Furthering research and practice in school-university partnerships in the context of preservice teacher education

Beyond boundaries in teacher education: Promoting collaboration and partnership Together with my colleagues, Associate Professor Debbie Heck from the University of the Sunshine Coast and Dr Helen Grimmett from Monash University, I have an interest in engaging in furthering research and practice in school-university partnerships in the context of preservice teacher education. Since 2014, when I was appointed the Director of the Master of Teaching (Primary) program at The University of Queensland, Debbie, Helen and I have been using innovative strategies such as cogenerative dialogues and metalogues to investigate how effective school-university partnerships may be developed and sustained. Simultanesously, we have explored these and other dialogic pedagogies together with the concept of cogenerativity to probe the notion of teacher professionalism – both for preservice teachers and our own as teacher educators. Debbie, Helen, and I have continued to collaborate over the past five years, having benefited from earlier TERI ventures and translation of our participation in these activities into international publications (peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters) and national conference presentations. A list of relevant outputs follows: Forgasz, R., Heck, D., Williams, J., Ambrosetti, A., & Willis, L.-D. (2018). Theorising the third space of Professional Experience partnerships. In J. Kriewaldt, A. Ambrosetti, D. Rorrison, & R. Capeness (Eds.), Educating future teachers: Innovative perspectives in professional experience, (pp. 33–47). Springer: Singapore. Grimmett, H., Heck, D., & Willis, L.-D. (2018). Becoming dialogical practitioners in initial teacher education classrooms. In Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference, Education Research Matters: Impact and Engagement, 2-6 December 2018, Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales. Heck, D., Forgasz, R., White, S, Williams, J., Tobin, K, Ambrosetti, A., & Willis, L.-D. (2016). Theorising the third space of professional experience partnerships. Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) Conference, 3-6 July 2016, Ballarat, VIC. Heck, D., Grimmett, H., & Willis, L.-D. (2017). Using metalogue to develop an understanding of cogenerativity and school-university partnerships in initial teacher education. In Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference, Education: What’s politics got to do with it?, 26-30 December 2017, Hotel Realm Canberra, Canberra. Heck, D., Grimmett, H., & Willis, L.-D. (2019 in press). Teacher educators using cogenerative dialogue to reclaim professionalism. In A. Gutierrez, J. Fox, & C. Alexander, Professionalism and teacher education: Voices from policy and practice, (Chapter 7). Springer: Singapore. Willis, L.-D. (2016). Exploring cogenerativity for developing a coteaching community of practice in a parent-teacher engagement project. International Journal of Educational Research, 80,124–133. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.08.009 Willis, L.-D., Grimmett, H., & Heck, D. (2018). Exploring cogenerativity in initial teacher education school-university partnerships using the methodology of metalogue. In J. Kriewaldt, A. Ambrosetti, D. Rorrison, & R. Capeness (Eds.), Educating future teachers: Innovative perspectives in professional experience, (pp. 49–69). Springer: Singapore. Willis, L.-D., Heck, D., & Grimmett, H. (2019 submitted). Can LEGO® Serious Play® help teacher educators better understand the notion of professional identity? Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) Conference, 3-5 July 2019, Sunshine Coast, QLD.