Building a teacher education community : recognizing the ecological reality of sustainable collaboration

This paper reports the implementation of a collaborative pre-service science teacher education program between an Australian university and a collegiate of eight schools. The program was designed to facilitate the transition to teaching of pre-service teachers by reducing the gap between theory and practice while promoting the professional learning of the teachers involved. The community building literature, combined with an ecological perspective, is used to evaluate the strategies adopted to build a learning community across pre-service teacher, in-service teacher and system level interactions. Both pre-service and in-service teachers were interviewed at the beginning and end of the project and field notes made about the community building strategies employed. The learning community was found to operate like any ecosystem, change was slow and the effects were felt in ways remote from the original intention, however, there is evidence that building a teacher education community resulted in gains in professional learning at all levels with some strategies being more effective than others.