“Anyone Can Stand in Front of a Bunch of Kids and Do Something”: A Bacchian Approach to Problems and Processes Involving Pre-Service Teachers Employed in a Teaching Role

The practice of employing education students as unqualified teachers in schools has grown over the last three years as the teacher shortage across Australia and the world worsens. This study uses a Bacchian approach to critically analyse the “problem” of pre-service teachers (PST) undertaking teaching roles as unqualified personnel whilst concurrently completing their teaching degrees through the lens of university lecturers working within the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) space. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven university lecturers. A Bacchian analysis of the discourse arising from these interviews was conducted and followed two distinct groupings, those being between the student and employer, and the student and the university. The silences within these discourses were found to be the voices of the university lecturers working within the ITE programmes since they were not given a seat at the negotiation table between schools and registering bodies, prior to the student undertaking a teaching contract. These findings demonstrate the need for strategies that engender greater awareness of and support for, PST working in the school system, where all stakeholders are actively involved in the implementation of a holistic, purposeful and accountable approach to addressing the teacher shortage in sustainable, future focused endeavours.