1992 onwards made it mandatory for ITE providers to offer pre-service courses with
schools. Conroy et al. ( 2013 ) describe the rise of‘teacher training schools’or
‘professional learning schools’ across a number of Countries as part of this
‘practice-based’reform agenda and in the Australian contexts most Universities
over the past decade have initiated various school-university partnership models
under various state-based jurisdictional initiatives such as the VictorianSchool
Centres of Teaching Excellence(Department of Education and Early Childhood
Development 2012–2014) and more recently the VictorianTeaching Academies of
Professional Practice(Department of Education and Training 2015–2016). While
not yet officially mandated in policy, established school-university partnerships will
likely emerge as an accreditation requirement for all providers of ITE across
Australia.
Such school-university partnerships can have their own continuum of function;
they can be rather loose connections with little real reciprocity or they can be fully
functioning and evolving communities of practice in which schools and universities
partner in a spirit of mutuality, joint enterprise and shared repertoire (Wenger
2000 ). To become such an evolving community of practice means that each and
every site of learning—for example, the school, the classroom, and lecture theater
—needs to offer opportunities for pre-service and mentor teacher reflection (theory)
and engagement (practice) but not always at the same time. The opportunities to
reflect and engage can be viewed in conflict or can be complimentary. For example,
Wenger ( 2000 ) recommends reflective periods that‘can activate imagination or
boundary interactions’(p. 229) that require alignment with other practices around a
shared goal, and that these could be used to counteract the possible narrowness of
engagement (practice) alone.
Such communities require that teacher educators (both school-based and uni-
versity based), facilitate these kinds of reflective learning opportunities for
pre-service teachers and with each other, moving between boundaries and across
the multiple sites of learning. Focusing on the role and work of the supervising/
mentor teacher and increasing the professional development of all mentors are
understood as keys to strengthening school-university links and improving
pre-service teachers’learning. In Australia, however, there are currently no formal
professional development requirements for teachers to meet in order to take up the
work of becoming a mentor/supervising teacher of pre-service teachers and little
work is done to support their understanding of a‘pedagogy of teacher education’
(Loughran 2006 ).
19.3 Mentors as School-Based Teacher Educators?
Teachers and teacher educators internationally are in the spotlight as attention
focuses on the important role teachers can play in improving student learning. This
includes mentors who are subjected to stronger critical examination as they are
required to take on greater responsibility for improving pre-service teacher
286 S. White and R. Forgasz