Keywords

Introduction

In this chapter, we describe our shared learning insights from a science teacher education initiative. The self-study or professional inquiry at the centre of the chapter is part of longitudinal research that examines a science teacher education university–school partnership that encompassed multiple stakeholders: us as science teacher educators, our pre-service teachers (PSTs) and in-service primary teachers and students from a local primary school. One of the key innovations of the partnership was the use of a local artificial wetland in Hazelwood, Latrobe Valley, situated between our university and the participating primary school, which was used as a teaching site. In the spirit of earlier research that explored partnership impact on in-service and pre-service teachers (see Green & Ma, 2018), this chapter adopts a self-study methodology to examine our personal and professional positions within the science education partnership. As part of the study, we assumed the respective roles of ‘critical friend’, a practice that has been well theorised by our FUGuE colleague Anna Fletcher in Chap. 6, to reflexively examine our personal and professional transformation within a 12-week (semester-long) science education course. Drawing on her own professional exploration as critical friend to a local primary school community, Fletcher characterises critical friendship through notions of trust and provocation, which she explains, enhances reflection. As Fletcher argues, the role of a critical friend is to critically challenge assumptions via a critique of participants’ practice and viewpoints. Appropriately, and directly aligned to the underpinnings of our self-study, Fletcher reminds us of how critical friendship methodology can be employed as part of collaborative professional inquiry that involves pairing colleagues from the same setting as critical friends for each other. By critically examining and reflecting on our science education practice, our self-study is squarely situated within FUGuE’s wider vision for regional research that privileges relationality and reciprocality. As such, our critical friendship has been instrumental in our shared transformation of becoming more place-responsive teacher educators.

The science initiative had two intertwining dimensions: the first involved developing science education through a university–school partnership, and the second was concerned with teaching science in a wetland setting. Each of these aspects is embedded within a wider discourse of national and global teacher education renewal that seeks authentic learning contexts for PSTs, as well as stronger connections between theory and practice (Darling-Hammond & Lieberman, 2012). Such links can be observed in the broader Australian teacher education landscape, and more specifically in the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group’s [TEMAG] (2014) report that amplifies the significance of theory/practice integration in teacher education programmes.

In light of these considerations, our role as science teacher educators exposes us to the multiple challenges faced by many Australian primary schools where science teaching is either limited or in some instances non-existent (Goodrum, Hackling, & Rennie, 2001). Moreover, research suggests that many in-service teachers (ISTs) have negative attitudes towards science (Kenny, 2010), directly impacting PSTs exposure to adequate science teaching mentoring. Acknowledging this dilemma, Jones et al. (2016) propose science-dedicated, school-based science partnerships in teacher education as an influential strategy for enabling PSTs to practice science teaching. In line with their science pedagogy innovations, we contend that building structured and mutually beneficial university–school partnerships holds great capacity for PSTs to integrate theory and practice (TEMAG, 2014), and experience first-hand, the ways science can be effectively taught in outdoor settings (Green & Ma, 2018).

As a way of enhancing PSTs active involvement in their science learning, as well as scaffolding their scientific knowledge and pedagogical practice, PSTs in our course were required to teach science beyond the traditional classroom setting (Zeichner, 2010). This pedagogical approach runs parallel with worldwide educational thinking and practice that recognises the contributions of diverse ‘informal’ scientific learning environments—in and out of school, which support experiential and pupil-orientated learning (Wallace & Brooks, 2015). A good example of this can be seen in the educational offerings of science museums and nature centres, who through carefully designed and practical experiences, are challenging and changing the roles and responsibilities of students and teachers in science learning (Kawalkar & Vijapurkar, 2015; Salmi, Kaasinena, & Kallunkia, 2012). Likewise, these informal settings are becoming increasingly recognised for their capacity to develop personal science epistemologies (Lobos Jung & Tonso, 2006; Salmi et al., 2012; Yeh, 2017), and advance science communication more broadly (Stocklmayer & Rennie, 2017).

