Rhetoric, Reality and the Practicum: Reconstructionism, behaviourism and primary teacher education in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Between 1986 and 1996, 14 cohorts graduating from a Papua New Guinea Teachers' College were sent out to community schools (called primary schools in Australia). They were sent out to take up the awesome burden of educating children in what has been called 'the grim reality' of the classroom in the Third World. They have had to carry the burdens of numeracy, literacy and resource development in a country that is essentially non-numerate, non-literate and without development of its huge natural resources potential. In that time, the Bougaineville conflict has put paid to assumptions that any such development would happen as a matter of course. The recent drought has further intensified the pressure on very limited resources. The findings of this study of the practicum in five primary schools in one of the provinces of Papua New Guinea suggests that the very course that the teachers have undertaken to equip them for that burden has let them down.