Walking the Walk: Democratizing Change in Teacher Education

In this essay, as a group of teacher educators, we discuss our experience of “walking the walk” of teacher education transformation at a time of urgent change. We reflect upon our process of integrating three key priorities in our preservice teacher education courses: education for sustainability; trauma-informed practice; and Indigenizing curriculum. Specifically, we reflect on how these processes were adapted according to the needs of individual courses and units, while at the same time making space for our strengths and our “unlearnings” as academics, and for the ethical considerations that troubled us. In this essay, we explore walking the walk of change and integrating social, environmental, and cultural justice principles in our work together toward equipping and enabling new teachers to be themselves agents of change.


The Transformation Context
Early in 2020, UTAS embarked on an institution-wide project of course transformation with the aim to become more place based and sustainable in its offerings to students. This project was initiated earlier than planned as a response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its widespread impacts on the higher education sector. The key goals for the transformation were a curriculum shaped to the needs and identities of the institution's communities and contexts (historical, environmental, geographic, socioeconomic); an active pedagogy that would promote student engagement and opportunities for distinctive experiential learning; and greater flexibility and more agile structures to support and enable student success.
In the School of Education, our focus was on our four PST education courses and how we might integrate the institution's goals of transformation within the regulatory framework of our nationally accredited curriculum. Although the regulatory framework (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2021) in some respects limited the scope of transformative possibilities available to us, it nevertheless turned our attention more closely to our collective and individual philosophies and sense of purpose as teacher educators at UTAS. Within the context of our necessary AITSL compliance, how were we to "walk the walk" of transformation in a meaningful way?
Given the other workplace changes of 2020, including a shift to fully online communication among colleagues, and the pressures of an immediate and time-bound transformation process (of 4 months), our question of meaningful transformation was far from being one we could address in a neat, linear, backward-mapped process of drawing up visions, goals, and strategies. Taking a more realistic approach that valued our integrity as academics with varied portfolios of responsibility and individual capacities to contribute to the work of collaborative transformation, we recognized the complexities of both our situation and our task and sought instead to value the emergent quality of our work together. By acknowledging that constellations of institutional, regulatory, individual, and curricularderived elements and articulations were at play, we sought to respect colleagues' needs for relationality, purposeful action, and strengths-based function in such a time of anxious change.
Mary Ann held a leadership position in teaching and learning and explains that working in a leadership role at this time called for an approach that could avoid crisis-laden discourse and instead foreground staff agency in an effort to surface and build on the School of Education's significant strengths, which included individuals' research expertise in areas related to cultural, social, and environmental justice (in areas of curriculum, pedagogy, and critical theory); a newly created school position of Indigenous teaching fellow; and a whole-of-school commitment to the goals of improving educational access, quality, and attainment in Tasmania. Through an intentionally entangled, and at times iterative, process of surfacing, articulating, and rearticulating the issues and concepts that mattered most to us, we arrived at three distinct and recurring urgencies in our work. Through a diversity of School of Education encounters such as forums, management team workshops, academic course meetings, and small group and paired discussion on a range of topics, the urgent need to address how haphazardly we engaged with Indigenous worldviews, how separately we worked when it came to sustainability education, and how little we collectively understood the impacts of trauma on learning have become apparent. Yet, in all three areas, the School of Education clearly had strengths of individual expertise and aspiration and the transformative collective potential had yet to be realized. As Jefferson and Anderson (2017) have identified, the work of transformation is sustained through praxis and collaboration, which is how we set out to proceed, enacting Giroux's conviction that: Critical pedagogy is about more than a struggle over assigned meanings, official knowledge, and established modes of authority; it is also about encouraging students [in our case, colleagues] to take risks, act on their sense of responsibility, and engage the world as an object of both critical analysis and hopeful transformation." (Giroux, 2011, p. 14) In transforming the school's courses informed by these approaches and the three priorities, we were guided by our discomforting suspicion that our courses were not sufficiently allowing our PSTs to come to their own understandings of the complex impacts of power, privilege, and trauma on learning, and how these impacts relate to teaching practices (Goggins & Dowcett, 2011;Levi, 2019;Wiggan et al., 2020). How could and should we enable PSTs to develop "response-abilities"?: "Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self'" (Barad, interviewed by Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 69).