In the same vein, outdoor environments such as parks, school grounds and other naturalised sites are also becoming recognised as valuable sites for science education (Adams & Branco, 2017; Fisher-Maltese, 2013). Although outdoor settings are known to promote students’ cognitive, affective and physical development (Malone, 2008), many ISTs and PSTs lack the confidence to teach science in them. Key stumbling blocks include a lack of teacher’s science knowledge and training (Carrier, Tugurian, & Thomson, 2013), teacher concerns about control issues, teaching within curriculum boundaries, as well as finding time to teach science in an overloaded curriculum (Green & Ma, 2018).

As science teacher educators with aspirations to build our students’ scientific knowledge and confidence to teach science in primary (elementary) education settings, we came to the realisation that we wanted and needed to do science ‘differently’. As such, for the past 3 years, we have applied and theorised the university–school partnership model in our science teacher education work. In addition to our pursuit of strong and effective outcomes for all our partnerships stakeholders, we have developed a significant interest in better understanding the role science teacher educators play in partnerships (Jones et al., 2016; Kenny, 2010). Despite teacher educator-researchers reporting positive effects of partnership-oriented PST coursework (see Carrier, 2009; Green, 2016), partnership influence on teacher educators’ personal and professional learning remains a largely under-examined field of study. In light of this, the main intention of our self-study is to explore and highlight our personal and professional transformation as a consequence of our involvement in a science partnership initiative and to utilise the research process to further develop and improve our science education practice.

Background and Study Context: Partnership Emergence and Application

The university–school partnership that underpinned our self-study was originally established by Monica prior to her science collaboration with Hongming. When she partnered with Hongming to co-teach the science method course in an undergraduate Bachelor of Education programme (primary), she proposed utilising the partnership as a way of framing teaching and learning within the science education course. This approach included using the nearby 10-acre artificial Hazelwood wetland. In the early stages of the science course, we introduced the partnership to PSTs, which involved them planning and implementing a 25-min ‘tuning-in’ lesson around the topic ‘Adaptation’ in small teaching groups (4–5) to primary school children at the wetland. A central element of the partnership involved meeting regularly with the school teachers and the local power company who owned and built the wetland. During this communication, we negotiated complex and incompatible timetables between the school and the university, all the while attempting to ensure stakeholder agendas were being met.

The school’s ISTs delivered an introductory lecture on inquiry-based learning to the PSTs and provided lesson plan feedback and informal mentoring on the wetland-teaching day. As PSTs were required to consider the pedagogical possibilities at the wetland site, Monica delivered a lecture on place-based pedagogies to set the theoretical foundation for their science lessons. Following this, PSTs visited the wetland 2 weeks prior to lesson delivery to familiarise themselves with the wetland environment and to select appropriate teaching sites that aligned with lesson outcomes. Many PSTs had never previously visited a wetland and as such, had limited personal and pedagogical experience in it.

A Window into the Hazelwood Wetland

As represented across many of the other chapters that make up this book, our academic work is situated in the region of Latrobe Valley, central Gippsland. Our partner school is located in the regional township of Morwell where many families experience socio-economic hardship, intergenerational unemployment and chronic health issues. Many students at the school have learning difficulties that require additional teaching support, and a large proportion has aboriginal heritage. Historically, the university–school partnership had used the wetland as its point of reference for teaching and learning. Wedged between two adjoining roads, the hidden wetland boasts an expansive body of water that is surrounded by grass tussocks, melaleuca tea tree, Blackwood and local gums. The site is home to migrant birds and other species: white swans build nests on a small island in preparation for the arrival of their cygnets; close by, the criss-cross tracks of native water rats through the grass and mud tell another story. These everyday wetland comings and goings occur within a wider industrial landscape dominated by the recently decommissioned Hazelwood power station and a woven set of ubiquitous power lines that transport regionally produced electricity to urban Melbourne. For the many children who rarely leave the region or have limited access to special places in their out of school life, the wetland is a magical wonderland that supports their inquiry-based outdoor learning in place (Somerville & Green, 2012) (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1
figure 1

Pre-service teachers build miniature bark canoes with children at the wetland

Full size image

Theoretical Framework: Place, Identity and Place-Based Education

The self-study is informed by theories of place and identity, and place-based education (PBE). Adams, Hoelscher, and Till (2001) describe place as ‘socially constructed and produced at an enormous variety of scales, from the body to a building like a museum, to a city or suburb, to an ecosystem like a wetland, to a nation state, to the world or cosmos’ (p. xxi). In this sense, they propose places as both concrete and metaphorical. Our study is located in the Latrobe Valley and is affiliated with local communities and the natural environment, both of which are experienced and concrete. Moreover, we see the place of Latrobe Valley as a metaphorical ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992) where different perspectives meet and interplay through social, cultural and educational practice; where identities within and beyond the region are formed.

