Welcome
This site has been developed to outline and share the findings of a significant research project titled: Seeing inside the field: From those who work in the field of teacher education.
Note parts of this site continue to be updated.
Aim of the study
The aim of our project was to explore what it means to be working in the highly politicised and contested field of teacher education, where policy drivers are entangled with broader political agendas. By engaging in creative arts-based processes with academics and others who work in the field of teacher education from across a range of settings and institutions – nationally and internationally – our purpose was to discover and share understandings about the core and complex aspects of their work and counter the marginalisation or silencing that can occur for those who work in teacher education.
Our key research question was: How do those who work in the field of teacher education articulate and represent the nature of their work? To assist in exploring this question we also developed the following sub-questions:
- In what ways do personal and professional dispositions intersect for those who work in the field of teacher education?
- How do the narratives and representations created by the participants relate to meta-narratives about teacher education?
- In what ways do arts-related and narrative methods contribute to understanding experiences of those who work in the field of teacher education?
The Significance of the Study
The significant cumulative changes to the policy and practice of teacher education have impacts on the nature of the complex work of those working within the field. Tuinamuana (2016), for example, argues that this requires those in the field to be “super-beings” (p. 338). Despite the intense regulatory, compliance and policy focus on teacher education, there exists a lack of understanding about the nature of teacher educators’ practice (Brennan & Zipin, 2016), or when it is described, the views are simplistic in nature (Loughran & Hamilton, 2016).
This project works to address this under-researched group and offers some insights into what underpins the nature of the work teacher educators undertake. This project allows for both individual and collective voices of teacher educators to be heard. Similarly, through the inclusion of visual images to convey educators’ ideas, it affords powerful forms of communication that capture both the cognitive and affective dimensions to speak back to dominant discourses.
Project Team
Lead Researcher: Associate Professor Mark Selkrig (The University of Melbourne)
Co-Investigators: Associate Professor Ron “Kim” Keamy (The University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Robyn Brandenburg (Federation University), Dr. Sharon McDonough (Federation University), Amanda Belton (The University of Melbourne)
The project received Ethics Approval from The University of Melbourne #1954704
To cite this Omeka site: Selkrig, M., Belton, A., McDonough, S., Keamy, R. K., & Brandenburg, R. (2022). Seeing Inside the Field: From those who work in the field of teacher education. Gallery and research site. University of Melbourne. https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/seeinginside/ https://doi.org/10.26188/21586230.v5
Note: The colour photographic quilts that appear on these webpages are images from the project and were curated by Mark Selkrig.