Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Teacher training (Queensland)”

The Wiltshire Committee's Review of the Queensland School Curriculum produced some surprises. One of these was for teacher educators. The Committee had not originally intended to investigate the preparation of teachers, yet several recommendations were made. The Wiltshire group say that practising teachers made so many adverse references to the quality of their preservice training that comment and recommendation were justified. The committee's recommendations are interesting in that they focus quite heavily on the links that might exist between teacher preparation on campus and teacher preparation in schools.

The instructional flexibility of rural and suburban secondary teachers in two educational regions of Queensland was investigated. It was proposed that the qualitative and quantitative differences between rural and suburban secondary, and particularly the significant differences in class size, would see rural secondary teachers more instructionally flexible than suburban counterparts. Using interpretative and positivist data gathering processes and analysis techniques, it was found however, that in all respects of instructional flexibility, there was no significant difference between rural and suburban secondary teachers. Several reasons were advanced for the finding. First, it was found that the same teaching paradigm dominated teaching regardless of setting that of teachers standing out the front of their classes and delivering the information to their students. Second, both teachers, and the Department of Education, have a simplistic notion of learning style which arguably impaired their ability to construe teaching and learning in other than traditional ways. Third, in what all teachers indicated they would prefer to do as teachers, and what they felt able to do in reality as teachers, there was considerable discord, attributed mainly to the perceived demands to 'get through the work program' regardless. This is construed to be an attitude which is essentially incompatible with catering to student learning style differences. Finally, it was suggested the significant factors affecting a teacher's instructional paradigm are the model of teaching demonstrated by the teacher training institution, the teachers own personal construct of teaching, and the role of the teaching practicum in perpetuating the traditional, teacher centred, dais based model of instruction.

The Queensland Department of Education has instigated, planned and supported, over a significant period of time, various programs to enable Aboriginal and Islander entrants to become trained and qualified teachers. Such programs have included for example:● teacher training which did not lead to a formal teacher qualification, such as the Aboriginal/Islander course provided at the then North Brisbane {Kedron Park) CAE;● the Associate Diploma of Education at Cairns College of TAFE, which led to employment as an Aboriginal/Islander Community Teacher;● the programs with enclave support, (such as those at Mt Gravatt CAE, Kelvin Grove CAE, James Cook University Aboriginal and Islander Teacher Education Program, AITEP), leading to a Diploma of Teaching or further awards, with full teacher registration.

This article explores the implementation of PEARL (Political, Embodied, Active, and Reflective Learning) in two courses at The University of Queensland: a first-year introductory Indigenous Studies course and a second year Indigenous Education course. We draw on findings from a 2-year (2010–2011) Office for Learning and Teaching (then ALTC) funded curriculum renewal project and findings from a pilot project (2013) implementing PEARL in a compulsory Indigenous Education course for all pre-service teacher educators in primary and secondary teacher training at The University of Queensland. Drawing transformative education theory into conversation with critical pedagogy and anti-colonial/racist education, we share student data from focus groups, questionnaires and reflective journals to examine the shift in students’ understanding of Indigenous issues, histories and peoples. Finally, we reflect on the ways the results hold great potential for the further implementation of PEARL into other university level courses, specifically in relation to a ‘pedagogy of solidarity’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

This paper outlines PhD research which suggests mobile learning fits the cultural philosophies and roles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are preservice teachers in the very remote Australian communities where the research was conducted. The problem which the research addresses is the low completion rates for two community-based Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs in South Australia (SA) and Queensland (Qld). Over the past decade, the national completion rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in teacher training was 36 per cent, and in these two community-based programs it was less than 15 per cent. This paper identifies the perceptions of the benefits of using mobile devices by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are preservice teachers in very remote communities. They report ways in which mobile learning supports their complex roles and provides pragmatic positive outcomes for their tertiary study in remote locations. The paper describes the apparent alignment between mobile learning and cosmology, ontology, epistemology and axiology, which may underpin both the popularity of mobile devices and the affordances of mobile learning.