Gee (2000) defines identity as ‘the “kind of person” one is recognised as “being” at a given time and place, can change from moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context, and of course, can be ambiguous or unstable’ (p. 99). According to Casey (2001), identity is created through the body’s physical interaction with the place; self and place are interconnected in a sense that each is an ingredient of the other. The sense-making process continues as people move to new places, becoming the ‘ingredient’ of the new places, negotiating the meaning of the places and continually contributing to the shifting of shared social memories (Twigger-Ross, Bonaiuto, & Breakwell, 2003).

Theories around the bond between place and identity are linked to the formation of identity in place, while place-based education (PBE) theories focus particularly on using place as a pedagogical site for educational purposes. Gruenewald (2003) argues that the conceptualisation of a theory of place should acknowledge the embodiment of human–world relationship as an inherent part of places themselves. Further, he suggests that for the purposes of democratic education, schools should facilitate meaningful student participation in the process of making and shaping places. Others view places as pedagogical, enabling individuals to authentically experience, understand and value the entwined, intermingling and sensorial connections between people and place (Duhn, 2012; Somerville, 2010).

Applying a Self-study Methodology

Self-study methodology stems from the context of teacher education and is defined by Zeichner as ‘disciplined and systematic inquiry into one’s own teaching practice’ (1999, p. 11). According to Hamilton and Pinnegar (2014), through systematic reflexive process embedded in a self-study, teacher researchers have the opportunity to examine their own teaching and develop assertions for action to improve their professional practice. Notwithstanding the definitions of self-study as diverse, we are attracted to it as an ontological concern that enables us as researchers to position our research in and explore the space between self and other (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2014). Given the complexities of self-study practice, researchers are encouraged to negotiate the tensions between generalising private experience for solving public issues and guiding private practice with public theory and insight (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). Building on these views, Loughran (2010) advances teacher educators as agents of educational change, suggesting that genuine change happens after teacher educators develop a better understanding of the complexities of teaching and learning, which includes focusing on personal experience.

As innovative teacher educators, we have sought self-study methodology as a way of better understanding the complexities of our practice, which set out to generate educational change. As part of the reflexive research process, we engaged in regular reflective conversations as critical friends, which enabled us to learn from and work with one another (Marshall, 2004). In order to increase the trustworthiness of our study, we acknowledge Feldman’s (2003) advice on providing clear and detailed descriptions regarding data collection and representation construction as detailed in the following sections.

Method: Conversational Reflections Between Two Teacher Educators

The purpose of our study was to reflect on our academic work in the science teacher education course as a way of improving future practice. We did this by asking the following questions: What have I learnt from this experience by working with/in a university–school partnership and mentoring PSTs in teaching science in outdoor settings, and what are the implications of my learning for ongoing practice as a science teacher educator? The data set consisted of our respective autobiographies as well as recorded conversations and meetings before, during and after course delivery. We viewed our autobiographies as part of the data set as a way of telling our broader lived experiences and histories that are central to the study context. As Pinnegar and Hamilton (2009) remind us, we reposition our past experience in the meaning-making of our total life experience when we bring forward a past memory into the present time. We view our autobiographies as enabling; allowing us to make links between our past and present, providing a platform from which to analyse how we connect self to others as we focus on the ‘problems and issues that make someone an educator’ (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p. 17).

Acting as critical friends we communicated our individual understanding of our respective roles and practice, which included inquiring about, and challenging each other’s perceptions of working with/in partnership through a place-based pedagogy framework. Audio recordings were transcribed and revisited to identify themes in relation to our research questions. The themes were discussed and further examined with regard to the individual learning we experienced throughout the teaching semester and are interpreted and presented later in the chapter as ‘the learning journey’. Following this, we discuss our collaborative learning, focusing on the impact of the self-study for our teaching practice.

