Educational Partnerships and Collaborations

Partnerships and collaboration are two ideas that have transformed teacher education and enhanced teacher professional learning, enquiry and research. Increasingly, the changing context in which teachers work requires them to continually update and enhance their knowledge and skills, and to engage in different forms of professional development in order to understand the needs of their pupils and the communities they come from. This underlines the need for stronger partnerships to connect teachers with each other, with teacher education providers, with local communities, with local government, and with business and National Government Organizations (NGOs). Educational partnerships as a concept recognises the new ecology of digital interconnectivity, the need for stronger collaboration at all levels, and a new collective responsibility for education. Partnerships in the form of transnational education, public-private collaborations, interactions between formal and informal educational organisations, collaborations between tertiary organisations and industry/the service sector and amongst schools and between schools and their communities have emerged as strong policy and practice drivers. This series aims to span this broad understanding of partnership and make a contribution to both theory and practice.