At the intersection of community, schools and university, Associate Professor David Turner and his colleagues are breaking fertile new ground.
“Typically, in education policy and teacher education we have waited for the Government to come along and say, ‘You are not doing very well at this,’ or ‘You should be looking at that,'” says.
“In my time I’ve seen many reviews of teacher education. Time and again we go back to an improvement approach which is top down.”
“The big difference in our project is the profession – school teachers and leaders – are saying, ‘We think we can do this better and we want to work with the University to achieve it.'”
In this case, the community and schools are within the Catholic Diocese of Lismore. The ‘University’ is the Southern Cross University Faculty of Education , to which Associate Professor Turner belongs.
It should come as no surprise he lights up at the prospect of supporting teachers to create world-class learning environments.
He has taught both here and abroad, been a school principal and academic. For eight years he was the Director of Professional Learning for the Queensland Association of State School Principals.
“The capacity to make a difference in the lives of the kids in schools is something I have always enjoyed,” Associate Professor Turner said.
“I’ve always been attracted to opportunities to challenge the status quo and do things differently.
At first though, he had a bit of a false start, studying business and working for a finance company, soon finding he and the corporate world weren’t a great fit.
“Mum was a teacher and growing up I spent a lot of time around teachers,” he said. “So, I went back to college.”
“Like most teachers, I was drawn by the opportunity to have a positive impact in people’s lives. To make a difference.”
Associate Professor Turner’s first post was to Magnetic Island and he was elevated to his first principal’s job at Gumlu in the Burdekin region, south of Townsville, within two years of joining the profession.
For a period, his career wove between teaching, the education department, further study (MBA, Southern Cross University, 1998), time as a photographer and back to teaching, as principal at Kenilworth State Community College in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
It was here he chanced across Professor David Lynch. He was establishing a new approach to teacher preparation, the Bachelor of Learning Management, where students collectively developed their capabilities in schools.
Associate Professor Turner was in.
“I had 12 classrooms in my school and had these 18 university students turn up once a week,” he said. “They bought new energy and insights into our school community, and the experienced teachers at our school were great mentors.
“An independent ACER study indicated it produced students who were better prepared for real-world classroom environments.”
The work led Associate Professor Turner to doctoral studies and more senior academic posts.
As chance would have it, Professor Lynch is now the Director of the TeachLab Research Group at Southern Cross University.
He sought out Associate Professor Turner – who was then wrapping up his role at the principal’s association – to steer the emerging research partnership with the Catholic Diocese.
The partnership is still taking shape, but its principles build on their earlier work together: the University and teaching profession having different but equally important contributions to make in creating outstanding learning environments for students and getting trainee teachers in the best possible shape to start their career.
The appetite to work in partnership with schools and the profession is one of the things that made Southern Cross distinctive, according to Associate Professor Turner, along with a deep commitment to sustainability and First Nations knowledge systems within the curriculum.
TeachLab is one of three centres of focus in the Faculty of Education, along with and the .
Faculty Executive Dean Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles co-leads SEAE and is a nationally regarded researcher, whose current work focuses on the pivot points between climate, childhood, country and education.
“Many of the leading members of our Faculty have deep, practical experience in the classroom,” she said. “Their talent and passion for the field has led them on a path to research, which then informs how we prepare education students for their careers.
“And we are working in the school system, in partnership with leaders and teachers, with the goal of creating learning environments which are fit for the modern day and are literally world-class.
“All of this responds to the interrelated crises facing the national education system that were recently addressed by the .
“We feel Southern Cross University – which operates across a regional and rural footprint where these challenges are greatest – has a significant contribution to make.”