Our Place-Culture Autobiographical Reflections

Hongming’s Story

I came to Australia from China after a few years teaching in a secondary vocational school. At that time, many Chinese students chose to study overseas out of curiosity about a world once shunned due to political and economic reasons, and in the hope that the new adventure would bring new perspectives and opportunities that would enrich their life experiences. I was one of them. After a few years of postgraduate study, I was offered a position as a teacher educator at the Gippsland campus. The changes I had to deal with were significant and posted both opportunities and challenges for me, personally and professionally (sometimes these two dimensions intertwined). The largest challenge came from the multifaceted cultural differences. There were new people to live and work with, new social and educational systems to become familiar with, and, new cultural traditions I needed to respond to. I needed to learn the English language not as a ‘foreign’ language (as I did in China), but as a daily language spoken as part of who I am now. All these changes were part of the driving forces that made me reshape my view of self and others—my self-identity.

Among most of the influential driving forces was the impact the place had on me. I did not identify myself as a person that had strong place attachment back in China. Moving to Australia raised my awareness of the environment around me as the landscape and climate were very different. Coming from northern China, which has a typical temperate monsoon climate with four clearly distinct seasons, I could not tell the four seasons in Melbourne for the first few years—most of the months were the same to me with only a few very hot days in summer. All the trees were gum trees with evergreen bushes throughout the year. I started to miss the feeling of excitement when I spotted the first sprout from a bare branch in spring in China. To some extent, the changes made me rediscover the significance that the place had on me in China (things that I had taken for granted) and memories of past places became symbolic links representing who I used to be. The new place, however, had not gained significance as part of who I was becoming.

The same was true in terms of my relationship with the Gippsland region. For the first few years, my movement was limited within the university campus and so was my mind. I did not have many meaningful exchanges with local people and community. The region seemed to me nothing special as elsewhere in Victoria, where I remained an outsider culturally, without sharing the history with the people. I could not feel the same feeling. I used to have some conversations with one of my colleagues on how people could be judged by their appearance and behaviour. He said that the same judgemental rule would not apply to me as people already see me as ‘different’. This feeling of being culturally ‘other’ haunted me in the first few years and I was not sure how it could be overcome.

When I first started my work at the Gippsland campus, I became a member of a research group called ‘Place, Space and Body’. The group was led by Prof. Margaret Somerville and dedicated to place-based pedagogy research. Although I gained a fundamental understanding of place pedagogy during this period, I struggled to find my place within the conceptual framework. At that time, it was difficult for me to envisage the connection between science education and place pedagogy, except for areas closely related to environmental education. The opportunity appeared when Monica approached me with the proposal of working with a partner school that involved PSTs teaching children at a local wetland as part of the science method course I coordinated. I had conducted some classroom observations at the partner school but had never worked with the teachers in a formal partnership, nor had I ever mentored the PSTs design and delivery of lessons in outdoor settings. All of this meant I needed to step outside my comfort zone and work with all the uncertainties the partnership brought. I knew I would learn much from the experience and that it would be the start of a transformative journey.

Monica’s Story

My personal identity as a ‘Gippslander’ commenced as a child growing up on the south side of Morwell, a few hundred metres away from the iconic open cut mine. At night I could hear the clunking machines unearthing the brown coal that would be used for electricity production at the nearby Hazelwood power station. I came to know my local neighbourhood through adult-free shared adventures with siblings and other kids from Anglo and Italian families in our respective backyards and local creeks. Fast forward to my primary teaching career that commenced in a small rural school in West Gippsland where my students and I spent considerable time outside building gardens, making compost and planting trees as part of everyday learning.

It wasn’t long before I returned to full-time study and pursued my eventual profession in outdoor education. For the large part of 15 years, I worked and lived in the Australian bush—cross-country skiing, bushwalking and kayaking rivers and oceans in wild and semi-remote alpine, desert, river and ocean environments—on trips that lasted anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks. Teaching in these settings fostered my ongoing passion and love of the natural world, and profoundly shaped my personal and professional interest in social and ecological matters associated with planetary sustainability. These opportunities also instilled within me a sense of adventure and strengthened my pedagogical capacity to take calculated risks in my teaching.

