1. Why, how and where did you enter the field of education?

I suppose I fell into it - I certainly didn't plan it. I was a student at Auckland University and I ended up doing Arts because I couldn't think of anything else to do, and I majored in education and history, with minors in philosophy and Hebrew. During the last year of my undergraduate degree I became interested in an area called 12th century intellectual development, and that really got me very interested. I went on and did an MA in history, where I studied 12th century intellectual development and I loved it. I then went back the next year and did another MA in education, concentrating on the philosophy area. At that stage I thought 'well, what do I do now?' I decided I'd better go and be a teacher; there didn't seem much else to do. But I didn't want to do it at a teachers' college in New Zealand. So, I ended up with an UNESCO scholarship to do my teacher education at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland - a College of the University of London.. So I went there, did my teacher education programme, and then started teaching in northern Zambia on the copper belt at a place called Ndola. I then saw advertised a job as an assistant lecturer in education at the University of Otago, New Zealand, so I put in for it, got it, and that was my start.

2. Was there anyone who influenced you? Why?

My father did: he was an academic at the University of Auckland, also in the area of Education. Also, there was an academic called O'Connor who was a Professor in the History Department of Auckland University who taught me the area of 12th century intellectual development, and he influenced me enormously on the academic and scholarly side. I suppose these were the two along with Des Minogues who influenced me mostly in these early years. There were also other great people who influenced me later in my career in education, though.

3. What were your original goals or aims?

My very first goal was to get my doctorate done. I'm highly pragmatic - I knew I would have to get my doctorate done because even in the early 60s, it was seen as a meal ticket, so I did that, and then I guess it became a career in earnest . Once you're an assistant lecturer, within a week you want to become a lecturer, and so once you get to be a lecturer, you think that's all you ever wanted and then, at the end of that week you want to be a senior lecturer! So, I was on the grind upwards. I was very interested in the areas within which I taught and research but I cannot say that I was imbued with any feelings of contributing to society or anything like that at that stage.

4. Could you outline the milestones or highlights of your career path to date?

After I taught at the University of Otago, I got an appointment at James Cook University and I think my first real milestone was in the early years there. I won an Imperial Relations Travel Grant to go on study leave to London. My year, or a bit over a year at London University was without a doubt a milestone: meeting a lot of the great names that I'd read, and overall it was just a marvellous experience, and it actually cemented my real interest in the academic side of the work - not so much teacher education and all the education part, but the scholarly academic research in education. The next milestone was when I worked for a marvellous man called Ted Scott at James Cook University, and he became a real mentor to me throughout my career, and most probably still is, although the he's in his 80s now; but he was the Dean of Education at James Cook, and I thought he was quite remarkable. The next milestone would be when I was appointed Chair of Education and Head of Educational Studies at the University of New England when I was very young - that was an enormous challenge and it was a milestone. When I took up an appointment at QUT I came under the influence of Professor Dennis Gibson. He influenced me most probably more than any other single person that I met during my academic career. Another milestone came later, when I did a large consultancy for the Queensland State Government on post-compulsory education - this was when I was at QUT - and I had to try and work out a new system across the state for dealing with the post-compulsory educational relationship event of schools with universities, and that was a marvellous experience. After that, the next milestone was being appointed Pro Vice Chancellor back at the University of New England, where I had originally got my Chair.

5. What are you most proud of having accomplished over your career so far?

Without a doubt it was at QUT when I was involved with setting up a brand new faculty, which was pretty much straight from the CAE sector, and then within six or seven years it was the largest faculty of education in Australia and it was highly successful in terms of research, competitive research grants, commercial income, every index that you could possibly think of. I was immensely proud of how that faculty of education responded to the challenges of the 90s.

6. Did you ever see yourself as a future Dean of Education?

No! But once I started working at universities, I certainly became immensely ambitious at a very young age; and at a very young age, I knew I wanted to be a Professor of Education, but to be a dean or any other management level never really crossed my mind.

7. When did you start to see yourself as an educational leader?

Most probably when I was at James Cook with Ted Scott; this was back in the 70s, when I was a lecturer. He supported me and gave me a whole set of indicators suggesting I had a role to play in the future in senior management in universities, and I think most probably in the late 70s I began to think about how I could operate at a more senior level.

8. Looking back, do you think your understanding of the relationship of practice and research in education has changed over time?