School at the Center, a US initiative that falls into the category of place-based education', has demonstrated significant improvements in educational outcomes while, at the same time, contributing to rural community development. To explore the transferability ofthe program to Australian conditions. The Rural Education Research and Development Centre at James Cook University, assisted with Federal funds, undertook to trial the School at the Center ideas in North Queensland. The trial showed that the ideas were transferable and had significant impacts on educational outcomes and student engagement; generated a deal of public interest in the media and in local communities; and promoted closer relations between teachers, students, their schools and their communities. Following comments from some teachers Involved In the trial about the lack of introduction of beginning teachers to such effective educational strategies, consideration turned to making the results of the trial available to institutions involved in pre-service training of teachers. But teacher training programs do not have much room for new content to be added and, for new material to be really considered, there must be a strong academic and theoretical base for the initiative as well as the evidence that 'it works'. School at the Center (SatC) is an example ofplace-based education. Therefore there should be a strong academic and theoretical understanding ofwhat 'place' means to education. However, while place is considered in other disciplinary areas, its meaning for education appears to be largely unexplored.

This article examines a controversial initiative in Indigenous education: the establishment of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA). The article provides a brief description of the Academy's three campuses and their communities and considers: the circumstances of its creation, including the role of Noel Pearson and Cape York Partnerships; the rationale and philosophy underpinning the case for establishing the Academy; implementation; and some key issues relevant to assessing this reform. These include its impact on a range of performance measures, the veracity and power of the social and educational rationales on which the reform is based, the use of ‘Direct Instruction’ (DI), and the practicability of extending and broadening the reform. The time period considered is from late 2009 through 2011. The article draws on publications, and on visits to campuses of the school and meetings/communications/discussions with personnel from the Queensland Department of Education and Training (DET, now Department of Education, Training and Employment), Cape York Partnerships, the CYAAA and others undertaken in the author's role as a teacher union officer.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number four seeks an equitable and widespread education that enables an outcome of sustainable development by 2030. Intersecting the studies of society and earth processes, a geographical education is well placed to make cohesive sense of all the individual knowledge silos that contribute to achieving sustainability. Geography education is compulsory for the first three years of the secondary education curriculum in Australia; however, research has shown that many geography teachers are underprepared and report limitations in their teaching of sustainability. This article engages with this research problem to provide a critical reflection, using experiential knowledge as an analytical lens, on how tertiary level geography training at one Australian regional university can equip undergraduate teacher education students with the values, knowledge, and skills needed to develop their future students’ understanding and appreciation of the principles of sustainability. The authors unpacked a geography minor for a Bachelor of Secondary Education degree at Central Queensland University and, deploying content analysis, explain how three units in that minor can develop these students’ values, knowledge, and skills through fostering initiatives and activities. The analysis was framed by elements of pedagogy that offer learners a context for developing active, global citizenship and participation to understand the interdependencies of ecological, societal, and economic systems including a multisided view of sustainability and sustainable development. The study concluded that the three geography units engage student teachers in sustainable thinking in a variety of ways, which can have a wider application in the geography curricula in other teacher education courses. More importantly, however, the study found that there is a critical need for collaboration between university teachers of sustainability content and university teachers of school-based pedagogy in order to maximise the efficacy of sustainability education in schools.

Most secondary teachers in Queensland will encounter Aboriginal and Islander students in the classroom at some time or other, and most teachers will have no experience or training to prepare them to meet the special needs of the indigenous students. Aboriginal and Islander students are, indeed, different from mainstream (or Anglo-Celtic) Australian students in their learning characteristics, their social or cultural backgrounds, existing educational disadvantagement and experience of prejudice, and their use of forms of English other than Standard Australian English (SAE). To say that all students are equal and should be treated the same way is to deny these important differences and impede the learning of Aboriginal and Islander students in the mainstream classroom.Two features of Aboriginal and Islander learning styles about which classroom teachers need to be aware are field sensitivity and external locus of control. Students described as “field sensitive” (or field dependent) are influenced by context and develop cognitive styles related to a global, or whole, approach to thinking. The introduction to learning new material, therefore, needs to take this learning style into account, if Aboriginal and Islander students are to cope with learning in a culture which is not their own. The introduction needs to be global in its approach, to enable these students to apply it to their existing knowledge. (Tutor leaflet, n.d.) Field dependent behaviours exhibited by indigenous students, according to a leaflet issued to tutors working with Aboriginal and Islander students in Townsville, include a preference for group type, co-operative learning tasks and a sensitivity to the feelings and opinions of peers, rather than an individual, competitive learning style. There is also a tendency to relate to the teacher/tutor at a highly personal level.

