Teaching English Teachers for the Future: Speaking Back to TPACK

This essay presents a critical, reflexive account of a twelve-month collaboration, when a practising secondary English teacher was seconded to work with a team of English teacher educators in a faculty of education in Melbourne. The collaboration was made possible by funding from DEEWR as part of the Teaching Teachers for the Future project (TTF). TTF aimed to produce ‘systematic change in the Information and Communication Technology in Education (ICTE) proficiency of graduate teachers across Australia’ with a particular focus on ‘enabling pre-service teachers to achieve and demonstrate… competence in the effective and innovative use of ICT’ in order to ‘improve student learning’ (ALTC & ACDE, 2011, p. 4). Adopting collaborative, inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning and research within the TTF project, the authors explored what it might mean to think about and ‘do’ English teaching and new technologies more critically than the project guidelines recommended. In this essay, we report on the practices and relationships negotiated in the TTF project as it was enacted in our particular context. We consider them critically within a broader investigation of standards discourses and practices that are currently impacting on the professional practices of English educators in schools and universities.

English In Australia