New Teachers Learning in Rural and Regional Australia
Source: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 38, Issue 1 (February 2010), p. 39 – 55.
This article reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of beginning primary school teachers in rural and regional Victoria, Australia.
The study uses a conceptual framework of place and workplace learning to ask:
How do new teachers learn to do their work? and
How do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching?
In this article, the authors focus on data from the first year of the three-year longitudinal study, using a place-based survey and ethnographic interviews.
The authors found that the space of the classroom was the dominant site of learning to become a teacher for the new teachers in this study. This learning was understood through the discourse of classroom management.
Analysis of these storylines reveals the ways in which the community and classroom are not separate but intertwined, and the process of learning about their communities began through the children in their classes.