title: The challenges of teacher education-exploiting synergies to meet multiple demands

authors: Cooper, Beverley

abstract: Internationally questions about the nature of effective teacher education have come to the fore as a consequence of the demands to produce equitable outcomes from a more diverse range of learners working with ever more challenging curriculum. This expansion has arisen in part from a realisation that mastery of formal conceptual or propositional knowledge alone is no longer a sufficient basis for active participation in today’s knowledge society. In conjunction with these expectations and understandings, policy makers have introduced a range of mechanisms to hold teachers, schools, and teacher educators to account for student learning and achievement. These mechanisms include the specification of standards for either or both of student learning and teacher performance, along with a requirement to provide evidence of impact. University-based teacher educators are in unique positions of being accountable to students, teachers and teacher accreditation agencies or teacher learning and development that impacts positively for students in the classroom, and being accountable to their university in terms of research productivity. They also need to ensure student teacher graduates develop the attributes specified in their university graduate profile.
In this paper, we use New Zealand as a case study to explore some of the convergences that teacher educators might usefully consider across school curriculum goals, university graduate attributes, and teacher performance standards for preservice and practicing teachers, where these have the potential to shape and inform their practice and learning. We begin by elaborating on the landscape of change and then provide two examples of convergence from our own work and that of our colleagues. We describe how projects we have conducted assist in meeting multiple goals. Firstly we illustrate how the need to develop numerate citizens can be imbedded in a teacher education program and secondly illustrate how the need to develop the capacity for learning lifelong can be developed through researched program innovations based on a combination of a design research approach and a design-based intervention research approach. Drawing on our analysis, we scope some of the possibilities for exploiting synergies these shifts can have for initial teacher education and teacher educators.

text: The challenges of teacher education-exploiting synergies to meet multiple demands Internationally questions about the nature of effective teacher education have come to the fore as a consequence of the demands to produce equitable outcomes from a more diverse range of learners working with ever more challenging curriculum. This expansion has arisen in part from a realisation that mastery of formal conceptual or propositional knowledge alone is no longer a sufficient basis for active participation in today’s knowledge society. In conjunction with these expectations and understandings, policy makers have introduced a range of mechanisms to hold teachers, schools, and teacher educators to account for student learning and achievement. These mechanisms include the specification of standards for either or both of student learning and teacher performance, along with a requirement to provide evidence of impact. University-based teacher educators are in unique positions of being accountable to students, teachers and teacher accreditation agencies or teacher learning and development that impacts positively for students in the classroom, and being accountable to their university in terms of research productivity. They also need to ensure student teacher graduates develop the attributes specified in their university graduate profile.
In this paper, we use New Zealand as a case study to explore some of the convergences that teacher educators might usefully consider across school curriculum goals, university graduate attributes, and teacher performance standards for preservice and practicing teachers, where these have the potential to shape and inform their practice and learning. We begin by elaborating on the landscape of change and then provide two examples of convergence from our own work and that of our colleagues. We describe how projects we have conducted assist in meeting multiple goals. Firstly we illustrate how the need to develop numerate citizens can be imbedded in a teacher education program and secondly illustrate how the need to develop the capacity for learning lifelong can be developed through researched program innovations based on a combination of a design research approach and a design-based intervention research approach. Drawing on our analysis, we scope some of the possibilities for exploiting synergies these shifts can have for initial teacher education and teacher educators.

year: 2019

title: What anniversary? New Zealand “Celebrates” fifty years of television

authors: Lealand, Geoff

subjects: television

abstract: The first official transmission beyond experimentation began on 1 June 1960. As a consequence, this became a very significant date in New Zealand television history, marking the fiftieth anniversary of its introduction, the celebration of which is primary focus of this chapter.  However, it is important to put this history in context, given that the late arrival of television had a persistent influence on the structure and purpose of the medium in New Zealand.

text: What anniversary? New Zealand “Celebrates” fifty years of television The first official transmission beyond experimentation began on 1 June 1960. As a consequence, this became a very significant date in New Zealand television history, marking the fiftieth anniversary of its introduction, the celebration of which is primary focus of this chapter.  However, it is important to put this history in context, given that the late arrival of television had a persistent influence on the structure and purpose of the medium in New Zealand.

year: 2012

title: Revitalizing Te Ika-a-Maui: Māori migration and the nation

authors: Mahuika, Nepia

subjects: Māori

abstract: Maui-Tikitiki-A-Taranga is more than simply a ‘mythic’ hero. For many he is a prominent figure in a long family line. The whakapapa that binds Māori to our tupuna is significant to the present and future, and carries with it the ‘ultimate expression’ of who we are. Maui has been described as ‘the most important culture hero in Māori mythology’, whose exploits and archetype provide precedents that Māori respond to in the present. The status of Maui within my own tribal boundaries is clear: ‘In accordance with the traditions and tikanga of Ngati Porou, we as People of this Land have been here since the beginning of time, or more aptly in the context of Aotearoa, since Maui fished up Te Ika-a-Maui (North Island). Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is attributed with fishing up the North Island, raising it out of the depths of the sea, for successive generations of Māori to populate and cultivate.’ Maui’s waka, as Ngāti Porou uphold, is Nukutaimemeha, believed to be ‘cradled’ upon our ancestral mountain Hikurangi. However, there are other stories that recognize the waka as the South Island, with Stewart Island its anchor. These variations aside, the history remains a well-rehearsed one throughout the Māori world and in other parts of Polynesia.

text: Revitalizing Te Ika-a-Maui: Māori migration and the nation Maui-Tikitiki-A-Taranga is more than simply a ‘mythic’ hero. For many he is a prominent figure in a long family line. The whakapapa that binds Māori to our tupuna is significant to the present and future, and carries with it the ‘ultimate expression’ of who we are. Maui has been described as ‘the most important culture hero in Māori mythology’, whose exploits and archetype provide precedents that Māori respond to in the present. The status of Maui within my own tribal boundaries is clear: ‘In accordance with the traditions and tikanga of Ngati Porou, we as People of this Land have been here since the beginning of time, or more aptly in the context of Aotearoa, since Maui fished up Te Ika-a-Maui (North Island). Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is attributed with fishing up the North Island, raising it out of the depths of the sea, for successive generations of Māori to populate and cultivate.’ Maui’s waka, as Ngāti Porou uphold, is Nukutaimemeha, believed to be ‘cradled’ upon our ancestral mountain Hikurangi. However, there are other stories that recognize the waka as the South Island, with Stewart Island its anchor. These variations aside, the history remains a well-rehearsed one throughout the Māori world and in other parts of Polynesia.

year: 2009