(Work integrated learning for higher degree research : a pilot study of bilingual teacher-researcher education program)

Different from traditional postgraduate training which produces researchers who pursue research and work at universities, Work Integrated Learning HDR programs are for a new generation of multiskilled teacher-researchers. This paper reports a ten year of ‘work integrated leaning, higher degree research’ (WIL HDR) program at an Australian university – which is a ‘research oriented, school engaged teacher-researcher education’ (ROSETE). The enrolled candidates in this program are a group of Chinese-English bilingual teacher-researchers. They substantially engage in teacher-research in schools of Sydney region (2 days/week) throughout their candidature, teaching Chinese to school students. The focus of the study explores how working-integrated learning may enable the bilingual candidates to construct theoretic-pedagogical contributions to making Chinese learnable for monolingual English speaking students. This research found that work integrated leaning provided HDR candidates with sufficient opportunity to negotiate the knowledge production through workplaces and enabled them to have direct positive impact on end-users – school learners