Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn’s research while affiliated with University of Technology Sydney and other places

As detailed in the opening chapter and further explored through the subsequent chapters, primary science teacher education in Australia is positioned within a particularly interesting moment in time.

The spotlight on initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia continues to burn brightly.

The central question underpinning this chapter is “What is the purpose of primary science teacher education?”. Despite the simple framing, this is a question without a definitive, fixed answer as science is inextricably linked to the societies within which it is situated.

This chapter takes a deep dive into a recent initiative in science teacher education already mentioned in Chaps. 1 and 2—primary specialism. Chapter 1 identified the training/hiring of science/STEM specialists as an area of national priority in an effort to raise the volume and quality of science teaching in schools.

In this chapter, we provide case snapshots that celebrate and reflect the diversity of practices that Australian primary science teacher educators use to design and deliver their programs to enable ‘classroom-ready’ graduates.

There is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) ‘crisis’ which involves a shortage of students—the next generation, who will be responsible for our futures—studying STEM.

In this chapter, we analyse the life-cycle of international partnerships between an Australian university and universities and schools in Nepal and Bhutan. The collaboration placed the Australian university hosts in a distinctive role with special responsibilities of providing stimuli, engaging teachers and teacher educators in joint processes of working through contradictions, developing new ideas for practice, and supporting their embedding in institutional practices. Participants included researchers, teacher educators, in-service teachers, pre-service teachers, and school students. The partnerships produced lasting positive changes that broke away from existing practices in ways that were often deemed unviable. Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we explore partnerships as a process of jointly creating new knowledge and artefacts that make new practices possible. Conflicts of motives were crucial—not between different partners, but between motives to enact engaging, inclusive pedagogies, and seemingly opposed motives to cover curriculum content. Participants were able to resolve this dilemma, develop models for new practices, and then implement these. The chapter highlights the expansive nature of the learning that can take place through school-university partnerships, offering wider lessons for those seeking to create school-university partnerships to transgress the status quo and realise what was previously considered impossible.

Contemporary schools seek to employ teachers who are curious learners, who can employ practitioner inquiry skills to investigate, inform and grow their own classroom practice, responsive to their circumstances. As a profession, the question we must ask is how do we best prepare and continue to equip teachers with the necessary research skills to investigate and inform their own practice? In this study, we share our pedagogical stance and features of our approach in a new core undergraduate subject for pre-service teachers (PSTs). We discuss professional learning groups (PLGs) for initial teacher education students as the main intervention in the subject, and, more specifically, we elaborate how regular participation in PLGs formed in an on-campus subject can help PSTs to become researchers. We draw on 183 student exit tickets and student feedback surveys to consider broader implications for how to engage teachers in research. This study poses questions about the nature of practitioner research and investigates the role that PLGs play in disrupting the challenges universities face in preparing teachers to engage in and with research.