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Re-designing a first year teacher education community service-learning subject using constructive alignment
Conference paper   Peer reviewed

Re-designing a first year teacher education community service-learning subject using constructive alignment

Sharn Donnison and D Edwards
Proceedings of the 2011 Australian Teacher Education Association Conference, pp.1-8
Australian Teacher Education Association Conference, 2011 (Melbourne, Australia, 04-Jul-2011–06-Jul-2011)
Australian Teacher Education Association
2011
url
http://atea.edu.au/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&view=viewcategories&Itemid=132View
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Abstract

Curriculum and Pedagogy teacher education community service-learning first year in higher education
Community service-learning is a recognised pedagogical approach in higher education especially in a North American context (Eyler & Giles, 1999). However, it is less common in Australian higher education and especially so in a first year teacher education subject (Butcher, Howard, McMeniman, & Thom, 2005). This paper reports on measures taken to constructively align an innovative subject in the first year program of a teacher education course that incorporates community service-learning and foundational principles of sociology. The subject has been offered since 2008. We initially describe the subject, its current intended outcomes and assessment practices to achieve these outcomes. This is followed by an examination of students' actual learning outcomes and how these have differed from the subject's intended aim. Using reflective practice, we then invite our audience into our deliberations as we redesign this subject using constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2007) to better achieve our aim of facilitating preservice teachers' informed and experiential understanding of structural inequality within societies, and factors that impact on unequal access to education. These deliberations focus on examining and constructively aligning the intended learning outcomes, learning experiences, and assessment tools with the intended aim of the subject.

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