Partner Perspectives Matter: Lessons Learnt When Navigating Continued Pre-service Teacher Placements During Disruption

Partner Perspectives Matter: Lessons Learnt When Navigating Continued Pre-service Teacher Placements During Disruption

It is well understood that authentic and mutually beneficial school and university partnerships are vital to maintaining quality placements for pre-service teachers. The function of these formalised partnerships is twofold; first they regulate placement requirements and support student progression and secondly, they ensure universities are graduating classroom ready teachers. The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of these partnership arrangements more than ever. For pre-service teachers, the pandemic critically disrupted the school environment in which they were expecting to undertake their placement. Despite this, an Australian regional university made the decision to continue with as many placements as possible as the first wave of the pandemic unfolded. This at a time when placement-based work integrated learning (WIL) was being cancelled across Australia. The voices of the university, schools and students were captured during this time. This qualitative case study illuminates the findings from a large-scale survey and email communications distributed to all pre-service teachers and schools at the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Findings show that while the continuation of placements was welcomed by the university and schools, the capturing of students’ voices illuminated a significantly different perspective. Despite the University and school’s best efforts to support student placements, their decisions were based on formalised accreditation requirements, with an assumption that students could cope and would appreciate the experiences the disrupted teaching environment would provide. This proved not to be the case for all. Implications from this study illuminate the problem of the peripheral positioning of students in the placement partnership and the need for them to be positioned as authentically central.

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