Planning a new era in Teacher Education
Let us now consider the prospects for the planning of a new era in teacher education at the proposed Mount Lawley campus. First, it was fortunate that fresh building designs could be given a clean slate on an unencumbered, though relatively confined site. Because of the impending introduction of the new three-year training course, with its extra year of instruction, scope was given for both increased depth and a less frenzied accumulation of individual subjects—as had characterised the existing English and Scottish-based training syllabus. And this had remained unchallenged for so many decades.
In a sense the dream of Bob Peter, as the prospective new Principal of Mount Lawley Teachers College, was not only to develop both a brief for a more scientific and therefore psychologically-based teacher education system, but also to enshrine it in an equally advanced campus architectural brief. The result, hopefully, could be a set of buildings and services worthy of a “new age” of student teachers. Thus the many planning committees (up to ten) based at Graylands College campus to plan for Mount Lawley were made up of the staff that Bob Peter had selected from those he was already working with there.
Much later in 1978, as Bob Peter himself described, in an interview prior to his retirement, (from what had by then become the Mount Lawley College of Advanced Education): ‘These committees laboured long and hard and developed extensive briefs for the Public Works Department, who were the architects for the enterprise.’ It does not seem too far-fetched to claim that in the years immediately prior to 1970, as a result of this innovative approach to planning a new system of teacher education for Western Australia, the buildings to go with this system were also a break-through.
Hence even the disposition of the architectural units on their ‘virginal’ campus could be a signature for the intended new era of primary teacher preparation. It was with this that Bob Peter and his future staff were entrusted. And despite minor discomforts (such as an initially inoperative air-conditioning system for the sealed window buildings) and the need for some adroit temporary re- allocation of spaces (while later larger units such as the library were ultimately scheduled for construction), the architecture was quite daringly innovative and successful. In short, back in 1967-1969 there was emerging an almost perfect match between the pedagogical and physical aspirations of the new college campus. Bob Peter and his planning staff already had made a remarkable achievement.
Suburban traffic was running past the site bordering Alexander Drive and Bradford Street but of the original Scadden pine plantation perhaps only a dozen of the introduced ‘maritime pines’ remained. The invading ‘veldt grass’ from South Africa had grown tall, dwarfing the occasional banksia, paperbark or other native shrubs and offering a savannah-like spectacle where the old rubbish tips and night soil dumps had been. One of these ‘virgin’ photographs graced the cover of the first College Calendar in 1970 to emphasize the ‘clean start’ given for the new campus site.