There appear to be considerable differences in the outcomes of group string teaching programs in Queensland. Some teachers appear to be able to generate, manage, and administrate highly efficacious programs; others seem to experience difficulty transferring the knowledge and skills required for students to become successful string players. As a case study with multiple participants, this investigation set out to document the reflections of mid-career group string teachers, observe the outcomes of their programs and teaching methods, and establish a preliminary collective profile of skills, knowledge, and attributes. Key findings include a high degree of overlap in the participant profiles, and the potential for further research into undergraduate training and post-tertiary supervision of group string teachers entering the workforce. Implications of the study include the need to appraise current undergraduate programs preparing group instrumental teachers in Australia, and the necessity for developing strategies to mentor these graduates in their early teaching years.

Teachers are enculturated into their profession through processes which begin in childhood and continue during their preservice education and professional life. This study examines some of these processes by focussing on the professional development of secondary school teachers during their first year of teaching. This year is regarded as a pivotal year in the development of teachers because it is usually a time of significant personal and professional re-adjustment. The study is grounded in both mechanistic and organismic theory, but focuses mainly on a critical appraisal of 'stage' theories of teacher development as espoused by Fuller and Bown ( 1975), and re-examined by theorists such as Ryan (1986), Berliner (1988) and Marshall, Fittinghof and Cheney (1990). The study uses an ethnographic, longitudinal approach to examine the usefulness of 'stage' theory in explaining the development of beginning secondary school teachers. Its participants are four teachers who began teaching in Queensland secondary schools at the beginning of 1993. Data for the study were collected throughout the year using participant observation, verbalized thinking and in-depth interviews. While this triangulation process assists in authenticating data, the overall conceptual framework for the study reflects a phenomenological perspective in which a strenuous effort is made to capture the teachers' voices. 'Stage' theory is found to be a useful heuristic for examining beginning teacher development, but one subject to significant limitations. In keeping with recent studies which emphasize the idiosyncratic, context-dependent nature of teaching, the study finds that beginning teacher development can be explained most accurately in terms of a contextual model of development. Rather than exhibiting a linear progression through a series of identifiable 'stages', beginning teacher development is dependent on the interplay of personal and situational factors which shape the enculturation process. The study suggests ways in which the supportive roles of preservice teacher educators, school administrators and colleagues can be enhanced.

This study compares the views of three groups of art educators - secondary, tertiary pre-service lecturers, and scholars - about the content and structure considered important in art teacher pre-service education. Items of program content and structure, as well as issues in art-teacher preparation were gleaned from the writings of selected scholars and incorporated into a survey questionnaire. The survey was distributed to secondary art educators throughout Queensland and to art pre-service lecturers throughout Australia. An analysis of the results identifies areas and degrees of agreement and difference on items both within and between groups. The study can assist the development of art teacher pre-service programmes that reflect the values of both theoreticians and practitioners of art education.
Education, Faculty of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of
Graduate

This thesis documents the development, implementation and partial evaluation of a number sense program within a mathematics education unit in the Bachelor of Teaching course at the Australian Catholic University (McAuley campus). The program aimed to promote the development of primary pre-service student teachers' number sense, their understanding of, and reflective practice in, mathematics. The conceptual framework, which guided the study, drew upon research and literature on number sense, on undergraduate student teacher development and on reflective practice. The following became the research questions for the study. Question 1. (a) How do student teachers in a pre-service teacher education course use, at the commencement of a semester, number sense in their understanding of, and calculating in, mathematics? (b) What aspects of student teachers' experiences in mathematics have contributed to their approaches to, and views of, mathematics? Question 2. How does a number sense program within a mathematics education unit assist pre-service teacher education students iri their understanding and use of mathematics? Question 3. How do pre-service teacher education students' experiences, in a number sense program within a mathematics education unit, promote the development of reflective practice in mathematics? The research methodology, interpretive in nature, drew on a number of perspectives in order to more effectively investigate the research questions. It incorporated elements of case study and illuminative evaluation perspectives, and utilised a multiple methods approach, including participant observation, for the collection of data. During the investigation, it appeared that student teachers had little past experience with activities which promoted either number sense development or reflective practice in mathematics. Many of the student teachers' views of, beliefs and assumptions in, mathematics were seldom challenged in the past, and opportunities to justify and defend their mathematical thinking,particularly to their peers, were limited. It was concluded that student teachers' experiences in developing number sense, when using socio-cognitive, constructivist and reflective approaches, assisted in developing them beyond technical rationality levels of reflectivity and beyond basic duality epistemic levels.

