Open letter in support of the work of AERO
You can add your signature
In recent times, the Australian Education Research Organisation has come in for criticism from the education establishment in Australia. Rebecca Birch and I have teamed up to write an open letter to Australia's federal and state education ministers in support of AERO. You can add your signature to this letter by following this link to Google Forms. Teachers will not be asked for the name of their school.
Please find a minute over the next week to sign. At this point, we will review the list, check the signatures and remove any if necessary. The letter and finalised list of signatures will then be published on Medium.
Dear Ministers,
We are a group of teachers and education professionals who are supportive of the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and who appreciate its work. AERO generates and disseminates research-based evidence on educational practices in an accessible fashion. Some of us have engaged with this evidence as individual teachers and others have made use of it in our school professional learning programs. It is practical and curated in easily digestible forms in a way that much education research is not. It is targeted at “best bets” in classroom practice, with clear guidance on application, in a way that much education research is not. To summarise, it is useful to teachers in a way that much education research is not.
The work of AERO addresses a need that initial teacher education has not historically met. What is often missing from teacher education is a grounding in research evidence. We learn little about what robust research shows about the effectiveness of different teaching methods and we are left with few tools for evaluating research for ourselves. Moreover, busy teachers lack the time and resources to read original research and so AERO plays a valuable translation role.
An organisation such as AERO should not need to exist because this evidence should be provided by the university education faculties that train teachers. It was the foresight of education ministers that identified the need. Teacher education programs vary and there are notable bright spots in teacher education in Australia. However, in general, we feel let down by our experiences of teacher education. It often consists of engaging with sociological theory that, while interesting, does not reflect the day-to-day work of teachers. The contrast with, for example, the highly practical AERO resources on classroom behaviour management is stark.
We write because we are concerned about a spate of recent negative articles in the media about AERO. These articles appear to have been timed to coincide with a review of AERO that KPMG is conducting at the request of the federal government. They are invariably written by education academics and teacher educators, and despite appearances, do not represent the concerns of the teaching profession.
Criticisms include AERO’s charitable status, the threat of neoliberal policy to teacher autonomy, and the influence of think tanks, all of which are tangential to the key question of whether AERO is delivering on its aims, namely to
a. generate high-quality evidence
b. present the evidence in ways that are relevant and accessible, and
c. encourage adoption and effective implementation of evidence in practice (and policy.)
Criticisms of AERO vary, but few address these key aims. Some critics seem to assume that teachers are unable to read AERO’s output critically, will accept everything it produces as revealed truth and assume anything it has not (yet) addressed is unimportant. This is a deprofessionalising view of teachers, and one expressed in articles where the authors, ironically, claim to be defending our professional status.
We cannot help come to the view that the true source of these concerns is the same one that prevents so many teacher education courses from making space for the issues that AERO addresses: an ideology of teaching and education that is inimical to robust effectiveness research. Regrettably, education academia has evolved as an ecosystem in which delivering good outcomes for children in classrooms is a somewhat distant concern. By acting as an alternative source of intellectual authority for teachers, AERO poses a threat to that ecosystem and this is why it is under attack.
It is ultimately up to ministers to decide the way forward for AERO, but we thought it important our collective voice was heard.
Yours sincerely
Rebecca Birch
Greg Ashman