One of the sad things at the moment is that Brendan Nelson is actually putting his finger on something that's at least contetable and worthy of debate. He talks about the disjunction between research and teaching. Now, while I think that is particularly so in faculties of education, I do not believe for one moment that all teaching is imbued and guided by research; I just don't believe it. One reason is that I believe that the majority of teacher education staff don't do research; they're not research active, and yet they are still able to run reputable programmes or at least programmes of teacher education which are acceptable enough. However, having said that, I think that research is absolutely vital to the practice of teaching - guiding the profession; guiding what happens in schools; what happens in systems and so on, and it's very sad that too rarely do education administrators - such as state departments - take advice from university research workers - they tend to see research situated in ivory towers and being fairly divorced from reality, which in my experience is not the case.

9. How do you think the general education community views educational research?

I think schools and state systems look with great suspicion upon educational research, and within universities, I think educational research is very much seen as the poor cousin, and to a certain extent, I agree with that. A lot of educational research is done by people who don't have substantive research background within substantive discipline areas, and I think there are research shortcomings when, for example, education historians too rarely are history graduates. They are too often graduates of some sort of theory or foundational courses and they just fall into the history of education; and the same thing happens with educational psychology, and the sociology of education. So, therefore they're seen as first cousins in universities and people who are not trusted completely by state education systems and schools.

10. What do you feel are the current issues facing Teacher Education?

The major one at the moment is the press from government, and I think most probably the community, for teacher education to be based more within the school system as extended prac teaching, and added to that, sharing the control of teacher education with the state systems and with the Commonwealth. The second one is not new, but is significant, which is the problem that teacher education programmes have to do all things for all manner of men and women, and so the curriculum of a teacher education course becomes somewhat of a carpet bag that's expected to have so much in it. It's similar to the secondary schools, when they were first blamed for moral dimensions within the community, so they therefore have to teach sex education, and then they were pressured to do driver education - very soon we'll be driving all that sort of pressure down on Kindergarten, and it goes on and on.
Another real issue for teacher education programmes is how to raise their academic status within universities. There's a need therefore, to attract the right sort of people into the teacher education programmes to raise the academic status within the university, and I think too rarely do we do that.

11. What do you think the future of Teacher Education in Australia holds?

I think that in teacher education we will see more of a stepping up of schools of teacher education or faculties of education and the sharing of the studies with other substantive faculties in the university. For example, I think teacher education will be far more university based than faculty based; so if you're going to be a history teacher, they should be doing their substantive discipline work within the faculty of arts in the history department; they shouldn't be stranded around in the school of education. So, I think we'll see that will have to occur across all Australian universities, and indeed, it has already occurred in many universities. And if you're going to be a maths science teacher - which at the moment, the low standards for maths science teaching is a concern - you will have to do the maths and science within the faculty of science, so that you're actually going to know something about what you're going to teach!

12. What are your views on the current Australian Tertiary sector?

We are now facing the biggest changes in tertiary education over the last twenty or thirty years, and I think that in many ways it's going to rival the Dawkins reforms of the late 80s. The addition of private providers teaching at degree level; the re-examination of protocols of what it is to be a university; the re-examination of research frameworks across the country; the introduction of competitive money for teaching and learning within the universities; the contraction of Commonwealth funds to the universities; and the acceptance and reliance on self funding in universities which is now at a high level yet accompanied by a seemingh ever imcreasing set of government regulations.

13. What do you think the sector's immediate challenges are?

I think the obvious one is financial. We've got a lot of universities that have their backs to the wall now. With the perpetual cutting back of Commonwealth funds, the refusal to index salaries within universities properly, the meddling of the Commonwealth, industrial relations reforms, are all significant challenges. The stability in the tertiary sector is becoming very delicate, and I think it's having a real effect on morale, planning, strategic planning, everything.

14. What do you think your faculty's strengths are?

Well, I don't have one now, because I'm Pro Vice Chancellor. But the strengths of the area that I deal with without any doubt is design. I'm responsible for that part of the university which deals with all the areas from building construction through architecture, to the School of Art.

15. What do you consider to be the most important attribute from graduates from your faculty?

Well there's a corporate view, which is like all the ATN universities - that our graduates are known for their capability on their first day at work, that they hit the ground running, fully fashioned professionals; that's how the ATN and RMIT like to see their graduates. I would like to see our graduates as infinitely malleable, full of initiative, with various capabilities to have three or four careers in a lifetime and to learn while they're doing it.

 RMIT University, 10th May, 2005

 

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