DOI: 10.26181/31132525
title: Yarra University Interviews

description: <b>The project</b>This project investigated integrated school-university-system partnerships intended to improve teaching education. The research questions were:1. What are the developmental trajectories of integrated partnerships and how are they designed to support work-based learning by beginning teachers?2. How are mentor teachers and tertiary educators affected by integrated partnerships and with what effects on their professional work and learning routines, habits and ways of asking questions?3. How does the entanglement of school, university and systems in global education policies and historic educational networks remake schools and with what effects on teaching workforce development?<b>Four partnership case studies</b>The project team invited participation from teacher educators in Victorian universities. In each university, a teacher educator, actively building school-university partnerships, acted as a point of contact and informant. In the four participating universities, these teacher educators facilitated access to one of their partner-primary-school.This recruitment strategy meant the project could access four school-university partnerships through ‘case study’ universities. The teacher educators facilitated institutional access to primary schools and to informants: in schools, the principal and two teachers; in universities, a leader or associate dean responsible for teacher education and the placement officer in each university.<b>Interviews and data analysis</b>Interviews were conducted with mentor teachers and principals in participating schools, and teacher educators, placement officers and teacher education leaders in participating universities.Questions probed each these informant’s involvement in professional networks, their motivations and involvement in school-university networks, their work-life experiences and retrospective reflections on their prior school-university partnership work.Interviews were conducted through 2019 and before March 2020, when COVID restrictions were introduced in Victoria.Data analysis occurred through 2020 and 2021, raising complex methodological and interpretive questions about the effects of pre- and post-COVID worlds. Assumptions about time, space, temporalities of place, contextualisation, and the lived experience of the COVID pandemic and its narrative recontextualisation of everyday life, prompted novel questions about methodology, interpretation of data and implications for teacher education – in the present, immediate and longer-term future.<b>What interviews revealed</b>The interview transcripts showed school and university professionals engaged in complex partnership work and entangled institutional, professional, community and personal networks.These networks operated across different spatial and temporal horizons. They touched the people inhabiting different policy, professional and personal domains in different ways and with unpredictable effects.The professionals interviewed described challenging situations and complex partnership processes that relied on trust. They described and complained about rigid governance arrangements often determined at levels well beyond those tasked with the immediate and everyday work of building and sustaining partnerships. How professionals in schools, universities and government responded to these unpredictable challenges played into their troubleshooting work. Ultimately, personal values, professional commitments and levels of trust affected wider professional and institutional relationships, with major consequences for the trust that made partnerships productive and, even, possible.<b>The methodological challenge</b>When the researchers reviewed the interview transcripts, they were living with the effects and personal challenges of the COVID pandemic every day. They read transcripts as they were experiencing a world affected by COVID restrictions.In this unfamiliar emerging world, schools were closed. Students were expected to learn, and teachers to teach, online from their homes, where other family members were also living, working and navigating COVID challenges because many workplaces were closing and requiring their employees to work from home.Within teacher education, Student teachers were unable to meet the legislated standards to demonstrate their competence as teachers. This meant they couldn’t complete their teaching practice and so they couldn't graduate. Meanwhile policy makers, educational leaders, managers and workplace professionals struggled to find workable solutions to these unexpected developments, which showed no sign of easing.The methodology challenge lay in these different worlds:· Transcripts recorded informant’s descriptions of a pre-COVID world, which had remained reasonably stable and familiar since at least the 1990s.· Researchers reading transcripts could see both the terms and conditions of life that birthed TEMAG policy reforms AND how they were mutating into an uncertain and unpredictable COVID-world.Researchers’ subsequent discussions with the informant teacher educators revealed even more complexity. The teacher educators talked about their experiences in universities and schools as policy makers, institutional leaderships and professional educators in schools and universities did their best to respond to the unexpected crises that emerged within the COVID-driven context.The analysis of these fluid and unfamiliar circumstances became central to the analysis of interview data. The interpretation of interview data recognised the significance of time and space, tracing the temporal effects, professional judgment and action outcomes through the COVID-pandemic in schools, universities and the school-university partnership case studies. These analyses traced the policy and professional work that was re-making teacher education organised through school-university partnerships.These analyses have been published as:Seddon, Terri, Kostogriz, Alex, Barbousas, Joanna (Eds). (2021) <i>Teacher Education Through Uncertainty and Crisis: Towards Sustainable Futures</i>. London, Routledge.