A little respect goes a long way in education

Building bridges between cultures and institutions lays at the heart of a research project designed to improve the delivery of pre-service teacher training.

Senior lecturer in education Dr Sue Smith is supervising the Race, Religion and Respect in Initial Teacher Education (3RITE) project, which is being conducted in Australia and Indonesia.

“I was delighted to secure faculty funding for the first round of the project,” Dr Smith said.

“Two of our Indonesian doctoral graduates, Dr Deasyanti Adil and Dr Ratna Suryaratri from the State University in Jakarta, are working with me.”

Pre-service trainee teachers are asked to reveal how they perceive themselves in art-based and “acting out” workshops.

“The workshops we have run as part of the 3RITE project have been great fun and are a really rich way for university lecturers and academics to learn from their students about differing value systems, complex identity issues and problem solving,” Dr Smith said.

“It is very important, as educators, that we are able to deal with issues surrounding exclusion and inclusion.”

Dr Smith said she was talking to three universities in Indonesia that were interested in using the 3RITE techniques as part of their teacher education.