This thesis examines the cultural models and discourses that a group of aspiring, primary school teachers in South-East Queensland employed to explain their current world and describe the likely development of their own careers and lives. Thirteen males and fifty-seven females, aged between 15 and 25, were involved in the study. All participants had expressed an interest in preservice teacher training with 77 percent of the cohort currently enrolled in a teacher-training program in the South-East region of Queensland, Australia. This study adopted a multi-method approach to data collection and included informal interviews, scenario planning workshops, focus groups, and a telephone survey. Initial pilot studies, incorporating informal interviews, preceded scenario planning workshops. Four males and eleven females were involved in six scenario planning groups. The scenario planning format, based upon Schwartz (1991), followed a seven-step approach whereby participants formulated and evaluated four possible future scenarios for Australia. These formed the stimulus material for the second stage of the study where thirteen focus groups critically analysed the scenario planning data. Interpretation of the data was underpinned by a framework based on an amalgamation of Gee's (1999) theoretical concepts of acts of meaning, cultural models, and Discourses and Bernstein's (1996) theoretical concepts of classification, framing, and realisation and recognition rules. The respondents exhibited five pre-eminent Discourses. These were a Technologies Discourse, Educational Discourse, Success Discourse, Voyeuristic Discourse, and an Oppositional Discourse. The group's Technologies Discourse was pervasive and influenced their future predictions for Australian society, themselves, and education and was expressed in both positive and negative terms. The respondents spoke of their current and future relationship to technologies in positive terms while they spoke of society's future relationship to technologies in negative terms. Their reactions to technologies were appropriated from two specific cultural resources. In the first instance this appears to be from their personal positive interactions with technologies. In the second instance the group have drawn from Science Fiction Discourses to predict malevolent and controlling technologies of the future. The respondents' Technologies Discourse is also evident in their Educational Discourse. They predict that their future classrooms will be more technological and that they, as teaching professionals, will be technologically literate and proficient. Their past experiences with education and schooling systems has also influenced their Educational Discourse and led them to assume, paradoxically, that while the process of education is and will continue to be a force for change, schools will not evidence a great deal of change in the coming years. The respondents were optimistic and confident about themselves, their current interactions with technologies, their future lives, and their future careers. These dispositions formed part of their Success Discourse and manifested as heroism, idealism, and a belief in utopian personal futures. The respondents' Voyeuristic Discourse assumed limited social engagement and a limited ability to accept responsibility for the past, present, and future. The respondents had adopted an 'onlooker' approach to society. This aspect of their Discourse appeared to be mutable and showed signs of tempering as the respondents matured and became more involved in their teaching careers. Finally, the respondents' Oppositional Discourse clearly delineated between themselves and 'others'. They were users of technologies, teachers, good people, young, privileged, white, Australian, and urban dwelling while 'others' were controllers of technologies, learners, bad people, older or younger, non-privileged, non-Australian, and country dwelling. Current reforms introduced by Education Queensland have stressed the need for a new approach to new times, new economies, and new workplaces. This involves having a capacity to envisage new forms, new structures, and new relationships. 'New times' teaching professionals are change agents who are socially critical, socially responsible, risk takers, able to negotiate a constantly changing knowledge-rich society, flexible, creative, innovative, reflexive, and collaborative (Sachs, 2003). The respondents in this study did not appear to be change agents or future activist teaching professionals (Sachs, 2003). Rather, they were inclined towards reproducing historical, traditional, and conservative social and professional roles as well as practices, and maintaining a safe distance from social and environmental responsibility. Essentially, the group had responded to a period of rapid social and cultural change by placing themselves outside of change forces. Successful educational reform and implementation, such as that being proposed by Education Queensland (2000), demands that all interested stakeholders share a common vision (Fullan, 1993). The respondents' Discourses indicated that they did not exhibit a futures vision beyond their immediate selves. This limited vision was at odds with that being espoused by Education Queensland (2000). This body recognises the importance of being able to envisage, develop, and sustain preferable futures visions and have developed futures oriented curricula with this in mind. Such curricula are said to respond to the changing needs of today's and tomorrow's society by having problem solving and the concept of lifelong learning at the core. The future towards which the respondents aspire is one where lifelong learning and problem solving have little significance beyond their need to stay current with evolving technologies. In reflecting on the respondents' viewpoints and the range of Discourses that they draw upon to accommodate their changing world, I propose a number of recommendations for policy makers and educators. It is recommended that preservice teacher training institutions take up the challenge of equipping future teachers with the skills, knowledges, and dispositions needed to be responsible, reflective, and proactive educators who are able to envisage and work towards preferable visions of schooling and society. Ideally, this could occur through mandatory Futures Studies courses. Currently, Futures Studies courses are not seen as an essential area of study within education degrees and as such preservice teachers are given little opportunity to engage with futures concepts, knowledges, or skills. The success of the scenario planning approach in this thesis and the richness of the issues raised through interactive engagement in imagining possible futures, suggests that all citizens, but particularly teachers, need to enlighten their imaginations more often through such processes.

