The Western Sydney Rustbelt: Recognizing and Building on Strengths in Pre-Service 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 to learning that support pre-service teachers in attempting to consider how their own ethnicity and culture shapes practice and may disrupt the effects of poverty on educational outcomes to make a difference in the lives of their students.