Beyond determined efforts by inspired individuals : a study of effective and sustainable university school partnerships, draft Report

Australian teacher education, for all its travails, is in a hopeful condition. A national report into\ud teacher education has recommended increased funding for teacher education for the first time\ud and national project funding for research into partnerships in teacher education has been\ud awarded to a research team with evident social commitment. Little wonder then, that the\ud course of the project and the form of the project report is optimistic about the possibility that\ud partnership-based teacher education is an achievable goal and that it can actually lead to\ud claimed benefits beyond an instrumental improvement in the ‘training’ of teachers, without\ud being mandated by governments or by elite institutions such as universities.\ud Accordingly, the report of this investigation into the nature of effective and sustainable\ud university-school partnerships has adopted an approach which seeks underlying explanations\ud rather than an arms-length and theorised critique. The report of the project has what might be\ud regarded as a conventional form. A brief discussion of the literature precedes an outline of the\ud project’s methodology culminating in a detailed exposition of the results of the collaborative\ud analysis of the data and what might be termed a set of findings