The Challenge of Teaching

This book presents thirty-one accounts by final-year pre-service teachers, providing guidance and insights for less advanced teacher education students, and illustrating the use of life history and narrative stories as methods for pre-service teachers to explore educational issues in classroom practice. This life-history approach identifies those political, economic, and social forces that have impinged on the individual at different points in their life and contributed to the process of changing their identities. These stories are not written by established specialists in the areas they deal with, but instead by novice teachers at the beginning of their paths towards mastering the intricacies of teaching and learning in school settings. As such the book provides a mentoring framework and a means of helping pre-service teachers share their valuable experiences and insights into aspects such as how to manage practicum requirements. It helps establish a supportive relationship among pre-service teachers, providing them with access to valuable peer experiences. In addition it helps pre-service teachers make sense of their own practicum experiences and reflect on their own beliefs and professional judgement to develop their approaches and solve problems in their own classroom practice.

Gretchen Geng is currently an associate professor of pedagogy and learning at Charles Darwin University. Before that, she worked in various schools and universities in Australia for over 15 years. Gretchen has strong research interests in improving the quality of and curriculum development in teacher education programs.

Pamela Smith began her teaching career in rural and urban NSW as well as overseas in Sabah, East Malaysia with the Australian Volunteers International before moving to Darwin just before cyclone Tracey. She has been teaching for 40 years. Ms Smith's career has spanned the sectors of early childhood, primary, secondary and now tertiary education with some periods of specialist teaching in ESL [English as a Second Language] and music. She has held various executive leadership positions, including assistant principal, senior teacher in primary schools. At Charles Darwin University Ms Smith has been involved in the area of professional experience placements and coordination of a teacher education program.

Paul Black came to Australia in 1974 after completing a doctorate in linguistics at Yale. After undertaking research on Australian Indigenous languages he took up a position in the School of Australian Linguistics program for the education of indigenous literacy workers and interpreters, which increasingly involved him in applied linguistics. In 1990 he joined the applied linguistics program of the then Northern Territory University, now Charles Darwin University, where he has specialised in linguistics, language acquisition, and language teaching pedagogy; he also spent three years as a visiting lecturer in English at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at Charles Darwin University, having retired from his full-time position in 2015.