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Citation for Professor Bob Meyenn: Fellow of the New South Wales Teacher Education Council

The New South Wales Teacher Education Council is proud to announce the award of Fellow of the Association to Professor Bob Meyenn, of Charles Sturt University. Bob Meyenn has served teacher education in New South Wales, and in Australia, with distinction. He was been a member of the TEC since its official constitution in 1987, and has served as member, member of the Executive, and as President.

In this time he has been an outstanding role model for new and beginning teacher educators, a respected colleague of successive generations of NSWTEC executive members, an active and innovative presenter of research and activity in teacher education at educational research conferences, both in Australia and internationally, and a leading voice in all debates about teacher education policy and practice at his own state and at the national level.

His career in education is extraordinary in terms of its commitment to social justice and the provision of quality education for all. After gaining his Leaving Certificate at Homebush Boys' High School, in 1960, and after two years of training at Balmain Teachers' College, Bob began his career as a primary school teacher in 1963 as an 18 year old graduate. From a small country school at Somerton, on the banks of the Peel River in the north west of NSW, he went on to teach mathematics in the Solomon Islands under the Australian Volunteers Abroad scheme and then later at Bankstown Boys High School in Sydney. After a second stint in the Solomon Islands as headmaster of Goldie College in the western province, Professor Meyenn travelled to England where he earned his Master of Education, from the University of Bristol, in 1976, and his PhD from the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1979.

On his return to Australia in 1981, Bob Meyenn took up a lecturing position at the Riverina College of Advanced Education, and immediately began to make his mark on teacher education in New South Wales, recognising the importance of providing high quality teacher education for rural and inland NSW, and taking up this challenge within his own institution. His appointment as Head of School at Riverina led to him accepting the position of Dean of the Faculty of Education at Charles Sturt University when it was founded in 1989. Professor Meyenn served as Dean of Education at Charles Sturt for 19 years, and presided over the growth of teacher education in that institution – to encompass four schools across campuses in Albury-Wodonga, Bathurst, Dubbo and Wagga Wagga, and offering teacher education for early childhood, primary and secondary education, vocational education and training as well as recreation and human movement programs. More recently, Bob Meyenn has led CSU to be the first Australian university to successfully set up its operations in Canada, where the Faculty's Ontario campus has now graduated three cohorts of students.

Bob Meyenn's contribution to the NSW Teacher Education Council is far reaching. As its longest serving Executive member, he has led the NSW Deans of Education as President, and as initiator and participant in a number of schemes designed to support high quality teacher education practice. Throughout his career he is remarkable in the degree to which he has established and maintained very good relationships with the major employers and a real connection with our profession. He has served on a number of ministerial advisory councils, including the NSW Public Education Council. He was also selected by the NSW Government to lead the five year study into class sizes in the early, formative years of primary education. The study quickly resulted in kindergarten classes in NSW reduced to 20 with a subsequent class reduction program over several years. Like much of his research and service, this work has marked Bob Meyenn quite distinctly as a champion of public education, abd this has extended to his public commitment to and advocacy for improving the funding of education in Australia from early childhood right through to the tertiary level.

This public advocacy and commitment to education can be noted in the many leadership roles Bob Meyenn has taken as Dean of Education. From his continuing role as Chair of the Board of Directors for Australian Volunteers International – an association which he began as a 21 year old volunteer teacher in the Solomon Islands, Bob Meyenn has also served as President of the Australian Association of Research in Education, as a Ministerial Appointment to NSW Public Education Council., and a Member of the NSW Aboriginal Education Advisory Committee. He was an inaugural member of the Executive of the Australian Teaching Council (ATC); a Member of the NSW Ministerial Advisory Committee on Teacher Education and Quality of Teaching (MACQT); and served for many years on the NSW Director-General's Teacher Qualifications Advisory Panel (TQAP). He has worked as Director of the Western Institute of TAFE; served as a key participant in the work of the Australian Council of Deans of Education; and within this catalogue of outstanding service and commitment to teacher education, he as also served us, as President of the NSW Teacher Education Council.

Bob Meyenn's skills and experience, along with his irrepressible interest in people and his ability to engage with others from all walks of life have led to his appointment on the range of state and national committees and boards noted above. The NSWTEC honours Bob Meyenn for both the quality of his professional work, and his passion for teacher education as evidenced by his contribution to the field. These mark him as an outstanding teacher educator, and an exemplary choice for the Inaugural Award of Life member and Fellow of the NSW Teacher Education Council.

Teachers Make a Difference

"In terms of student achievement, the teacher is a more significant factor than any other kind of school resource." (US National Commission on Teaching and America's Future)

"In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have." (Lee Iacocca)

"Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was." (Helen Keller)

"I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile... But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move... Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience." (John Dewey)

Why teach? Because teachers make a real difference (www.education.qld.gov.au)

Teach... and make a difference (www.det.nsw.edu.au)