A new model of teacher education for small island states: The Nauru Teacher Education Project
This chapter presents the Nauru Teacher Education Programme for addressing a chronic shortage of local teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Republic of Nauru. Based in engagement theory and culturally responsive teaching, the project has run successfully since 2013 and graduated 39 teachers in early childhood, primary and secondary education. The programme employs a blended approach with students completing online units in Nauru utilising a Moodle platform and supported by two on-island lecturers employed through the University of New England. Use of the Moodle platform allows the Nauruan students to engage with Australian peers, who are undertaking the same units. All Nauruan students completing the Associate Degree also undertake a four-week Australia-based teaching practicum in a small rural town in New South Wales, thus exposing them to professional practice within Australian schools. The practicum also allows for cultural exchange, exposing the Nauruan students to Australian culture within the schools and in out-of-school activities, and enabling the students to share Nauruan cultural activities, history and geography with their host schools.
Pre-service Teacher Education in Nauru: Where, Who, and Why
Rural education thrives on building teaching capacity and mentoring from within communities. Whilst isolated and remote areas have the potential to participate in online teacher education, strategic and effective delivery requires a targeted analysis of the characteristics of the learners, the motivations that drive them, and day-to-day environmental and community factors influencing the students' studies. This paper reports on an innovative model of teacher education recently implemented in the Republic of Nauru. In this model, the Nauruan Government has partnered with an Australian regional university to develop quality Pacific-focused teacher education programs that are delivered through a hybrid of online and classroom instruction. The Nauru Teacher Education Project (NTEP), conceptualised and administered by the University of New England, provides culturally responsive online and on-island teacher development for the community of Nauru. It is here that the lecturers come to 'know the students'.
Integrating Science and Literacy Using Teacher-Made Readers
Teacher-made teaching and learning resources are an effective way to facilitate relevant and appropriate curriculum content, values and attitudes for students. This is particularly significant when the context is rather unique, as was the case in the remote developing Pacific Island CountnJ of Nauru. Such resources can be deployed in accompaniment with carefully selected commercially available resources. This approach has been shown to be particularly effective when integrating literacy and other disciplines such as Science. This study demonstrates the relevance; benefits and practicality of having teachers create their own ston;books for use in communicating chosen science concepts in a way that develops science knowledge and understanding as well as reading development and other literacy skills.
Supporting families: a nurturing teacher education strategy in Nauru
There has been little recent documentation concerning Pacific family support for family members locally involved in university study in their Pacific home country and how such responses affect both parties. Some studies dealing with family support for student family members, including Pacific families residing in the USA, have been published. A New Zealand Ministry of Education report on Pasifika students' educational success rates raised the need for effective family support contexts. Another study researched the family support negotiation patterns of mature-age part-time students in Australia, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea. Only one University of the South Pacific research focused on Pacific family and community expectations of family members studying and residing with their families in their Pacific home countries. This Nauru-based study describes mixed support responses from Nauruan families towards their teacher education student family members and Nauru Department of Education student engagement and well-being development strategies.
A Locally Focused and Sustainable International Teacher Education Project within Oceania
Developing Pacific Island Countries (PIC) often battle with remoteness, a lack of available resources resulting in outdated infrastructure, too few well-trained local teacher educators and a heightened lack of available local teachers. Approaches to alleviate these problems in many PICs have included the employment of expatriate teachers to supplement teacher supply from local teacher education institutions. In the Republic of Nauru, a model is being implemented where the Department of Education has partnered with the University of New England (UNE) to develop a two-phase quality teacher education programme with a Pacific focus. The mixed-mode delivery offers online teaching material with continuous full-time on-island support to enable the students to remain in-country for their studies in Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, or Secondary Education. A sustainable and transformational aspect of this model is its mentoring. Those mentored will in turn provide academic support to help later cohorts complete this Pacific-focused international teaching qualification. The project design has an associated multi-faceted longitudinal research and programme evaluation component. Data collected includes students' online reflective learning journals, in-class and online interaction, and video footage and course assessment data as well as interviews with students, their families, the Department of Education, and the University lecturers. This paper reports on the project design, the characteristics of the cohort and identified changes in students' perceptions of themselves as a teacher and learner during the first year.