This thesis examines the cultural models and discourses that a group of aspiring, primary school teachers in South-East Queensland employed to explain their current world and describe the likely development of their own careers and lives. Thirteen males and fifty-seven females, aged between 15 and 25, were involved in the study. All participants had expressed an interest in preservice teacher training with 77 percent of the cohort currently enrolled in a teacher-training program in the South-East region of Queensland, Australia. This study adopted a multi-method approach to data collection and included informal interviews, scenario planning workshops, focus groups, and a telephone survey. Initial pilot studies, incorporating informal interviews, preceded scenario planning workshops. Four males and eleven females were involved in six scenario planning groups. The scenario planning format, based upon Schwartz (1991), followed a seven-step approach whereby participants formulated and evaluated four possible future scenarios for Australia. These formed the stimulus material for the second stage of the study where thirteen focus groups critically analysed the scenario planning data. Interpretation of the data was underpinned by a framework based on an amalgamation of Gee's (1999) theoretical concepts of acts of meaning, cultural models, and Discourses and Bernstein's (1996) theoretical concepts of classification, framing, and realisation and recognition rules. The respondents exhibited five pre-eminent Discourses. These were a Technologies Discourse, Educational Discourse, Success Discourse, Voyeuristic Discourse, and an Oppositional Discourse. The group's Technologies Discourse was pervasive and influenced their future predictions for Australian society, themselves, and education and was expressed in both positive and negative terms. The respondents spoke of their current and future relationship to technologies in positive terms while they spoke of society's future relationship to technologies in negative terms. Their reactions to technologies were appropriated from two specific cultural resources. In the first instance this appears to be from their personal positive interactions with technologies. In the second instance the group have drawn from Science Fiction Discourses to predict malevolent and controlling technologies of the future. The respondents' Technologies Discourse is also evident in their Educational Discourse. They predict that their future classrooms will be more technological and that they, as teaching professionals, will be technologically literate and proficient. Their past experiences with education and schooling systems has also influenced their Educational Discourse and led them to assume, paradoxically, that while the process of education is and will continue to be a force for change, schools will not evidence a great deal of change in the coming years. The respondents were optimistic and confident about themselves, their current interactions with technologies, their future lives, and their future careers. These dispositions formed part of their Success Discourse and manifested as heroism, idealism, and a belief in utopian personal futures. The respondents' Voyeuristic Discourse assumed limited social engagement and a limited ability to accept responsibility for the past, present, and future. The respondents had adopted an 'onlooker' approach to society. This aspect of their Discourse appeared to be mutable and showed signs of tempering as the respondents matured and became more involved in their teaching careers. Finally, the respondents' Oppositional Discourse clearly delineated between themselves and 'others'. They were users of technologies, teachers, good people, young, privileged, white, Australian, and urban dwelling while 'others' were controllers of technologies, learners, bad people, older or younger, non-privileged, non-Australian, and country dwelling. Current reforms introduced by Education Queensland have stressed the need for a new approach to new times, new economies, and new workplaces. This involves having a capacity to envisage new forms, new structures, and new relationships. 'New times' teaching professionals are change agents who are socially critical, socially responsible, risk takers, able to negotiate a constantly changing knowledge-rich society, flexible, creative, innovative, reflexive, and collaborative (Sachs, 2003). The respondents in this study did not appear to be change agents or future activist teaching professionals (Sachs, 2003). Rather, they were inclined towards reproducing historical, traditional, and conservative social and professional roles as well as practices, and maintaining a safe distance from social and environmental responsibility. Essentially, the group had responded to a period of rapid social and cultural change by placing themselves outside of change forces. Successful educational reform and implementation, such as that being proposed by Education Queensland (2000), demands that all interested stakeholders share a common vision (Fullan, 1993). The respondents' Discourses indicated that they did not exhibit a futures vision beyond their immediate selves. This limited vision was at odds with that being espoused by Education Queensland (2000). This body recognises the importance of being able to envisage, develop, and sustain preferable futures visions and have developed futures oriented curricula with this in mind. Such curricula are said to respond to the changing needs of today's and tomorrow's society by having problem solving and the concept of lifelong learning at the core. The future towards which the respondents aspire is one where lifelong learning and problem solving have little significance beyond their need to stay current with evolving technologies. In reflecting on the respondents' viewpoints and the range of Discourses that they draw upon to accommodate their changing world, I propose a number of recommendations for policy makers and educators. It is recommended that preservice teacher training institutions take up the challenge of equipping future teachers with the skills, knowledges, and dispositions needed to be responsible, reflective, and proactive educators who are able to envisage and work towards preferable visions of schooling and society. Ideally, this could occur through mandatory Futures Studies courses. Currently, Futures Studies courses are not seen as an essential area of study within education degrees and as such preservice teachers are given little opportunity to engage with futures concepts, knowledges, or skills. The success of the scenario planning approach in this thesis and the richness of the issues raised through interactive engagement in imagining possible futures, suggests that all citizens, but particularly teachers, need to enlighten their imaginations more often through such processes.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Education and Professional Studies
Full Text

