Home ::

'english education': navigating the space

The website is designed both for Monash University English Education pre-service teachers, and for the wider population of pre-service and professional educators in Australia and throughout the world. Most spaces in the website are open to all users, although some space has been set aside for local matters with respect to administration, curriculum, pedagogy or assessment in the Monash pre-service course. Access to these matters is usually signaled by ‘Monash users only’, and requires a simple log in by these Monash users.

The website is divided into the following areas. Voices, Becoming an English Teacher, Professional Learning, Planning for Learning, Learning from Experience, and Curriculum and Assessment. All of these can be accessed by clicking on the toolbar [wrong word?] at the top and bottom of the home page. It is also possible to access Voices, by rolling the cursor over the centre of the starfish and clicking on the home page. The other areas can be accessed by rolling the cursor over the separate arms of the starfish on the home page.

Voices

The ‘original’ text in this area explores notions of professional voice and professional identity in English teaching. This area is also the first port of call for the wide range of discussion forums that operate in response to issues raised throughout the website.

Becoming an English Teacher

This area looks at a range of issues affecting the continuum of professional learning as one moves from being a pre-service (student) teacher to the early years of one’s professional life as a teacher. There are multiple voices of pre-service and early career teachers who discuss their experiences of becoming a teacher, and users of the site are encouraged to write in to add their experiences and/or comment on the experiences of others. It considers the career of English teaching as being in a constant state of becoming.

Professional Learning

This area inquires into the ways and contexts in which professional and pre-service teachers learn. Teachers throughout the western world are increasingly being told by policy makers and politicians what they should teach, what they should be doing in classrooms, what they should know, and how they should be learning all this. Various perspectives on these very questions are explored here, and we consider the ways in which professional learning practices and professional communities mediate professional identity.

Planning for Learning

We do not provide glib advice such as the definitive template for lesson plans here! This area does, however, consider a wide range of issues and authentic samples of approaches to planning for students’ learning in a range of settings. As in other areas of this website, educators are encouraged to contribute to the conversation by providing written commentary on the issues or experiences present on the site, and/or by writing about their own experiences and authentic stories of planning.

Learning from Experience

This area of the site consists largely of narrative accounts, from pre-service teachers, of their practicum experiences. There are some extended reflective accounts of practicum experiences, but most of the accounts are brief more anecdotal reactions or narrative fragments. Occasionally, there are voices of supervising teachers to provide another perspective on their mentoring or co-mentoring role during the practicum.

Curriculum and Assessment

This area explores curriculum and assessment and the ways in which they connect with and influence each other. It grounds this exploration in Victorian teachers’ accounts of how they experience and interpret curriculum and assessment in their particular settings, and it locates some current debates about within some historical understandings of this area.

Discussion Forums

When these Forums are operational, each of them will provide a space for joining the professional conversation. Users will be able to contribute their own ideas, and they will be able to gain access to all archived conversations relating to any of the issues raised in this site, plus any others that are relevant to the professional learning of English language and literacy teachers, especially pre-service and early-career teachers. There will be links to various websites and resources, within these areas.

It is anticipated that these forums will be operational later in 2006.

Links

Many links on this site are signalled by the presence of a small starfish icon. Wherever possible, such a starfish icon is colour-coded so that users can know more about the nature of the link they are making when they click on it:

An amber starfish indicates that the link is to a pdf file

An aqua starfish indicates that the link is to a url (ie. outside this website)

A green starfish indicates that the link is to a graphic

A purple starfish starfish indicates that the link is to a WORD doc

search