Once curriculum priority areas were determined, we drew implicitly on principles of sociocracy to mobilize curriculum innovation by developing response-abilities of our own, with each other. Sociocracy is a governance approach developed in the 1970s by Gerard Endenberg with the intent of creating "harmonious organisations" through values of equivalence, transparency, and effectiveness (Christian, 2013, p. 61). Sociocracy in operation involves a main circle with connected working circles via people who have cross-membership. This structure allows for effective two-way communication while enabling only those with relevant skills or interests to be part of a working circle. Such working circles were established in each of the three priority areas to enable academic staff to encounter the priority in their own ways across the four education degrees (totaling over 150 individual units), thus allowing each priority to be approached differently and in contextually relevant ways. The flexibility in the sociocracy model ensures structure and coherency remain in our transformation journey, while allowing for individualized journeys of academic staff toward professional and personal agency in integrating the curriculum priorities in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and connected. The following sections offer insights on the ways we encountered each of the priorities through reflection and action.

Encountering EfS
In the School of Education, we made the decision to embed education for sustainability (EfS) in the PST education course curriculum (Evans et al., 2017). Consistent with sociocracy (Christian, 2013), a fluid, albeit impassioned, circle of academics was formed to learn and frame together how we might think more deeply about EfS as a distinctive feature of what we do as a school. This journey began with establishing a baseline of information on how sustainability featured in each preservice teaching course. An interactive mapping exercise was undertaken, which saw colleagues further develop their understandings of the sustainable development goals outlined by the United Nations (n.d.)-the guiding framework for conceiving of sustainability in the school-and consider how their units intersected. Through this process, it became apparent that EfS did exist in our units in myriad explicit ways. For example, humanities and social science units made natural links to geography, out-of-school learning, and active citizenship sustainability projects, including through forest education. The eighth author, William Baker, shared how EfS was already a component of the creative arts unit he coordinates: Four years ago, I reconceptualised my first year Bachelor of Education unit in music and visual arts education around the General Capability of literacy, and the Cross Curriculum Priorities (CCPs) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Histories and Cultures, and Sustainability. The impetus for this change was to ensure generalist PSTs were engaged in the unit as a direct result of explicit curriculum relevance.
The pedagogy of the unit is a reflection of the belief that PSTs need to make music and visual arts in order to understand them and to develop the skills and understandings essential to their practice. This approach is broadly known as "action learning" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2).
In 2017, in a survey, PSTs were asked to rate their pre-module and post-module understanding of the Sustainability CCPs. Following the module, out of the 23 PSTs, 21 rated Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2021. josotl.indiana.edu their understanding as 'very good', indicating a significant improvement. Whilst acknowledging the limitations of self-reporting, this is an amazing endorsement of an approach that embeds sustainability education in other areas of learning.
William's narrative highlights the importance of transformation agendas that acknowledge, value, and make space for the understandings and practice that staff bring to the process (Baker et al., 2016). Knowing how sustainability is integrated in a curriculum enables a building on from, rather than a disregard and building anew, which has the potential to create ill feelings among staff and inevitably more work for everyone (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999). In addition to identifying current practice, the mapping exercise brought forth conversations with staff regarding opportunities to integrate or deepen sustainability links with other units and content, which have since formed a key component of how embedding EfS across courses is occurring. To that end, Damon shares his reflection: The second compulsory English/literacy unit focuses on contemporary approaches to reading and writing instruction. In the past, the pressure to cover all essential elements of reading and writing meant that I only emphasised the teaching of literacy, without links to other content areas. The course transformation created an opportunity to integrate sustainability for education into the Unit. This integration is supported by a growing body of research that has found the teaching of literacy skills and strategies in isolation can actually stifle literacy development, particularly in relation to reading comprehension and writing (Ashman, 2018). Instead, research suggests teachers should explicitly teach students to apply their reading and writing skills in the context of building their background knowledge of social sciences and science concepts and processes (Wexler, 2019). Since strong literacy learning enables strong learning in all content areas (Caponera et al., 2016), the integration of sustainability ideas into the unit seemed important. This involved modifying an assessment task which asked PSTs to create two writing lessons, two assessment plans, and two theoretical rationales. A key aspect of students' writing lessons is their selection and use of model texts that highlight effective uses of the writing features taught in their lessons (i.e., specific grammatical or structural features). In the past, students selected model texts from a list of relatively generic narrative and persuasive texts written by authors of children's literature. Now, with support from Kim, the students will be offered a list of sustainability related narratives and persuasive texts, each linked to relevant SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals]. In addition, students will justify their choices of model texts with reference to EfS thinking.