In my eventual transition from outdoor education to teacher education many years later, I returned to Gippsland where as part of my role as teacher educator, I sought new collaborations with teachers, environmental educators and community and cultural leaders as a way of framing my teaching and my students’ learning. My appreciation of the pedagogical value of local places, neighbourhoods, wetlands and school grounds were underpinning themes of my Ph.D. that examined and theorised place/community pedagogies. My Ph.D. research focus was further expanded when approached by a leading (retiring) primary teacher from a local school seeking a school–university partnership in the Morwell River wetland.

Although my daily commute to university took me past the wetland, I had never ventured through its gates. My initial wetland visit took place on a sunny but cold winter’s day with a small group of colleagues from the School of Education where we met the passionate teacher and power company’s environmental officer who showed us around the site to view frogs, bird life, carp traps and human-made nest boxes. While the tour exposed me to the site’s ecological richness, it was the follow-up wetland trip that brought to life the site’s pedagogical significance. Here I observed children’s learning as they undertook the role of journalists interviewing local ecologists; as scientists monitoring the health of the water through water testing activities, as photographers taking photos of frogs hidden under logs, and as architects building miniature huts from sticks and branches with Gunaikurnai Elder Aunty Doris Paton.

What transpired after this unforgettable experience was a new and (eventual) sustained collaboration with the local school that linked teacher education coursework to place-based learning. Working with the logistics of 50+ PSTs and over 150 children in the first year of the partnership was challenging, and I did my best to support my pre-service teachers to deliver fun practical lessons to children. Despite my outdoor education expertise, feelings of anxiety and uncertainty at the initial wetland-teaching day filled my body: so many complex logistics to deal with, so many nervous PSTs, so many excited children, so much potential for things to go wrong; and for things to go right as it turned out. My teacher education practice beyond this day would be forever changed.

Our Shared Science Education-Learning Journey

Hongming’s Reflections

The personal and professional re-formation of my identity has been the major learning outcome from this self-study. I start from the first day I visited the wetland. Monica led the way and showed me the various locations—pockets of native forest, a bird hide, shallow pools of water and the grassy meadows. I felt both excited about the possibilities of doing something new, and at the same time unsure about how to capture the possibilities in my teaching. I feared that I did not have enough knowledge about the wetland and worried that our PSTs did not have sufficient wetland knowledge either. Later we shared our initial experience in a recorded conversation:

Monica: Hongming, would you be happy to talk about anything the wetland visit brought up for you?

Hongming: I have visited similar places, but not as a science teacher educator but more like a tourist. … just admiring the scene. But at that time, I was also thinking, “If I were the students, what kind of teaching activity I could do with the kids?” … I also noticed that you were feeling quite comfortable with the environment, and you pointed out different things to me—like I was the student, and this is a quite good learning experience. I realised that I don’t have all the knowledge about the wetlands.

Once I acknowledged the gap in my own wetland knowledge, I undertook some research on local ecosystems and tried to link this to my general knowledge about adaptation and natural selection. However, the most remarkable learning moment for me was not from books or the Internet: it happened in the wetland when I accompanied Mr. M. (a former science coordinator from the local primary school) leading a ‘nature walk’ for a group of PSTs on the reconnaissance day. Mr. M. had rich knowledge about the wetland and he showed the PSTs animal tracks, different types of plants and where to find frogs around the water pools. As the wetland opened further and deeper during the nature walk, the knowledge I gained before from books and the Internet became connected more closely to the particular site, and the wetland itself became less superficial to me.

A sense of place at the wetland was not just cognitive or intellectual to me; it was also affective. The sense of becoming intimate (emotional) with the place increased as I became more familiar with the wetland. Monica and I pursued discussions about the significance of what the wetland offered pedagogically, which might include feelings of emotion:

Hongming: I grew up in city areas, I feel like this is not a place that I’m quite familiar with…. But I also feel that the environment is so wonderful, and you would enjoy everything around you. So, this [the wetland experience] is more related to emotional feelings. You can design some activity that combines the feeling of enjoying the environment and also make learning happen.

Monica: What I’m hearing is [that] while you might be uncertain about the wetland and there’s some ambivalence and unknowns—many unknowns in fact—you can see some possibilities of what might happen there. … I’m hearing an idea of emotional learning. I think there are many layers to learning that might happen at the wetland.

