The Canberra Times ..

I thought other TFA Associates might be interested in this letter to the editor from ACT AEU President, Philip Rasmus, published in the Canberra Times following an article on TFA, and my response. The Canberra Times didn't publish my response, but I found that writing it concreted my belief in what we were doing.

See you all tomorrow ..

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Your article ''Program puts pressure on to learn to be teachers in just six weeks'' (September 10, p5) correctly identifies the Australian Education Union as a vehement critic of the Rudd Government's ''Teach for Australia'' program.

The notion that one could successfully operate in any other profession, eg medicine, law, plumbing, after six weeks training, not including any on-the-job experience, is patently preposterous.

Why, then, does anyone imagine that it's OK for their children to be taught by untrained teachers?

Curiously, the two pictured graduates seem unnervingly naive.

One is quoted as saying, ''Any new teacher would surely feel [challenged and somewhat terrified] fronting up to thirty kids, no matter how much preparation they have had.'' Absolutely wrong. During conventional teacher training, a potential teacher has many classroom opportunities to confront their fears. If these fears prove disabling and incurable, they seek a different profession.

They thus avoid burdening a class of students with their inadequacies.

The other graduate, an arts/science student, seems to have finished uni without being challenged to substantiate claims. How else could she make a statement like ''I see the program has had success in other countries''? Evidence, please?

I wish these people all the best.

They are merely the victims of our Government's persistent refusal to implement successful strategies to address teacher shortages. However, ''lambs to the slaughter'' is among the 1thoughts which come to mind.

Philip Rasmus, Australian Education Union, ACT Branch President.

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And my response -

As a 2010 Teach for Australia Associate, I’d like to respond to the opinion of AEU ACT Branch president, Phillip Rasmus, published on September 12.

In deciding to apply, I of course put some research into the views of various stakeholders in education – the AEU inclusive. I read the study of Teach for America by Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, on which the AEU founds its concern, just as I read criticisms of this study which note, among other things, its questionably localised data sampling. I also read the report of a study commissioned by Mathematica Policy Research, which paints a decidedly different picture of Teach for America’s success and indeed recommends that schools, given the chance, should hire its Associates.

I say this to substantiate my colleague's statement and, moreover, to impress the fact that I’m aware of what I applied for and I’m aware of dialogue pertaining to comparable programmes overseas. This should go some way to diffusing claims of unnerving naivety.

Correlatedly, and as to my own suggestion that all new teachers entering a classroom for the first time would feel challenged, a recent statement of the Federal President of the AEU, Angelo Gavrielatos, is of note: “repeated surveys of beginning teachers tell us that they do not feel properly prepared for the reality of teaching when they enter the profession”. My parents and brother share similar sentiment, as do many of my friends who are also teachers. And, despite my TEFL training, I too felt the same way when beginning work as an English teacher in China.

For this reason, I am grateful that the Teach for Australia programme not only offers preliminary training in partnership with the University of Melbourne (of comparable coursework contact hours to a Graduate Diploma of Education from the University of Melbourne), but ongoing in-school and external mentoring for the full two years of the programme.

Lastly, the programme appeals to me for both its objective, and the means through which it aims to meet it. Educational disadvantage is a real issue, and one that most of the Teach for Australia Associates will not yet have directly experienced. I don’t see how a programme that attracts graduates to the teaching profession, places them in schools where this disadvantage is most palpable, and then, working with these schools, provides continuing tutelage and professional development, is at all a bad thing; I’m excited to have found a career opportunity I can believe in.

This does not make me a victim, perhaps just hopeful -- just as I hope, after the programme has established itself, the AEU will lend its support to Teach for Australia as a new voice in the shared call for improved Australian education. I think hope is something worth injecting into disadvantaged educational environments. And I look forward to trying, through the framework of Teach for Australia and the experience of other teachers I’ll be working alongside, to make some contribution toward doing so.

Emlyn Cruickshank, 2010 Teach for Australia Associate