Our Research - Southern Cross University

Shaping Education for a Sustainable Future

Our research at the SEAE Research Centre is committed to exploring and understanding the complex relationships between sustainability, the environment, and the arts within the context of education. We strive to develop and disseminate knowledge that leads to more ecologically aware and creatively enriched educational practices. Our work is dedicated to shaping a future where learning is an active, engaged process that empowers individuals and communities to navigate and respond to the pressing environmental challenges of our times.

Meet our team

Research Projects

Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media

Lead Researcher: Dr Aspa Baroutsis (SCU)

Co-Investigators: Professor Bob Lingard (UQ and ACU)

Project Summary: Legacy news media such as newspapers, and new media such as Twitter, continue to change, and remain persuasive forces, in the field of education policy. The project seeks to identify accounts of the functioning and effects of legacy and social media in education policy. Methodological and ethical strategies for researching newspapers and social media and their effects on education policy are investigated, and how educators, policy makers and journalists can work productively together with these media. One outcome of this project is a book, published by the prestigious Routledge group, whose critical focus is the profound digital disruptions affecting media and the functioning of society, including education.

Amount: $10,000
Turning up the conversation on consent

Tuning in and turning up the conversation on consent in university residential colleges

Lead Researcher: Professor Liz Mackinlay

Co-Investigators: Professor Lisa Featherstone (UQ)

Scheme: This project is part of a multi-moded project “Sexual violence and the limits of consent” which was granted funding from a special Federal Government Research Support Package (RSP) at UQ which aims to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on Australia’s research

Project Summary: In this project, the overarching aim is to make such unspeakability heard and provide insights into sexism and sexual violence facing girls and young women in secondary and tertiary education in the context of schools, streets, social and sexual relationships, universities, and workplaces. More specifically, by engaging and working with external partners whose primary goal is the development and promotion of education which empowers young women in university residential colleges this project seeks to develop a research process and partnership that provides us with a means to understand how girls and young women make sense of sexism and sexual violence and the actions they might take to respond critically, collectively, and creatively. This one-year project is funded by The University of Queensland’s 2022 Vice Chancellors Strategic Funding. Liz is joined in this work by Associate Professor Margaret Henderson, Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Renee Mickelburgh and research assistant Bonnie Evans (School of Communication and the Arts, UQ); Dr Christina Gowlett (School of Education, UQ); and Dr (Rev) Anita Munro (Principal, Grace College UQ).

Amount: $599,000
Healing and Rights

Healing Juntanza: Counter-mapping Interethnic Feminist Geographies in Colombia

Lead Researchers: Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro

Funding Provider: Antipode Foundation

Project Summary: This Colombian-based project aims to bring together Indigenous and Black representatives (15-20) of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá (Women’s Network Matamba and Guasá – Red) in a three-day juntanza for interethnic feminist healing and knowledge sharing.

Amount: $17,138
Advancing Child and Youth-led Climate Change Educa

Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles; Professor Tracey Bunda; Professor Alexandra Lasczik; Associate Professor Louise Phillips; Adjunct Professor Kim Snepvangers; Professor Rita Irwin; Dr Shannon Leddy.

Climate change education is in its infancy. By co-researching with Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, youth, and Elders across Australia and Canada, this project conceptualises and advances climate change education with Country. Climate change education is not adequately understood within Western science. Western perspectives on climate crises are in deep contrast to Indigenous perspectives enmeshed in continuous storying with descendants, ancestors, and Country. Collaborating with Elders, this project will generate child and youth-led transcultural curriculum and pedagogical understandings of climate change education with Country. It delivers on the United Nations Convention on Climate Change through corresponding quality education.
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Enabling child and youth global citizenship literacies and leadership

Lead Researchers: Associate Professor Louise Phillips

Co-Investigators: Professor Pauline Harris (UniSA)

Funding Provider: Queensland Department of Education Horizon grant

Project Summary: This project investigates how schools, regions and education systems can respond to children and youth as active global citizens. It aims to locate mechanisms and resources that schools, regions and education systems can apply to foster children’s global civic literacy capabilities. The WHO, UNICEF & LANCET report A future for the world’s children (Clark et al., 2020) notes “Children have little voice in the shape of their future” (p. 607) yet to
have any hope in navigating the current convergent crises, processes must be incorporated that ensure children’s
participation in decision-making on public matters. Global citizenship literacies provide the communication tools
necessary for active citizenship participation. Expected outcomes include the development of a global citizenship
literacies framework, resource catalogue and videos for schools, regions and education systems to use with children
and youth to face challenges and utilise opportunities as global citizens in their changing worlds.

Amount: $66,400
Beyond global discourses of data: Storying learning in marginalised schools

Lead Researcher: Associate Professor Ian Hardy (UQ)

Co-Investigators: Associate Professor Louise Phillips (SCU), Dr Obaid Hamid (UQ), Associate Professor Vicente Reyes (Nottingham)

Scheme: Australian Research Council Discovery Project

Project Summary: Globally, Australian school education is seen as under-performing. Consequently, attention to data, particularly numeric and standardised test data, in schools have become pervasive. This project aims to understand how teachers and educators in schools and school systems actually engage with a broader conception of data for enhanced learning, on a truly global scale, particularly in schools serving struggling communities. This project will reveal the myriad ways educators in diverse settings - England, Australia, Singapore and Bangladesh – engage with data. The project will re-conceptualise how data are understood globally, and will provide significant benefits including informing education policy-making and improving teaching practices.

Visit the Beyond global discourses of data website

Amount: $333,786
Mapping scientific concepts through nature play in early childhood education: Achieving excellence in STEM through evidence-based pedagogies

Lead Researcher: Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Co-Investigators: Associate Professor Alexandra Lasczik, Associate Professor Linda Knight (RMIT), Professor Karen Malone (Swinburne University of Technology)

Scheme: Education Horizon Grants Scheme 2019, Qld Government Department of Education

Project Summary: This project aims to determine how young children's (4four-to-five years) learning of scientific concepts can be supported through nature play. The increase of children attending kindergarten/preschool continues to rise markedly with 339,243 Australian children enrolled. Coupled with this increase is the rapid surge of nature-play pedagogies in kindergartens. However, the effectiveness of nature play is untested, making this the first study in the world to explicitly research nature play in early childhood education. This is significant because nature play is a core feature and tradition of early childhood education practice and pedagogy.

This project will forge new knowledge about nature-play pedagogies and how they can support children’s scientific learning in early childhood education. Such research supports both the Queensland Department of Education STEM Strategy (2016) and the National STEM Education Strategy (2016-2026) where “it recognises the importance of a focus on STEM in the early years”.

Visit the Childhood Nature Play website

Listen to The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Research Files podcast

Amount: $88,725

Dartaphacts exhibitions

"dartaphact” mixes data, art and act/ivism in processes that make the mattering “facts of experience” visible to wider publics. The concept is deliberately ambivalent about being an object (artefact) and a verb: the artful making of experiential facts. The first half of the concept – darta – (hybrid of data and art) is an explicit intervention to trouble what counts as social science data which emphasises and values the speculative process of what comes to matter through arts-based research. The second half of the concept – phact – signals the explicit posthuman ethico-political activist potential of what matter can The “ph” at the heart of the concept replaces “f” in dartaphact to register the posthuman forces of artful objects as potential political enunciators and to encourage a move away from the illusion of objective, fixed, knowable and measurable social science fact. ¹

¹ Renold, E. (2018). ‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 37-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1296352

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Publications from our research projects:

Our Academic Publications

SEAE Impact and Engagement