Through his narrative, Damon evidenced an epistemological shift-teaching literacy in isolation to teaching literacy in connection with sustainability-brought about by his engagement in the curriculum transformation process in conjunction with his own reflections on shifts in practice in his area of expertise. Further highlighted in his experience is the importance of opportunities for collaboration to support changing practice. Overall, experiences to date reveal that embedding EfS in curricula can be better conceptualized as a progressive evolution of current practice, supported through sociocratic processes that embrace everyone as valued contributors and potential agents in creating change (Christian, 2013).

The Need to be Trauma Informed in Practice
In contrast to sustainability, content relating to trauma-informed practice (TiP) within the current degree structure was not easy to locate. TiP is a relative newcomer to undergraduate education curricula. Although some tertiary educators have reported understanding trauma-informed care, many are unfamiliar with trauma-informed strategies or how these can be taught or enacted (Carello & Butler, 2015). Also, whereas the impact of trauma on learning has been recognized (Porges, 2017;Siegel, 2012), how TiP is addressed in the PST education context was new to many of our colleagues. After engaging with professional learning, however, they unanimously embraced the responsibility for all future teachers to graduate with understanding and a beginning skill set in TiP. The socioeconomic context of Tasmania and the priorities around young people's well-being and mental health meant that this area was embraced by staff and students as fundamentally important.
Since being trauma informed in practice is grounded in educators' beliefs (Bath, 2008), and since beliefs drive practice (Brookfield, 1995), the need to challenge currently held beliefs about student learning and behavior is essential. Thus, a developmental approach was chosen to underpin the embedded nature of this work. Although a theoretical base for the curriculum was established, shaping of relevant content was undertaken collaboratively with colleagues. The experience of embedding content depended on personal reflections and interactions with unit coordinators that respected individual frames of reference and ensured purposeful authenticity. This is articulated below from Frances' and Robyn's perspectives: Planning for Positive Behaviour is a second-year compulsory Unit in our PST courses. The focus of the unit is to explore the theoretical and practical issues concerned with establishing and maintaining positive learning environments that allow all students to participate fully in educational opportunities. The Unit presents a highly suited space to incorporate TiP. It introduces key theories in relation to understanding student behaviour, and points PSTs to how understandings and beliefs about student behaviour have shifted from a behaviourist to a humanist approach in the past few decades. One of the major assessment tasks asks PSTs to reflect on their personal belief in relation to establishing positive learning environments. This offers an opportunity for them to reflect upon and challenge their own assumptions about student learning and behaviour. (Frances Fan) In 2021, the PSTs were provided with specific content on TiP in the form of recorded presentations and on-campus interactions. These presentations extended PSTs' understandings on how traumatic events influence children's brain development and their growth in different areas. These resources equipped the PSTs with better knowledge in TiP, with strategies to respond to the needs of students who have experienced traumatic experiences. I lecture in Mathematics Education. When I heard that TiP was being embedded into our teaching courses, I thought this would be personally irrelevant. On reflection, however, I realised that I had always embedded TiP into my classes. Many students are anxious about mathematics. This anxiety can be so severe that their working memory is affected, and they cannot carry out even simple calculations. The reasons for this Mathematics Anxiety include being publicly embarrassed by mathematics teachers (Turner et al., 2002). It is essential that they overcome this anxiety if they are to become successful mathematics teachers. I teach in a first-year, first-semester unit. My aim is to conduct classes where students can experience mathematics in a non-threatening environment. The students work in groups so that no one needs to address the entire class; all I require is that everyone listens to the group's discussion. Group answers are offered by volunteers. The questions they tackle are based in the real world and different solution methods are encouraged. I wander around the room so that students can discuss their work with me quietly. (Robyn Reaburn) As the semester progresses the nervous students become more confident, they start to talk within their groups and voluntarily offer solutions to the entire class. They do not hide their workbooks if I come near. They have learnt to become more confident in their mathematical skills, and they have learnt how to produce an encouraging environment for their future students (Robyn).
