3 research outputs found
Initial Teacher Education Policy and Practice
The purpose of this study was to generate a systematic description of policy and practice
across qualifications of initial teacher education in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study was
conducted in two phases. Data from publicly-available documentation of the 27 providers of
initial teacher education were recorded in an electronic data base as a means of compiling
individual profiles of each qualification. Subsequently, twenty-five providers participated in
interviews to ensure that profiles accurately reflected the policy and practice of the
qualification. Qualification profiles were reviewed to identify common and distinctive
characteristics of initial teacher education according to sector (early childhood, primary and
secondary), type of qualification and type of provider. Findings were considered within a
framework of contemporary national and international research and implications identified
for future research, policy and practice in initial teacher education.
This project confirms that initial teacher education is incredibly complex and multi-faceted
and that New Zealand qualifications reflect many of the achievements and the challenges of
implementing quality teacher education that are experienced internationally. The official
documentation reveals that there is a general lack of explicit coherence among components
of many qualifications, that in some cases there is no clearly articulated conceptual or
theoretical base underpinning qualifications, and, that, in the documentation of many
qualifications, there are conspicuous silences surrounding aspects of initial teacher education
critical to the New Zealand context. There is also evidence that the regulatory and
compliance environment within which providers operate is sometimes perceived as
distracting, rather than ensuring quality.
This national project has enabled us to identify key areas for further and ongoing attention
both by individual providers of initial teacher education and, more importantly, by the
professional community of teacher education in collaboration with the Ministry of
Education, the New Zealand Teachers Council and others. We need to determine, and thence
articulate more clearly, the fundamental goals of initial teacher education and to demonstrate
how programmes of ITE are coherent in their underlying values, goals, design, curriculum,
pedagogy and implementation. There is a need also to consider how current external quality
assurance processes can be made more coherent with fundamental goals of initial teacher
education and the research on theory and practice that underpins these goals
Phenotypic and Genome-Wide Analysis of an Antibiotic-Resistant Small Colony Variant (SCV) of Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Small colony variants (SCVs) are slow-growing bacteria, which often show increased resistance to antibiotics and cause latent or recurrent infections. It is therefore important to understand the mechanisms at the basis of this phenotypic switch.One SCV (termed PAO-SCV) was isolated, showing high resistance to gentamicin and to the cephalosporine cefotaxime. PAO-SCV was prone to reversion as evidenced by emergence of large colonies with a frequency of 10(-5) on media without antibiotics while it was stably maintained in presence of gentamicin. PAO-SCV showed a delayed growth, defective motility, and strongly reduced levels of the quorum sensing Pseudomonas quinolone signal (PQS). Whole genome expression analysis further suggested a multi-layered antibiotic resistance mechanism, including simultaneous over-expression of two drug efflux pumps (MexAB-OprM, MexXY-OprM), the LPS modification operon arnBCADTEF, and the PhoP-PhoQ two-component system. Conversely, the genes for the synthesis of PQS were strongly down-regulated in PAO-SCV. Finally, genomic analysis revealed the presence of mutations in phoP and phoQ genes as well as in the mexZ gene encoding a repressor of the mexXY and mexAB-oprM genes. Only one mutation occurred only in REV, at nucleotide 1020 of the tufA gene, a paralog of tufB, both encoding the elongation factor Tu, causing a change of the rarely used aspartic acid codon GAU to the more common GAC, possibly causing an increase of tufA mRNA translation. High expression of phoP and phoQ was confirmed for the SCV variant while the revertant showed expression levels reduced to wild-type levels.By combining data coming from phenotypic, gene expression and proteome analysis, we could demonstrate that resistance to aminoglycosides in one SCV mutant is multifactorial including overexpression of efflux mechanisms, LPS modification and is accompanied by a drastic down-regulation of the Pseudomonas quinolone signal quorum sensing system