(De)valuing partnerships in contemporary teacher education: lessons from four Australian universities

To be effective, productive and sustainable, teacher education faculties need to mobilise multiple partnerships involving diverse groups of gatekeepers, participants and stakeholders with separate aspirations. A key element of that mobilization must be identifying ways to fulfill those aspirations as far as possible, thereby valuing members of the partnerships. Yet, given that partners’ interests are often competing, it is difficult to value all partners equally, potentially leading to a devaluing of the partnership and of the teacher education that it is intended to promote. This paper addresses the research question, “Which forms of partnerships add value to and are valued by Australian schools and faculties of teacher education?” The research context is four such schools and faculties, traversing regional Queensland and metropolitan Sydney. The research design draws on a qualitative, inductive, comparative case study method (Lloyd-Jones, 2003) that elicited analytical themes from a common set of questions applied to selected teacher education partnerships in the four institutions. The thematic analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) applied to the responses to these questions yielded findings that were consistent with the theoretical framework related to educational partnerships developed by Cardini (2006). In particular, the valuing of partnerships depends on explicit and sustained efforts to value the contributions of individual partners and to render the partnership the sum of all parts, rather than being principally to benefit the host institution. The significance of these findings lies in identified strategies for teacher education schools and faculties and their diverse partners to enhance the mutual advantages of their partnerships.