By experiencing the place, myself, I realised the transformative power of PBE and increased place awareness within my own pedagogical development, which included the potential of incorporating cognitive and affective educational purposes into a place-based pedagogy. Consequently, I feel more confident and more passionate about mentoring PSTs to plan place-based lessons. The wetland place has become more meaningful to me (not just gum trees everywhere) but unique plant and animal forms that have adapted to a particular Latrobe Valley wetland environment.

Pedagogically, the wetland experience was the first time I had attempted to incorporate PBE into my science method framework. I was worried that if our PSTs were not effectively mentored with outdoor pedagogies, I would fail the primary school students whose learning was dependent on us for a whole day. I did not feel that the incorporation of outdoor pedagogies was conducted effectively at first, and expressed my concern to Monica after six weeks of teaching:

Hongming: I found that I’m working on two tracks and to be honest these two tracks are not working together very well. On the one hand I have to cover all the general science method and on the other hand I will have to think about how to scaffold the students into wetlands teaching and also give them time to do that. Just reflecting on the first 6 weeks, this hasn’t been done in a very harmonic way.

Delving deeper into the source of the challenge, I realised the problem was a representation of my struggle at the conceptual level of incorporating PBE as an organic part of my own science teaching pedagogy. The struggle dated back to my earlier years as a member of the ‘Place, Space, Body’ research group, when I found it difficult thinking about science teaching outside of normal classrooms. Having had this understanding, I started to examine the way I dealt with PBE and essential science teaching methods and began identifying the meeting points through curriculum links and an inquiry-based model that allowed various aspects of science teaching strategies to be explored through the meaningful incorporation of PBE.

When I analysed my conversations with Monica, I could see we had spent a lot of time discussing organisational details, and I asked many questions about how to work with the teachers from the partner school. Discussions ranged from clarifying school expectations and communicating those expectations to our PSTs, to trivial matters such as working out PSTs groupings, activity locations and wetland parking arrangements. It was through these various practices that I had opportunities to engage with local people and community at different levels. I was conscious about working on the partnership in a culturally appropriate way: I saw Monica as a cultural ‘insider’ and mentor who helped me negotiate meanings within the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992). It was like I had landed in totally new territory, trying to navigate and find my bearings with Monica as my compass. Her advice also highlighted the emotional support she provided through her collegiality that helped reduce my anxiety as I worked with the uncertainty and the unknowns.

As one of the stakeholders in the partnership, my increased cultural understanding was a major outcome. In time, I began to understand the effective ways of expressing my own ideas, asking for clarification and learning the art of negotiation with multiple stakeholders. I felt more confident in approaching people in the community—ISTs, pre-service teachers and my academic colleagues, as well as creating new working relationships with each of them. It was also encouraging to see that people, judging from the way they interacted with me, started to see me as ‘us’ instead of ‘other’. The partnership experience alone has not been sufficiently adequate for me to claim that I have become a cultural ‘insider’ in this region; however, it has significantly increased the bond between me as a science teacher educator, and the particular place of Latrobe Valley.

Monica’s Reflections

My first learning experience in the science partnership was focused on adjusting to my role as mentor, which involved sharing my accumulated partnership skills and knowledge with Hongming who was new to the partnership model. Not having had any previous mentoring in my own partnership learning, unsurprisingly this felt like new terrain. Being a pragmatic type, I deemed it important to share organisational and pedagogical considerations with Hongming, which included highlighting the need for regular and facilitated communication with ISTs that genuinely acknowledged their ideas and agendas. I emphasised the varying stakeholder responsibilities, the need for keeping PSTs informed about expectations and associated timelines, and the broader importance of supporting them in their foray into the new field of outdoor teaching and learning:

Monica: no one gets a free ride [in a partnership] … everyone needs to make a substantial contribution. We don’t want the teaching staff to think, “Oh I don’t have to teach science because the preservice teachers are going to do it for me.” We want to hear their ideas; we want the teachers to have a very active role; we want to hear their feedback. The communication with school is a very intensive thing and it’s ongoing… you need to set up good systems of communication. It’s all extra work [on top of the normal lecturing workload] and you have to just keep consulting everyone. Partnership work is very different to working on your own. It’s quite tiring actually.

