Authentic, meaningful and engaging education of pre-service teachers is of utmost importance in our increasingly complex educational landscape. If education students are to be prepared for the challenges of 21st century learning, they need to learn in authentic environments, working with not only university instructors, but also children and adolescents, teachers and administrators in order to develop deep understandings of the skills, knowledge and dispositions they will need for their chosen profession. In this symposium we talk about changing the culture of pre-service education as we explore new spaces and places for learning—for students and instructors alike.
In this presentation we will share a collaborative cross-sector approach to teacher education in a post-degree program. Working with two cohorts of secondary teacher education students, instructors based both on campus and in schools worked collaboratively to integrate their courses to enable students in their first term to learn about learning and teaching. These groups of students experienced situated-learning through weekly visits at a local secondary school, a seminar course led by secondary teachers from the same school and a collaborative teaching model with instructors from UVic, including a teaching team of instructors working in the Ministry of Education.
In this session, we will discuss the collaborative model and how it informed the design of the course experiences. The presenters, university instructors and students, will share their experience in interdisciplinary team-teaching and how they structured the courses to embody authentic learning through collaboration with various education partners.
Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Researchers
