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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 7, Issue 1, Article 1 (June, 2006) Kevin WATSON and Fran STEELE Building a teacher education community: Recognizing the ecological reality of sustainable collaboration
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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 7, Issue 1, Article 1 (June, 2006) Kevin WATSON and Fran STEELE Building a teacher education community: Recognizing the ecological reality of sustainable collaboration
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Towards a Sustainable Community
This study has illustrated some of the challenges involved in building a sustainable community around teaching and learning. The notion of sustainability is crucial and is central to any ecological view. Interactions and outcomes must be able to be sustained by the system rather than being dependent upon unsustainable external resources.
One challenge has been to generate a community identity. The implementation of the model resulted in enhanced learning outcomes for pre-service teachers, and a development of community within the pilot study group. However, this awareness of community did not appear to encompass all members of the teacher education project. Similarly, although every effort was made at the beginning of the pilot study to communicate the holistic nature of the project to principals and head teachers and to encourage the sharing of this vision with all staff, the study subsequently revealed no increased awareness among teachers of the value of a community approach. Teachers continued to see themselves as supervisors of pre-service students and did not view the project as an integrated learning experience. This will need to be addressed as the community matures. Teachers will need to be supported in their efforts to look beyond their supervisory role and see themselves as multifunctional within the dynamics of the maturing community.
As a consequence, it is suggested that the model should continue to evolve, shifting emphasis from actively constructing a community to orienting teachers positively toward the project in a way that encourages them to participate fully in the learning opportunities provided. It is hoped that this will embed the principle of shared learning and encourage teachers to view themselves as part of a broader professional education community and so increase the sustainability of the project.
A second challenge has been the lack of time. Time that is required to establish the views and needs of all participants, allow discussion and resolve conflicts that arise because of firmly held views on teaching and learning. One intention of the model was to operate within the existing university and school structures without a requirement for outside funding. The community was ideally expected to generate learning within an ecological whole, as proposed by Renshaw (2002). The model has not proven to be sustainable in this sense, and in the future outside funding may be required for teacher release time. This would enable community building strategies such as workshops, debriefing sessions and ‘brown bag’ lunches to be held more frequently or at times more conducive to teacher attendance. Funding may also need to be allocated to university staff to enable them to communicate the aims of the project more fully to participants.
Finally, the implementation of the model highlighted the challenge in developing a truly equitable exchange between members of such a diverse range of people. As others have shown (Grossman, Wineburg & Woolworth, 2001; Snow-Gerono, 2005) university-school partnerships involve inherently different cultural assumptions. In the pilot study this was evident through the differing approaches to pedagogy. A lesson learned during the study was the importance of not imposing views of teaching and learning, as recommended by Garmston (1998). As Sparks and Hirsch (1997) found, there are dangers associated with learning initiatives that are seen as part of a program, rather than meeting needs emanating from staff. Although the intention of the model was to evolve with the community, in the pilot program there remained a tendency to develop a professional learning agenda with a particular emphasis on student-centred teaching. Thus it is recommended that the model evolve to more effectively take into account teachers needs and views so that they may manifest in a multitude of interconnected ways and eventually generate project outcomes such as teacher professional learning.
Copyright (C) 2006 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 7, Issue 1, Article 1 (June, 2006). All Rights Reserved.