On reflection, this bombardment of ideas had great potential to overwhelm anyone new to partnership practice. Although I understand conversations like this as an important part of my partnership mentoring in the science education course, on reflection, the organisational focus may have inadvertently hijacked other important discussions, such as the development of scientific coursework concepts, and how, for instance, they might be developed and delivered by our students out at the wetland. Other science-focused conversations with Hongming, however, brought us back to acknowledging and advancing science as a simple ‘everyday’ notion:

Hongming: And I think another interesting discussion between us is how you understand science. Because sometimes in science education we talk about stereotypical image of science and scientists that people have. Normally when talking about science, people think that you have to be in the laboratory with a white coat and doing stuff like physics, chemistry type of thing. But you can do science just at your backyard, or when you’re in the kitchen, and in the wetlands. So, I would say most of them involve science.

Unexpectedly, my new mentoring role in the science course triggered personal and somewhat earlier (negative and stereotypical) memories of secondary school science. I would later learn that many of our PSTs brought similar narratives to their own science learning. I believe it was these insights that fuelled my desire to tackle science differently; to make it more accessible, authentic and enjoyable for pre-service teachers. In addition to these aspirations, we were both keen to document our science journey more formally through a research process, as portrayed by the following conversation:

Hongming: …the data set for this particular part can be just students’ reflection and interview data. I still think it would be good at the start of the year to just get some informal [data] and that can be anonymous, because that gives us a data set of what we were dealing with at the start of the course.

Monica: You know what would be interesting, and I haven’t done this before… we might record how students are feeling about having to teach science in a wetland, because I think there is a lot of ambivalence and uncertainty there. The PSTs have got a lot of challenges to manage in this approach.

Hongming: Yeah, like for example, in the first week we can ask more general questions about what they think science and science teaching is about, and reflect on their own experience as learner and how they see themselves as future science teachers. And the second - maybe in week 3 or 4 we can ask them to reflect on their feelings about teaching science in the particular [wetland] sites.

Following these brainstorming discussions, we began to develop ideas about longitudinal research that would investigate the nature and scope of science teaching and learning in outdoor settings through stakeholder perspectives. In light of this decision, Hongming suggested:

Maybe we can extend our current research to next semester and then next semester we can have something different? For the teachers it will probably be the first time they’ve been involved in a partnership. We could make comparison with the different teachers, and we can see the difference and maybe we can explore our development of an effective school/university partnership.

From the science education experience, I have come to appreciate the contributions of co-teaching in a partnership model, and the different strengths of such a collaboration. Partnership work is challenging and arduous, and significantly more enjoyable when shared with a colleague. Hongming has taught me the value of ‘sharing the load’ and capitalising on our distinctive skill sets.

The Implications of Our Partnership Work in Science Education

First and foremost, the science education partnership set out to provide PSTs with an opportunity to practice and enhance their science teaching skills. Furthermore, it provided a cultural contact zone (Pratt, 1992) informed by our individual and differing points of views, professional skills, knowledge and personal and cultural life experiences. As our autobiographies testify, we each brought different perspectives to the project. Building on these considerations, the following section of the chapter engages with the second aspect of the self-study, namely, the implications of our learning for future practice as science teacher educators, as explored through two themes: the value of place-based education in a science education course and the importance of collegiality and relationality in a partnership model.

The Value of Place-Based Education in a Science Education Course

Our partnership experience has made us more confident to understand and apply place-based pedagogies in science teacher education. Citing Plowright et al. argue that a nuanced understanding of place creates more meaningful knowledge for those in that place (refer Chap. 1), our experience highlights our individual and collective growth in understanding the nexus of place pedagogy and science teaching. As illustrated in ‘The learning journey’ section of this chapter, Hongming’s deep engagement with the wetland place advanced her scientific knowledge of the life sciences and brought with it a new connection to human and natural communities.

