; teachers who write are good teachers of literacy; teachers who use digital texts such as blogs and websites themselves are experts at using these in classrooms. There are also arguments in the literature about explicit teaching, direct instruction, inquiry based learning, whole language approaches, systemic phonics instruction, etc etc.

Teacher education

A fourth dimension is initial teacher education program’s impact on the above dimensions. So how does the standard of entry to teacher education program impact on graduate teachers’ personal literacy abilities? Does the mode of delivery of teacher education (four year, graduate entry etc) have an impact on graduate teachers’ ability to teach literacy? How does the length and type of professional experience (school based, intense internships) influence preservice teachers’ knowledge of the curriculum?

The content of initial teacher education programs is often hotly disputed as well. Do we teach phonemic awareness? Is there enough practice or too much theory? Who are the best people to teach initial teacher education? Teachers? Researchers?

The next step, a survey

We have used these four dimensions to construct a survey of members of the teaching profession across Australia.

We aim in this survey to answer the following research question, What are the expectations of the profession about the literacy capabilities of graduate teachers required to deliver high quality, intellectually demanding literacy education?

We envisage the results will provide some empirical data that can replace the anecdotes embedded in current storylines about the capabilities of preservice and graduate teachers.

After this survey our next step will be to discover what primary preservice teachers understand about their own personal literacy skills and their perceptions of their own abilities to teach literacy.

 

*My colleagues involved in this research are Associate Professor Beryl Exley (Queensland University of Technology) Associate Professor Lisa Kervin (University of Wollongong), Associate Professor Alyson Simpson (University of Sydney) and Dr Muriel Wells (Deakin University)  A related paper can be found here

Eileen-Honan

 

Dr Eileen Honan is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy and English Education at The University of Queensland.