One Size Doesn't Fit All: Teacher Education In Developing Pacific Island Countries
In global terms, the world is facing chronic teacher shortages "that will persist beyond 2015 for future decades to come if current trends continue" (UNESCO, 2013). UNESCO reports that the East Asia and Pacific Region need to fill an additional 57,000 teaching positions to achieve universal primary education standards. The closing of the global teacher gap requires development of new policies and strategies in hand with a financial commitment that has a long-term focus. In one developing Pacific Island country, a new model is being implemented where they have partnered with an Australian university to develop quality teacher education programs with a Pacific focus. This article will report on the needs analysis, the development of this strategy, the design hurdles, and the implementation phase of the project.
A Flexible Delivery Teacher Education Strategy in Micronesia
This study describes the experiences of a group of 14 pre-service and 14 in-service teachers from a small Pacific Island country in Micronesia, who were enrolled in a teacher education programme that was delivered online to their home country from the University of New England in Australia, with added online and face-to-face lecturer support. At the invitation of the Government of the Republic of Nauru to work in partnership to improve its children's school achievement, the project aimed to raise the quality of teachers in the country by enabling these jointly selected participants to cascade their new learning in pedagogical theory and practice throughout the 10 schools in the island nation, whilst remaining teaching in their home communities. The data revealed a complex interaction between certain technological and cultural variables, which needed to be more effectively managed in order to more effectively deliver the online teacher education programme.
Wellbeing and Resilience among Teacher Education Students in Nauru
The researchers wanted to understand how 22 Nauruan teacher education students responded to changing circumstances and whether or not they did anything specific to maintain their sense of resilience. The population of the Republic of Nauru is a small remote Pacific Island community of extended families, with the prioritisation of traditional family and community obligations. Most of the students access the Internet only when visiting their technology-equipped study centre, which is an allocated classroom in the secondary school. Even then technological infrastructure outages limit effective delivery. To ease these obstacles, teacher education is flexibly delivered, facilitated by two, face-to-face, support lecturers. Researchers noted that the students sensed wellbeing and resilience when their course and study habits were compatibly aligned with their family and community commitments and the students' technological, geographical and cultural contexts.
Practitioner exchange: Teaching Inquiry Learning in the Social Sciences
The difficulty in understanding the guided discovery inquiry learning approach to teaching social science and developing the appropriate skills to facilitate student learning, is that many teachers most likely did not experience such learning in their schooling and so do not have the necessary role models. This paper describes how a week-long workshop in Nauru, conducted by University of New England lecturers, provided appropriate knowledge and skills for pre-service and in-service teachers to authenticate global disciplinary research methods and concepts through the use of local content in the local primary classroom. The metacognitive learning, about inquiry learning, achieved by the lecturers and teachers was facilitated by the intensive school as both modelling and practice are essential to social science learning at all levels. The transferability of the inquiry approach to other cultural settings appears to imply the effectiveness of using this pedagogy in differentiated classrooms and in high multi-cultural settings.
International Partnerships for Teacher Education in Nauru
Developing Pacific Island countries often battle with remoteness, a lack of available resources resulting in outdated infrastructures, too few well-trained local teacher educators and a heightened lack of available local teachers. Approaches to alleviate these problems in many Pacific Island countries have included the employment of expatriate teachers to supplement teacher supply from local teacher education institutions. In the Republic of Nauru, a model is being implemented where the Department of Education has partnered with the University of New England (UNE), Australia, to develop a two-phase quality teacher education programme with a Pacific focus. The mixed-mode delivery offers online teaching material with continuous full-time on-island support to enable the students to remain in-country for their studies in Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, or Secondary Education. A sustainable and transformational aspect of this model is its mentoring. Those mentored will in turn provide academic support to help later cohorts complete this Pacific-focused international teaching qualification. The project design has an associated multifaceted longitudinal research and programme evaluation component. Data collected include students' online reflective learning journals, in-class and online interaction, video footage, and course assessment data as well as interviews with students, their families, the Department of Education, and the University lecturers. This paper reports on the project design, the characteristics of the cohort and identified changes in students' perceptions of themselves as teachers and learners during the first year.