Abstract:
Concern about the nature of teaching practice in secondary teacher training and the relationship between the training college and school contributions to that training have been recurring themes in the recent New Zealand literature of training. In 1979 the Department of Education's Review of Teacher Training sought "To encourage co-operation between all parties involved" in a search for closer "co-ordination between colleges and schools". As a result, in 1981, several school-based training innovations were established at the secondary Teachers College, Auckland, and two, the Mathematics/Science programme and the History/Social Studies programme, became the subjects of this present study in 1982.
The focus of the study has been on identifying those influences which appear to have most affected the dispositions and behaviour of the trainees during the period of training. The methodology is primarily that of ethnography and owes much to the tradition of descriptive case-study at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia.
In the early sections of the study, on outline of the history and training methods of Northern Hemisphere and New Zealand teacher training provides a background to the national and institutional context in which the programmes operated. Three trainees in each of the programmes are case-studied in depth, and on the basis of the evidence in their case-reports, dominant influences are identified and inferences drawn about the manner in which each influence contributed to the outcomes of training. Finally, the functioning of each of the two programmes as training systems is estimated and compared with that of systems in the Northern Hemisphere.