What resonates from these reflections is the diversity with which colleagues connect with TiP. The Robyn's reflections particularly articulate the need for us to be trauma informed in our own practice and be given opportunities and space to consider what this means for us. Through the transformation process, we identified and strengthened our collective understanding of the values that we have. This, in conjunction with a focus on embedding TiP across the curriculum, has encouraged critical reflection on our pedagogies and how we model "good" teaching in our courses.

Indigenizing the Curriculum
As we began the transformation process, we were aware that content relating to Indigenous peoples' histories and perspectives featured both explicitly and implicitly in our current curriculum. Specific engagement for PSTs came in the form of a unit entitled Cultural Awareness: The Non-Indigenous and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Interface, which was dedicated to the exploration of various manifestations of colonialism and cultural imperialism encountered by students in the final stages of their degree. Moreover, a range of disciplinary units engaged with historical, cultural, and epistemological critique of our nation. The underlying purpose of these units was driven by a desire to remove the settler-colonial mask that has shaped both our national and local narratives while remaining strongly cognizant of our positioning as predominantly non-Indigenous academics. For example, in the context of the humanities and social sciences, Peter shared the following: One historian has observed that 'the near annihilation of Van Diemen's Land's ancient peoples has become emblematic of racism and imperial ambition at its most insidious' (Clements, 2013, p. 1). The cumulative dispossession and violence resulted in a form of genocide (Lawson, 2014;Shipway, 2017). Seeking to reflect the importance of these issues, within Humanities and Social Sciences curriculum, our PSTs are challenged to think differently about the ways of 'doing' history that are respectful of Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing. For example, they work with a rich multi-media resource called 'The Orb' created by the Tasmanian Aboriginal communities and individuals with the collaborative support of Tasmania's Aboriginal Education Service (Department of Education, 2019). There are in-class visits from experienced Aboriginal educators and on-line presentations by Aboriginal elders.
In a key assessment task, the PSTs use aspects of eight-ways pedagogy (Yunkaporta, 2009) to create a 'yarning story' introducing the topic of First Contact between British explorers, invaders and settlers and local Aboriginal groups in Tasmania. Eight-ways pedagogy foregrounds story-sharing, non-verbal pedagogies, creative use of symbols and images and a strong sense of 'country'. PSTs are also encouraged to prompt children to see a dialogue between the past and the present and to link up historical learning with contemporary citizenship learning (Brett, 2018). PSTs appreciate that First Nations peoples' experiences are not only historical but that there is also a dynamic contemporary culture. In this way, in incorporating a practical example of integrated pedagogy at the cultural interface (Nakata, 2007a), we look not only to build the confidence of predominantly non-indigenous PSTs in their content knowledge, but also embed a more sophisticated appreciation of indigenous epistemes.
Similar positionings also drove our arts education curriculum, albeit with a focus on the power of creative modalities to confront issues of power and race in our nation's classrooms and broader society. W.B. offered the following in relation to the content and pedagogical and ideological underpinnings of a music and visual arts unit: The music and visual arts education unit, referred to earlier in respect of EfS, also contains a module focussed on the Cross Curriculum Priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures.
