Academic specialists or pathways providers: the changing roles of secondary school teachers in regional Queensland, Australia

Academic specialists or pathways providers: the changing roles of secondary school teachers in regional Queensland, Australia

[Abstract]: The postcompulsory dimension of secondary school education has been subject to unprecedented pressures, in response to the radical changes to employment and training associated with late capitalism and globalisation (Gorard, 2002). In Australia, as elsewhere, students are staying at school longer but they are also involved in a more complex set of relationships with education and employment than a decade or so ago (Australian National Training Authority, 2003).
These changes have had, and continue to have, a fundamental impact, not only on the learning and opportunities of students and their families, but also on the work and identities of secondary school teachers. Like their colleagues in the vocational education and training sector (Harreveld, 2004), these teachers are subject to the requirements of increasingly corporatist and managerialist curricula and assessment regimes. They are also in the ‘frontline’ of an educational battleground, as governments and other stakeholders demand more from schools while providing them with less.
These broader issues are illustrated and interrogated in this paper by means of mapping the perceptions and aspirations of 55 teachers from secondary schools in the Central Queensland region of Australia. Participants completed an open-ended, qualitative survey questionnaire about their understandings of the purposes of senior schooling, their own roles in achieving those purposes and their degrees of satisfaction in doing so.
Findings point to considerable tensions in teachers’ work and identities between the role of academic specialist, facilitating the entrance of students to university, and that of pathway provider, helping students to broker among available alternatives of higher and vocational education and employment. In the process, teachers varied widely in their judgments of the eventual success and worth of those pathways, particularly in regional communities away from the resources of metropolitan areas.
This paper has important implications for the current trials and 2006 implementation of the Queensland Government’s (2002) Education and Training for the Future (ETRF) agenda. While this agenda will be posited on all people between the ages of 15 and 17 who will be expected to be ‘earning or learning’, teachers are crucial to the attainment of such a vision. Their complex engagements with that vision are fundamental to its success, as well as to understanding the changing roles of the teachers themselves.
References
Australian National Training Authority. (2003). Vocational education and training in schools. Retrieved July 23, 2003, from http://www.anta.gov.au/dapVet.asp
Gorard, S. (2002). Robbing Peter to pay Paul: Resolving the contradiction of lifelong learning. Research in Post-compulsory Education, 7(2), 123-132.
Harreveld, R. E. (2004). The work of adult literacy teaching. In P. Kell, S. Shore & M. J. G. Singh (Eds.), Adult education @ 21st century (pp. 153-163). New York: Peter Lang.
Queensland Government. (2002). Education and training for the future (ETRF). Brisbane, Qld: Author.

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