This thesis reports a phenomenological study of the lived experiences of six female beginning directors of Queensland child care centres. The perspectives of the participants were shared with the researcher over a five-month period through interviews, synergetic focus groups and drawings. Their stories revealed leaders inprocess who, being faced with new contexts, were forced to reconsider values and beliefs about themselves and the meaning of leadership. They described themselves as jugglers of multiple roles and relationships which often seemed overwhelming, particularly within time constraints. Their stories, however, reveal resilient women who variously struggled, coped, coped competently and were transformed through their experiences. Self-awareness is, of essence, an individual self-directed journey. The study presents strategies to provide safe and secure situations for shared and individual exploration of self. This thesis argues that we need to reconceptualise leadership in terms of time and in dispelling delusions of goodness in leaders and followers. It argues that, for beginning directors to 'find themselves', as one participant described the process, they need safe and secure situations that support the self-awareness journey necessary to navigate their new contexts as leaders. This, in turn, stands to support higher levels of authenticity, self-esteem, motivation, and resilience for the individual, as well as increased trust within the organisation. The study presents a model for supporting beginning leaders toward resilience and authenticity. It is based on the essentialness of self-awareness to becoming a leader. Moreover, the study has implications for the public good as it informs policy and legislation governing early childhood centres in Queensland and early childhood training courses. Implications for the private good involve supporting beginning directors toward a greater understanding of their multiple roles, and, themselves within those roles.

