Curriculum leadership, quality and technology in a suite of Australian further education and training teacher education programs: making meaning, performing practice and constructing new learning futures

Abstract

Constructing new learning futures is an ongoing challenge and opportunity for contemporary learners and educators alike. A crucial element of that construction is making meaning by and for all participants in the educational enterprise. Such meaning making depends in turn on the performance of practice – that is, on the regular, repeated enactment of situated learning and teaching in specific contexts and environments that turns abstract and hypothetical ideas about education into experienced and lived realities. This paper applies and demonstrates this argument in relation to a suite of further education and training (FET) teacher education programs at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. The authors elaborate a set of evaluative questions for the leadership, quality and technology dimensions of the curriculum of those programs. On the basis of those questions, the authors generate a conceptual framework that they argue is productive in identifying the principles and strategies of making meaning and performing practice that are most likely to promote the construction of new and enabling learning futures.