Hongming’s professional learning experience also sheds light on the impact of developing meaningful attachment to a new place, particularly in relation to notions of mobility and immigration. Gustafson (2009) observes that placement attachment and mobility are often seen as contradictory phenomena, with local attachment regarded as deficient compared to the norm of global mobility; or valuing placement attachment for social integration or regarding mobility as a threat to social cohesion. With growing social, economic and cultural exchanges at the local and global level, addressing relationship with place (material and symbolic) becomes an essential element of how people react and interpret change (Anton & Lawrence, 2016). Hongming’s engagement with local ‘insiders’ in the physical and the cultural spaces of her new place (Latrobe Valley + wetland) has helped inform her professional development without necessarily compromising her attachment to ‘old’ places in northern China. Subsequently, her ‘sense of self’ and ‘sense of belonging in place’ have come about and developed over time through personal and meaningful engagement with place (Rishbeth & Powell, 2013).

The affective impact of place-based learning cannot be underestimated. In addition to increasing her pedagogical appreciation of the wetland site, Hongming has developed a closer bond with the wetland. Similarly, from her ongoing time at the site, Monica’s lifelong (educational and pedagogical) interest in environmental and outdoor education in local places is significantly strengthened and affirmed. As our exploration of place increases, so too does our emotional investment and sense of belonging in place. While we are yet to investigate these same outcomes with our students, we remain hopeful that a place-based pedagogy framework can enable them to develop new relationships with local people and places. Based on our accumulative insights, we have now embedded reflective assessment tasks in the science method course to encourage critical and personal thinking about the pedagogical significance of the place.

Collegiality and Relationality in a Partnership Model

The science partnership has been underscored by multiple complexities—covering key science teaching methods, developing and maintaining stakeholder relationships, and dealing with the pedagogical challenges of working in a wetland environment. Managing these complexities between our teacher educator selves takes careful consideration and raises the need for collegiality and relationality. In her role as mentor, Monica effectively shared and highlighted the cultural norms and skills associated with developing partnerships, which were initially foreign to Hongming. This shared knowledge has had a direct bearing on building Hongming’s understanding of what it takes to craft and maintain an effective university–school partnership. Likewise, Monica’s professional development as partnership mentor and science learner/teacher has been substantially enhanced. Furthermore, the shared and trusted collegiality has created new opportunities for us to explore, negotiate and reconstruct new meaning of science and science education. As our autobiographies illustrate, we each brought distinctive interpretations and understandings of science and science education (as derived from earlier life and professional experiences) and recognise these earlier layers as influential to our current professional practice.

Through reflective and respectful conversation we have investigated and developed a shared meaning of scientific and pedagogical concepts that lie at the heart of our teaching. To this end, we believe the authentic challenges we faced in developing the science education course required open-mindedness, mutual support and respect. Even though we each initially perceived our individual limitations in the place-based science course as a shortcoming, we took solace in knowing we could draw on each other’s strengths and look to each other in reliable, reciprocal and respectful ways. Drawing on our collective skill set, we have been resolute in finding solutions when problems arose, thus reducing (but never fully avoiding it must be said) the potential anxiety and uncertainty associated with trialling new teaching innovations.

Stepping Out of Personal and Professional Comfort Zones

Our self-study has provided us with a unique opportunity to explain, reflect on and refine our place-based science education endeavours that occur in the regional setting of Gippsland. Through examining our practice, and our own identity re-formation in relation to the partnership experience, we have unearthed previously unidentified elements of our personal and professional identity that support us to better understand ourselves as science teacher educators. Like other FUGuE authors in Part II of this book who have ventured into partnership relations for teaching and research purposes, we too have been transformed by our science experience. As such, we are more confident to innovate in our teaching, and we better understand the importance of relationality and reciprocity as central facets of our teaching and research practice. Although we realise there are many aspects of student learning, we are yet to know, we view our professional inquiry as a practice in progress: ‘solidified in the moment’ but with the understanding that ‘idea(s) may [will] continue’ (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2014, p. 159).

As articulated, this self-study belongs to longitudinal research that examines the pedagogical contributions of science-based university–school partnerships in a regional setting. Now in our fourth year of partnership work, we are, more than ever, attuned to the reality that engaging with local people and local places for educational purposes requires continually working with uncertainty and the unknown. In stepping out of our personal and professional comfort zones, we are keen to develop new insights into how science education can be taught in new and transforming ways. We hope our professional inquiry efforts resonate with and inspire other teacher educators who dare to take their work in new and unknown directions to improve teaching and learning outcomes for their students.