The Use of Technology by Rural and Urban Tertiary Education Students to Engage with Metropolitan and Global diversity
The NSW Institute of Teachers (NSWIT) and Graduate Teacher Standards (GTS) mandate that teaching graduates have a knowledge of Information Communication Technology (ICT), and with respect to diversity, the GTS (Element Two) mandates that graduates "demonstrate knowledge, respect and understanding of the social, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds of students and how these may affect learning".
Students enrolled in the internal Bachelor of Education program at UNE are generally from regional, rural or isolated contexts and often lack significant experience with issues that are core to the Education Contexts units, which address Element Two of the GTS.
Issues related to social inclusion, disadvantage and diversity can seem confronting to these students. With limited direct experience of diversity, the 'problem' is that Education Contexts units can be perceived as too abstract and divorced from these students' 'reality'. Nevertheless education policy Australia-wide, such as the NSW Quality Teaching framework, mandates that universities respond to this challenge in a pro-active manner.
Conversely, at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), however, cohorts of Chinese trained teachers are upgrading their teaching qualifications through participation in postgraduate programs in education. These students, not unlike the UNE students, generally have limited direct experience of 'Australian' knowledges, particular those forms of knowledge circulating in rural contexts.
The proposed research aims to explore the use of contemporary ICTs to provide learning experiences with regard to diversity, disadvantage and social inclusion to UNE first year pre-service teachers, as they engage in a collaborative dialogue with their Chinese trained counterparts.
Social inclusion will be facilitated through providing UNE students with improved access to knowledge about, and richer experiences of diversity, disadvantage and social inclusion at two levels. Of particular interest is the facilitation of dialogue between what may be very different epistemological frames with regard to diversity and inclusion.
Firstly, the project aims, through the use of ICT, to redress the exclusion of rural pre-service teachers from learning experiences otherwise available to pre-service teachers in metropolitan and 'global' centres, by enabling UNE students to engage in learning activities with Chinese teachers from the University of Western Sydney (UWS).
Secondly, the learning experiences will be two-way, providing peer-to-peer support across distance. The UWS Chinese students will also engage with issues of diversity and social inclusion as manifest in the rural context.
Specifically, the project will embed asynchronous online learning experiences such as video conferences and online forums and blogs in a first year, first semester Education Contexts unit such as EDCX 100.
The research project is thus intended to enhance the capacity of UNE teacher graduates to meet the NSWIT GTS requirements. It will also meet focus areas of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Priority Projects Program (2009), which includes "the use of information and technology" and "diversity" with regard to innovative curriculum development and renewal.
The UNE researchers, Dr Laurence Tamatea and Dr Keita Takayama, teach, research and write in the field of Education Contexts in the School of Education. The UWS researcher Professor Michael Singh, is Director of the Center for Education Research University of Western Sydney.
For more information on this research please contact Dr Laurence Tamatea : ltamatea@une.edu.au