The classroom of the Knowledge Age requires different roles for teachers and students, and a different learning and teaching paradigm, from traditional Industrial Age education. Teacher education institutions are currently charged with the responsibility of developing in pre-service teachers both skills and understandings so that they can take their place in the 21st century. These teachers must be skilled in the appropriate use of information technology rather than merely adopting the use of computers in keeping with a transmission pedagogy of education. The study reported in this thesis, took place at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 1998. It tracked a cohort of Bachelor of Education (Primary) pre-service teachers through the frrst year of their course where they undertook two units of information technology education as core to their degree. Adaptations of already existing informal surveys were used to explore the changes to the pre-service teachers' feelings towards computers, perceived competence with computers, and perceptions oftherole of information technology in education. Data from the cohort were analysed in conjunction with the fmdings of in-depth analysis often key informants, chosen to be a purposeful sample of participants. The main cognitive device used within the study, based on Lakoff and Johnston's (1980) Metaphors we live by and Black's (1962) interactive view of metaphor, was to ask the pre-service teachers to construct a personal metaphor that reflected their relationship with computers. This was asked for at four times throughout the year. The pre-service teachers' metaphors for computers were categorised using grounded theory principles and the categories inserted into the sections of Ihde's (1979) Technics and praxis theory that provided a meta-schema for analysis of the changes that occurred throughout the year. Ihde's schema was modified in accordance with the understanding of teacher progression through learning stages as identified by Russell (1996). Ihde (1979) proposed that different relationships with technology lead to amplification/reduction/selectivity parameters. The study identified whether preservice teachers' relationship with computers influenced their perception of the role of information technology in education. The research data did not uphold this hypothesis. However, the study found interesting occurrences. Pre-service teachers almost unanimously related that they gained in competence throughout the year and most developed more positive feelings towards computers. The pre-service teachers' perceptions of the role of information technology in education expanded from stereotypical responses, such as access to information, to roles more in keeping with the underlying pedagogy of classrooms of the Knowledge Age. The roles that emerged were divided into three sections-the role of the teacher, the learning process, and the role of information technology. The study further developed a theory for information technology education in preservice teacher education that is iterative rather than progressive, acknowledging that pre-service teachers had had limited modelling of the effective use of information technology in education on entry into the course. This theory was developed into a model to inform pre-service teacher education of Teacher preparation and skills for the Knowledge Age. Although the area under study is subject to constant change the underlying principles of teacher praxis upon which the two units of information technology education were based still remain constant. The construction of a personal metaphor for computers provided the pre-service teachers with a novel and effective way to track their changing relationships with computers.

Teaching with digital technologies is essential to the development of 21st century students’ graduate capabilities. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which Queensland VET teachers engage with digitally-enhanced teaching, or have the capacity to do so. Using a mixed methods approach, this thesis investigated the current digital teaching capacities of VET teachers and how current professional development opportunities are helping to address their learning needs.

That professional development is one of the most challenging and important activities facing principals and their staff, has been highlighted in the policy and professional development literature. The central purpose of this study was to explore the nature of professional development from the unique experiences of principals. It was felt there was a need to understand professional development outside the confines of theoretical constructs and overarching frameworks. A phenomenological methodology, therefore, guided the study and allowed the principals' experiences to speak for themselves. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews with eight primary school principals in Queensland who were asked to describe experiences of two phenomena. Firstly, they were asked to describe experiences of professional development for themselves. Secondly there were asked to describe experiences which demonstrated their responsiveness to teachers' professional development. Following the work of Giorgi (1985a, 1985b), a phenomenological psychological approach was used to analyse the data. The two investigations yielded 17 essential themes, and each of these themes was supported strongly in the professional development literature. In addition, three significant findings were raised for further comment. These related to the mismatch between current policy directions for professional development and the reality of principals' experiences; the principals' conceptualisation of professional development as a planned and unplanned activity; and principals as curriculum leaders. The study concluded by providing recommendations for further research to be conducted in the area of professional development and recommendations for the continual promotion of professional development for principals.

This chapter explores the issues associated with training teachers to become effective Augmented Reality game designers in their own educational settings. Within the context of defining and defending the use of games as instructional tools, the authors of this chapter describe a project in Queensland, Australia which involved training 26 teachers from the greater Brisbane area on the theory and process of designing narrative-based Augmented Reality games. This process resulted in usable games that the participants could then implement in their own educational setting. This chapter includes a discussion of the issues and challenges that were faced throughout this training process, and the authors propose potential solutions to address those challenges. Additionally, the authors propose future directions for further research into this area.

This chapter explores the issues associated with training teachers to become effective Augmented Reality game designers in their own educational settings. Within the context of defining and defending the use of games as instructional tools, the authors of this chapter describe a project in Queensland, Australia which involved training 26 teachers from the greater Brisbane area on the theory and process of designing narrative-based Augmented Reality games. This process resulted in usable games that the participants could then implement in their own educational setting. This chapter includes a discussion of the issues and challenges that were faced throughout this training process, and the authors propose potential solutions to address those challenges. Additionally, the authors propose future directions for further research into this area.