United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Promoting health and well-being through physical education partnerships

The United Nations recently approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which forms a guideline policy for all nations. While the UN have strongly advised that partnerships are essential for the implementation of these global goals, within local communities there is little evidence of how this is best done or what it looks like in practice. This paper shares a health and wellbeing community initiative that achieves goals three and four of the SDGs, and in doing so models how to implement physical education partnerships as advocated by the UN. The highly successful innovative initiative is “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness” (2011–2014).This paper shares a health and wellbeing partnership, modelling implementation of physical education (PE) advocated by the United Nations (UN). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exemplifies global efforts towards equality, specifically Goal 3 and 4 address health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross sector “partnerships”, identified as essential for the implementation of the SDGs. This is significant as the UN acknowledge a present gap of information on partnerships in action and a need for reporting from the ground level. The project “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness”, began as a partnership between a university and nearby schools and quickly grew to involve Australian Registered Training Organisations, the local health industry, Education departments and sport governing bodies. The collaborations involved pre-service teachers teaching Health and PE lessons to children in a disadvantaged socio-economic area, creating valuable learning experiences for stakeholders. Local and global communities were involved in research and reform. The project creatively optimised resources available through state, Australian and international connections. International partnerships enabled identification of unique contextual opportunities. Programme planning was strengthened with data gathered from an England and Wales Ofsted awarded Primary Physical Education course. Various methods, including; semi-structured interviews, reflective journal, observations, document analysis, and Student Evaluation of Teaching Units (SETU) were adopted. SETU is valid and reliable data collected by the university for the purposes of research. The findings support that partnerships enable SDG implementation and the research paper offers direction for localisation

Thinking dispositions for teaching : enabling and supporting resilience in context

Preparing pre-teachers for an increasingly challenging teaching profession is a complex work and requires teacher educators to engage in the careful design of both programmes and professional learning opportunities. This chapter explores how an explicit focus on thinking dispositions that enable effective teaching are developed in a Master of Teaching (Secondary) programme. This programme, delivered on-site at a secondary school, included carefully constructed teaching opportunities to support development of thinking dispositions. Ways of thinking and the impact they have on feelings, actions and beliefs will be examined along with how the implementation of our thinking dispositions framework supports the development of resilience in challenging teaching and learning contexts

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Introduction: Researching innovative perspectives in professional experience

Ambrosetti, AJ ORCiD: 0000-0001-6919-7778Professional experience in initial teacher education has always been valued, though there is limited agreement in Australia around the structure and knowledge base. Teacher educators from a wide range of institutions and jurisdictions worked together at a conference in early 2016 to share, critique and celebrate their different perspectives and innovative programs. The result is this edited volume of 14 chapters, representing the work of 30 authors from 18 different Australian universities, a secondary school and a state regulatory authority. Through collaborations across borders and within the field, a more nuanced understanding of the varied elements of professional experience, including new and renewed knowledge, has been recorded. This chapter provides the background, aims, rationale and synopsis of sections and chapters in the volume

Educating future teachers: Insights, conclusions and challenges

Ambrosetti, AJ ORCiD: 0000-0001-6919-7778— Innovative (adjective): having new ideas about how something can be done — When we speak of being innovative, we refer to changing processes, products and ideas or creating better ones. Taking the notion of innovation seriously, this volume provides research findings of new practices in professional experience in Australian initial teacher education programs and offers alternative ways of conceiving and enacting professional experience. This volume’s genesis lies in the questions that we posed when we began this project: 1. What are the promising innovations in thinking about, rethinking and enacting professional experience to better prepare prospective teachers to effectively enter the workforce? 2. What can new research contribute in strengthening teacher preparation in schools and early learning centres? 3. What might these promising innovations mean for the range of stakeholders responsible for designing and implementing teacher education including teacher educators, supervising teachers, policymakers, employers and regulatory authorities