ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on a longitudinal study of the opinions, beliefs and attitudes of pre-service teachers at an Australian Catholic University. The purpose of the study was to track students’ thinking regarding the aims of education, approaches to teaching and learning and the purposes of schooling and the identifying characteristics of Catholic schools. Students completed a survey that contained closed and open questions at the beginning of their first year and towards the end of their fourth year. The longitudinal study cohort consists of the sixty students who completed the survey on both occasions. The findings suggest that first-year students had a strong commitment to holistic educational aims, purposes and practices and that this commitment increased during their time at university. From a given list of 15 characteristics of the Catholic school, the generic item, ‘caring community’, was rated and ranked ahead of all explicitly faith-based options. While students’ levels of religiosity increased over the duration of the programme, the perceived importance of the faith-based purpose of schools was very low in 2014 and almost non-existent in 2017. These responses are discussed in the light of Sockett's (2008) four models of teacher education and the implications for the identity of Catholic schools are considered.
