Kia ora koutou, ngā mihi nui ki a koutou.
Our greetings to you all as the year inevitably accelerates towards its end! This is a busy time for many as they prepare accreditation documentation for the Teaching Council approvals process, getting ready for the large number of panels that will be held in the first part of 2020. Wherever you are in this process there is a lot to think about, discuss with partners and prepare in meeting the new requirements. The added uncertainty of a new process, with new panellists and new emphases makes this a challenging time to be in ITE. It is a time to support each other, and TEFANZ executive is happy to hear from anyone about how we can further support member institutions.
Responding to Māori and Pasifika people in ITE: a regular newsletter feature
The TEFANZ executive are including information useful for initial teacher education providers in relation to considering responsiveness to Māori learners and whānau and Pasifika learners and families in our newsletters. In this newsletter we share links from the Kōrero Mātauranga project that offer voices of Māori and voices of Pacific people about their views about the education system:
The website for further information on the Kōrero Mātauranga project is: https://conversation.education.govt.nz/conversations/education-conversation/what-you-told-us/
Joint TEFANZ/ATEA conference: University of Auckland, July 8-10 2020
Make sure that you have these dates in your diary! July 7th will be a pre-conference forum for early -mid career researchers and PhD students. The portal for submissions has opened and can be found at https://www.tefanzatea2020.nz/. It closes in early March.
We have excellent keynote speakers: https://www.tefanzatea2020.nz/keynote-speakers/
Professor Angus MacFarlane (Professor of Māori Education at the University of Canterbury), Dr Katrina Thorpe (an Aboriginal teacher educator and researcher) and Professor Linda Clarke (University of Ulster). We also have a panel of scholars from the Pacific joining us to share their perspectives on teacher education.
The conference will be exciting, and a great time to connect with teacher educators from here, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
The conference theme is ‘Initial teacher education: Global issues and local responses’, which gives lots of scope for papers. We look forward to receiving your work – please consider sending an abstract, and encouraging others to do so too. Putting together a symposium of several papers would be a good way to support postgraduate students and colleagues into conference presentation. Do circulate the opportunity around your networks.
Sharing our Key Teaching Tasks
Our website has a new section: TEFANZ accreditation support. In this space we want to share ideas and resources that might help members with their accreditation documentation and processes. Although Key Teaching Tasks (KTTs) need to be developed with partners, we thought members might like to see lists of KTTs that had been developed by other institutions, in particular institutions that have been through the panel process. You will find these KTT lists on the website, and we encourage you to share yours if you would like to (contact Alex Gunn: alex.gunn@otago.ac.nz).
TEFANZ Awards
At the 2020 Conference we will again award our emerging teacher educator and sustained excellence in teacher education awards. Please consider nominating people for these.
We invite nominations for:
1. Sustained Excellence in Teacher Education Award
2. Emerging Teacher Educator Award
The first award for sustained excellence is designed to provide recognition for significant contribution over time to teacher education. The second award is to recognise the work of an emerging teacher educator.
The awards which consist of a citation and taonga are open to all teacher educators.
Any two teacher educators from an institution that is a member of TEFANZ may nominate a teacher educator for an award. Nominations should consist of a written statement from each person making the nomination and a copy of the nominee¹s CV. You may include letters of support.
Nominees must be teacher educators from an institution that is a member of TEFANZ.
An award committee comprising the Chair of TEFANZ (or nominee), two other members of TEFANZ, and an external representative usually a past award winner will consider the nominations and decide on recipients of the awards.
Please send your nominations for these awards to Bev Cooper (b.cooper@waikato.ac.nz) by 1 April 2020, with ‘TEFANZ awards’ in the subject line of the email.
AGM 2020
There will be four places on the TEFANZ executive opening up at the AGM in 2020. Sitting executive members can stand again, but this is an opportunity for people who are interested to put themselves forward. Get in touch with Alex if you would like more information about the commitment and the process. Nominations are taken on the floor of AGM and can also be sent in in advance (to Alex at alex.gunn@otago.ac.nz).
