Teacher education in a remote community: Learning on the job

As part of the Commonwealth-funded project, Growing Our Own, Charles Darwin University, in partnership with the Darwin Catholic Education Office, is delivering a preservice education degree program to remote indigenous communities. This paper employs a case study approach to investigate how the program is operating in one of the communities, using examples from the Wadeye local context. In remote community schools, there is a high turnover of staff each year. In addition, there are very few indigenous teachers, although nearly every classroom has an indigenous Teacher Assistant, particularly in the bilingual schools. There are other connected issues, such as school attendance statistics and providing role models for young people. In order to build a more sustainable staff and increase the number of indigenous teachers from within the local community, lecturers from Charles Darwin University travel to five remote communities each week of the school year to deliver preservice teacher education to small groups of teacher assistants. Because they already work in classrooms every day, their ability to take a whole day for their university studies is only possible because of cooperation from their mentor teacher and the school. The program is designed to link closely with the daily work the teacher assistants are already doing in their classrooms. The learning tasks and assessment items are planned to complement and enrich their practice in the local environment, and to reposition them from being seen as teacher assistants to teachers. In this truly work-integrated learning model, the students’ daily work is essential to their studies.