Melbourne, and by the Education Department of Victoria. The data was collected as
part of thefirst author’s Ph.D. research.
In the ‘second wave’of data collection (2013), the Learning Partnerships
workshops were housed within an elective subjectPromoting Student Wellbeing
provided within The Master of Teaching (Secondary) at the University of
Melbourne, Australia. These workshops were led variously by thefirst author and
four colleagues, each of whom conducted workshops with their own classes of
around 30 pre-service teachers and 20–25 school students. The second author
gathered the data from the subsequent study, conducting post-workshop focus
groups with teacher trainees (11 females, four males) and school students from
Years 7–9 (47 females, 22 males). Focus groups were audio-recorded and tran-
scribed verbatim. Using techniques described by Willis ( 2006 ), and focus group
data was thematically analysed with two researchers cross-checking themes to
ensure rigour (Alsford 2012 ).
Survey data was also collected post-workshop in the second wave of the study.
Data was collected from 120 pre-service teachers and 125 secondary school stu-
dents from four schools in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. The research par-
ticipants were members offive differentLearning Partnershipsworkshops which
took place in thePromoting Student Wellbeingelective. Two of the workshops
were run with Year 10 students (aged 15–16), two with Year 9 students (aged 14–
15), and one with Year 7 students (aged 12–13). Each workshop of around 2 h in
length included approximately 25 school students with a class of approximately 30
pre-service teachers. Full details about the instruments and the data collected are
available elsewhere (Cahill and Coffey 2013a, b). Ethics approval study was
obtained from the University of Melbourne (2012 study: HREC 1237767.1) and the
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in July 2012. The
second wave of the research was conducted withfinancial support in the form of a
grant from the CASS Foundation.
In the following section, we focus on techniques used during both waves of
research to involve participants in detecting and deconstructing the discourses that
inform teacher–student relations, with the aim of shaping more generous modes of
interaction between the two parties. In doing so, we highlight the role that theory
can play in informing teacher education practice and analysis of participants
responses both within and after the workshops.
14.6 Pedagogical Approach Used in the Learning
Partnerships Workshops
The workshops employ a dialogic pedagogy to bring students and teachers vari-
ously into pairs and small groups in which students contribute as key informants
providing their advice to teachers. Participants also engage in collaborative tasks in
which they work to document and describe both the factors that enhance and those
14 Repositioning, Embodiment and the Experimental Space... 213