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The Western Sydney Rustbelt: Recognizing And Building On Strengths In Pre-Service Teacher Education, Loshini Naidoo, Jacqueline Ann D'Warte

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Preparing pre-service teachers to address the disparities in educational attainment that occur in settings with complex demographics such as high poverty and super diversity (Vertovec, 2007) require a theoretically driven contextual and spacial (Soja, 1996) understanding of disadvantage. This understanding highlights the structural and systemic inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor and limit social and economic mobility for disadvantaged students in schools. This paper uses a conceptual and spacial understanding to focus on the strategies implemented by a primary and secondary pre-service teacher program to support and improve pre-service teacher learning of disadvantaged schools. We detail approaches …