Bachelor of Education (Primary Education) Home

Welcome to the Primary Bachelor of Education site!

Over the four years you spend with us you will work with a wide range of staff who will assist you in reaching your goal of being a primary teacher.

We have all been teachers with a combined experience that covers most Australian States and Territories as well overseas teaching in Pakistan, Thailand, Fiji, the United States and Japan. Quite a number of us visit schools regularly and work alongside school staff. At last count members of the primary team were working in over 20 different primary schools.

You will also work with a stimulating, diverse and supportive group of fellow students who, like you, aspire to be the best teacher they can. Your classmates will come from many different parts of Sydney and elsewhere, and like the nature of most of your future classrooms, represent a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The primary Course is one where you will have plenty of opportunities to make new friends and feel like a valued member in a team of like-minded beginning teachers.

You will meet teachers here in the Primary Course who are passionate about both the education of children and the development of enthusiastic, skilful and thoughtful teachers. We combine these twin passions with wide-ranging interests including astronomy and weather studies, multimedia, the Internet and creative teaching, children's literature, performing and creative arts, languages, sport, early number knowledge in children, gifted and talented education and global education.

We are also active researchers and are working on a diverse range of projects, many with teachers in schools. Some of these projects include:

• the development of professional learning communities (Robyn Ewing);
• quality teaching and learning for gifted learners (David Evans);
• challenge and assisted performance in multilingual classrooms (Paul Dufficy);
• an international comparative study on teacher development of Teaching Games for Understanding/Game Sense pedagogy in Australia, USA & Singapore (Richard Light);
• loss and grief education (Jan Milton);
• strategies teachers employ to develop the Working Mathematically Strand for primary children (Janette Bobis);
• the integration of ICT in language classrooms (Lesley Harbon);
• children's online discussion of books (Alyson Simpson);
• understanding attitudes to art, art making and art education (Robyn Gibson);
• and the value of the creative arts to learning and development (Robyn Gibson, Robyn Ewing and Michael Anderson).

We are currently re-thinking how best we can assist you to become the teachers you want to be. Our belief is that a key component of this goal is how effectively you are introduced and assisted to participate in the professional teaching community.

To this end we see each year in the course as a Developmental Step towards the formation of your professional identity. Each Step is accompanied by a Theme which we hope to integrate across each year.

And after graduation:

Over the coming years we will refine this model with particular emphasis on your experiences in schools; the nature of your assessment tasks; the nature of the learning you undertake; and the links to the NSW Graduate Standards.

So, welcome to your Course! We look forward to working with you as you pursue your goals.