This module, developed in consultation with two Indigenous educators, foregrounds responding to Aboriginal Music and Visual Arts, and reflecting on these through a reconciliation lens. The learning activities require PSTs to reflect on the contemporary creative knowledges of artists such as Dewayne Everettsmith, Ricky Maynard and Aunty Lola Greeno and on ways that the PSTs may use this knowledge in classrooms.
There were four pedagogical drivers for developing this module: 1) to ensure relevance to PSTs through direct links to curriculum; 2) in response to a lack of knowledge about this priority in previous cohorts; 3) engagement with, and guidance from, two Aboriginal educators about Aboriginal perspectives in education; and 4) an overarching belief in the power of education to address and confront racism. As with our EfS module, active learning pedagogy (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2) was applied to the development of the new module.
Subsequently, transformation was not a question of "Indigenizing the curriculum," commencing from a blank slate, but rather how we could wrestle deeply with the key issues in the Tasmanian context to do this "better." A key decision was both to redesign the unit that had primary carriage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content and to reposition the unit as a foundational element of PSTs' 1st-year experience. This repositioning was seen as crucial as it allows us to critically engage PSTs with issues of power and hegemony in the context of education (and more broadly) at a more salient point in the transformation from student to educator. This redesigning has allowed us to more succinctly draw together the various threads of Indigenization that run through our curriculum and "set the scene" for more nuanced interrogations across the various disciplines.

Assembling Our Reflections
Our transformation journey began in response to structural and systemic pressures. Yet, it became an opportunity to reflect on and strengthen the operationalization of our shared ideology, that as teacher educators, we have a responsibility to provide learning experiences that support PSTs in becoming culturally and socially responsive teachers. We challenged ourselves to radically comply (Hunter et al., 2018) with institutional and course accreditation mandates: How are we taking agency as a school to work within accreditation and institutional structures, to take up pedagogical strategies that privilege a social justice lens? Our approach to transforming our curriculum was grounded in place and was a reflection of the strengths and challenges of our Tasmanian-placed context. Throughout our reflections, the necessity to offer a learning experience that would generate "rounded individuals" and "teacher citizens" underpinned curriculum and pedagogic conversations and revealed to us the importance of decisions and mandates being situated in morally and ethically robust philosophies. Our shared ideology is encouraging a collective effort to adapt what we do, to do better, but at the same time, the three-pronged curriculum transformation approach is proving an inclusive framework to support School of Education staff in efforts to "find a place" of transformation for themselves in the work they do. Our transformation journey is ongoing, but it illustrates how a process of change can be undertaken in teaching and learning in higher education-an increasingly Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2021. josotl.indiana.edu common reality for academics (Bruckmann & Carvalho, 2018)-and how frameworks that build positive and inclusive cultures can support academic agency in being a part of the change (Annala et al., 2021).
Our journey of transformation was time bound, which was not conducive to conducting a neat and linear process. Yet, in moving the transformation agenda forward, front of mind was to instate processes that were democratic and inclusive of all School of Education staff. Using a framework of sociocracy allowed space for decisions relating to curriculum focus and implementation to be "'good enough for now' and 'safe enough to try'" (Christian, 2013, p. 61). At the same time, working within a sociocracy framework has kept us accountable to the overall transformation agenda through the governing structures that supported open communication channels between working circles. The decision to move ahead with transforming our curriculum through embedding EfS and TiP and Indigenizing the curriculum using a sociocratic approach encouraged agency for all staff to input how areas are embedded relevant to their teaching expertise, which was highlighted through the reflections of Darren and Damon. At the same time, sociocracy ensured that those colleagues with curriculum connections already in place were recognised and celebrated, such as Robyn and William.
