Professional Dialogue, Reflective Practice and Teacher Research: Engaging Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers in Collegial Dialogue about Curriculum Innovation

While embedded in teacher professional standards and assumed aspects of teacher professionalism, willingness and ability to engage in professional dialogue about practice and curriculum initiatives are rarely examined or explicitly taught in teacher education programs. With this in mind, the authors designed an assessment task for pre-service teachers that required them to interview their supervising teachers about the implementation of sustainability as cross-curriculum priority in the Australian national curriculum, and to write a reflective account of the process. Forty-seven early childhood pre-service teachers and their supervising teachers consented to the interview transcripts and reflective accounts being used as research data. Analysis of the reflective accounts highlights what enabled and constrained the dialogue across professional experience settings and the benefits of having pre-service teachers engage in such an assessment task. The authors discuss implications for pre-service teacher education and on-going teacher professional learning.