Executive Meeting News
At the executive meeting on October 17th, held in Wellington, the following matters were addressed:
- We are moving our accounts and payments to a TEFANZ bank account, rather than being hosted by organisations, as the accounting is proving challenging. At the AGM in 2020 we will elect a Treasurer as one of the executive roles.
- We were visited by Ben O’Meara and Paul Aitken to discuss Ministry of Education ‘news’. The key points were the status of the Government’s various education review projects, in particular the release of the draft National Education and Learning Priorities document, on which feedback is being sought. The RFP for employment-based teacher education is expected in March on GETS – there is ministerial interest in employment based pathways for addressing shortages in technology and te reo Māori teaching and for those in regional areas with no providers. The Ministry does not have ITE reform on the ‘top of its list’ at present, as there is so much other work happening, and recommendations about ITE have been moved into work streams for the next term of government. We raised that ITE providers do not seem to receive reports and documents directly, and Ben and Paul agreed to add TEFANZ members to the direct mail lists for future mail outs. Ben and Paul will visit again at our March meeting to keep the connection going.
- Pauline Barnes visited and we discussed the panel processes (as the first panel had been held the previous week). Learning reports will be shared following review of the panel processes. Panel chairs are Candis Craven, Shane Edwards and Terry Fuljames. There is a pool of 40 or so panelists at present. More may be sought in 2020. Pauline drew attention to the need for explicit theory and practice integration and to page 16 of the requirements which lists what the panel will test for in terms of programme structure and content.
- We discussed how TEFANZ could support members in preparing for accreditation, in particular the idea of research into Key Teaching Tasks that was floated at the Forum. We agreed to share our KTTs on the website as they were developed, so members could see what others had done, and that it might be useful to research the performance of the Culminating Integrative Task, which is more difficult to develop and assess.
- We discussed the preparation of a carbon offset statement for presentation at the 2020 AGM and also how the 2020 conference could be made more sustainable.
- We discussed the Deans of Education trip to Australian institutions on which Tracey Hooker represented TEFANZ. We will reconnect with the chair of the Deans to ask about how we can work with them on possible actions that could arise from this trip.
- We agreed to have a section of the newsletter dedicated to promoting Māori and Pasifika resources and issues for members.
- We agreed to invite the Normal and Model Schools Association president/executive to our next executive meeting to talk about Normal schools and ITE.
- We invited Misty Sato to remain on the TEFANZ executive until the AGM, a request to which Misty later agreed.
Upcoming Hui:
NZEI
TEFANZ members met with NZEI president, Lynda Stuart, and NZEI staff on November 26th at Education House. As always it was a stimulating discussion – notes will follow when they are received from NZEI. NZEI is especially interested in research relevant to their members that is occurring in our organisations. If you have any papers or projects to share, please send them to Karina Bird – Karina.Bird@nzei.org.nz.
Next year the presidency will move to Liam Rutherford, and Lynda will return to May Rd School. There seems to be enthusiasm for continuing to meet from both sides, so our next meeting will be with Liam in the first semester. We will send the date as soon as it is set.
PPTA
The 2020 meetings between PPTA and secondary teacher education providers will be at the PPTA offices in Wellington on Friday 27 March and Friday 16 October.
Our next executive meeting will be in Wellington on 26th March 2020.
Noho ora ra
Fiona (on behalf of the TEFANZ executive).
The newsletter aims to keep our members up to date on TEFANZ activities and the national ITE landscape more generally. It will also be used to advertise opportunities to participate in policy or research activities that are offered to or generated by TEFANZ. We welcome contributions by member organisations who would like to connect with other members through this medium. We hope you find it useful, and are happy to receive feedback (via Fiona Ell, f.ell@auckland.ac.nz).
TEFANZ is a climate conscious organisation. TEANZ strongly encourages purchase of carbon offset for all travel associated with TEFANZ business and events.
Want to find out more about carbon offset?
https://www.orataiao.org.nz/offset_your_emissions
https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/sustainability-customer-carbon-offset