ready’. However, this cannot be a completed project that ends on graduation. There
is a need for newly qualified teachers to be able practice this research literacy in
on-going ways in schools which value and encourage‘research-rich environments’
(not just data rich!). The role for teacher education in this project is to develop and
refine pre-service teachers’research literacy, their ability to consume, adapt and
undertake research, which will require that through their degrees they are taught
how to read literature, how to be discerning in the selection of research evidence,
how to ask the right research questions, how to conduct research and how to
analysefindings in ways that lead to informed decision making. For this focus on
research to create what the BERA/RSA refer to as a self-improving system there
does have to be a relationship between schools and universities. However, again
this relationship needs to go beyond that encouraged in the TEMAG report.
Collaborative partnerships between universities and schools based on mutual
respect where each is seen as having the potential to inform theory and practice in
the other will have benefits for all young people in schools. At the current moment,
the TEMAG report sees this relationship as primarily a technical one related to the
organisation of professional experience within teacher education. Here again we
find ourselves in accord with the BERA/RSA report, which states:
Evidence gathered in the course of this Inquiry underlines the need to go much further, to
progress from being data-driven to being research-rich and from being isolationist to being
collaborative. This requires a much stronger relationship between schools and colleges, and
between practitioners in schools and colleges and those in the wider research community’.
(2014, p. 24)It is also critical that teacher education occurs in a research rich environment.
The TEMAG report stresses the need for teacher education courses to provide
pre-service teachers with ‘adequate content knowledge’ and ‘evidence-based
teaching strategies’. We agree these are important. However, the environments in
which teacher education occurs need to involve the academics teaching into courses
for pre-service teachers in undertaking and disseminating research that is not simply
instrumental, but also informed by attempts to tackle the big questions in education
related, for example, to its purpose, to its relevance to contemporary youth, to
addressing the issues of the day (climate change, marriage equality, global terror-
ism), and to what counts as ‘powerful knowledge’. Without encouraging
pre-service teachers to question assumptions and supposed education‘truths’, and
providing them with the tools to undertake such questioning, schools are unlikely to
become part of a‘self-improving system’.
References
Australian Education Council. (1987).National policy for the education of girls in Australian
schools. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service.
BERA/RSA. (2014). Research and the teaching profession: Building the capacity for a
self-improving education system. London: BERA.
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