Thinking innovatively about advancing the innovative potential of preservice teachers

Abstract

The recently released Australia's Teachers: Australia's Future (Department of Education, Science and Training, DEST, 2003) makes some very good points: it would indeed be wonderful to build a culture of continuous innovation in education wherein creative and enterprising persons who demonstrate high levels of competence and responsibility co-operate and learn productively together. However, the document itself is far from innovative in its views of how (preservice) teachers should be taught to foster learning in these new ways. In this paper I adopt a poststructuralist view that the capacity to act in innovative ways (or to defer to the accepted ways) is not a matter of personal knowledge, attitude or attribute alone, but partly at least shaped in teaching/learning relationships in teacher education and related educational sites. Because these relationships are constitutive of the educators of the future, their qualitative nature needs to change - epistemologically, so that preservice teachers learn better science and mathematics and more about technology enhanced learning as delineated in Australia's teachers: Australia's Future (DEST, 2003), but also ontologically such that preservice teachers themselves come to know innovative inquiry based ways-of-being a learner and educator in the twenty-first century.