The Northern Territory Teaching Schools program: Exploring the promise of partnerships in regional professional experience

One of the key challenges for education in Northern Australia is attracting and recruiting teachers who can respond to the challenges of the region at the start of their careers through professional experience in the region. For pre-service students in regional locations such as the Northern Territory these challenges include coping with the distance and isolation, and high staff turnover. In response to these challenges there are initiatives to improve teacher quality and promote remote and regional areas as options for study to employment pathways.

This paper describes and discusses the Teaching Schools Partnership, developed in 2006, involving teacher-employing authorities in the Northern Territory and Charles Darwin University to provide professional experience.

Utilising Wenger and Lave's notion of 'Communities of Practice' as a theoretical framework this paper analyses the challenges of offering professional experience with the resultant partnership practising, mutual engagement and joint enterprise of both parties.

The paper will outline the current theoretical and conceptual principles and the framework of the Teaching Schools Partnership and describe practices that have made this collaborative successful. Close examination of this partnership reveals a need to extend the present outlook and potentially engage at a broader scale with increased focus on community.