In our project of transformation, we agreed that it was imperative to embed the identified curriculum areas in ways that were authentic with meaningful connections. In this sense, our practice of curriculum transformation may more realistically translate as the progressive evolution of program content. We see this as a strength as well as a limitation of our approach. We see a focus on TiP as a new starting place for reconceptualizing the nature of the learner and the learner's relationship with the education system. As mostly sociologically grounded academics who frame our research and practice within particular discursive frames, we are still grappling with the epistemological framing of TiP that lies beyond our disciplinary boundaries. TiP is providing a window into what it means to step outside our comfort zones and shift epistemological frames. At the same time, we are yet to traverse how we decolonize our courses both epistemologically and structurally. Doing so would not only further reconciliation and social justice agendas but also opens the academy to new ways of knowing and producing knowledge (Nakata, 2007b). What is more, we have yet to reconceptualize what we do and how to organize courses using systems thinking. In furthering agendas of sustainability, courses designed using systems thinking would challenge problematic linear, siloed disciplinary logics that support social and environmental inequalities (Nakata, 2007b).
We see it as imperative that we now look beyond simply transforming course structure and content and delve into more complex issues surrounding both the structural and the epistemological boundaries of the academy. We see our process of Indigenization, for example, as a logical place to begin the broader process of decolonization. However, we are cognizant of the tensions that arise from such a goal and the reality that meaningful decolonization is likely unachievable within a school staffed by predominantly non-Indigenous academics; nor is it achievable if our pedagogy and practice remains bound by Western epistemologies and ontologies. Conversely, we see a focus on sustainability as a vehicle for the broader shifts required in education related to the desiloing of discipline areas and to challenging what is currently viewed as important to "know" in creating sustainable futures.

Concluding Words and Next Steps
In this essay we have reflected on our experiences of transforming our curriculum to centralize socially, environmentally, and culturally responsive teaching and learning in PST education. Our curriculum transformation project set us on a path of collective reflection about who we are and what we want for our graduates. In doing so, we identified curriculum transformation priority areas and sociocracy as a framework to support us in this undertaking. Our curriculum transformation journey is unique in the sense that it ambitiously attempts to embed three discrete but interrelated priorities together into existing courses. While these three areas all have some historical context regarding their incorporation and prioritization in PST education elsewhere (Carello & Butler, 2015;Evans et al., 2017;Ferreira et al., 2019), to our knowledge, this is the first time a curriculum transformation project has sought to introduce these three strands together. Our reflections suggest that simultaneously embedding three discrete areas into our curriculum has enabled rich discussions about connections between and with each area, along with the opportunity to meaningfully reflect these connections in content for PSTs.
Sociocracy has become a framework that supports our "success," both through the administrative requirements of course accreditation mandates and institutional regimes and as a framework that supports inclusive, meaningful, and authentic engagement by colleagues in the transformation journey. Perhaps the most meaningful transformation in our journey to date has been the development of a stronger shared vision and agreed values that enable us to present a more cohesive, place-based, and interconnected face to our PSTs around core values as they develop their own teaching and learning philosophies.
In our collective thinking about our approach to EfS, Indigenizing the curriculum, and TiP, we have sought to unsettle our PSTs' attitudes and values around their pedagogical choices across these domains of understanding. We have sought to encourage pedagogical relationships marked by dialogue and questioning. Through our critical thinking and social commitment, we hope to nurture these same qualities in our students.
We acknowledge that this work is not without challenges. Finding spaces for doing higher education pedagogy and curriculum differently, within a vortex of internal and external accountability and standardization imperatives, demands creativity, commitment, and collegiality from colleagues. Essentially, this essay has articulated our philosophy of radical compliance of competing imperatives (Hunter et al., 2018). Consistently refusing to offer a simple blueprint of how to institute a critical pedagogy in educational institutions around the world, Henri Giroux emphasized the contextual specificity of each application of socially transformative action in different settings (Giroux, 2011). Our curriculum transformation aspires to provide a curriculum for PST education that is grounded in place, nonhierarchical, and interrelated (MacDonald et al., 2021) and that supports PSTs in their becoming of socially and culturally responsive future educators. The next step in our journey is to consult and listen to our students more closely around course changes and to respect their "voice" and perspectives in our transformative intentions. We recognize that to truly democratize teacher education, stakeholder perspectives must guide the pivoting of curriculum approaches and priorities. In this sense, our walking the walk of democratizing change in teacher education has only just begun.