Current research projects

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

Learning with the Land

Lead Researchers: Professor Lexi Lasczik; Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles; Dr Rita Irwin (The University of British Columbia)

Funding Provider: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

Project Summary: For this Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project, Drs. Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles will be working with local Indigenous artists, elders and Indigenous community members as they co-design artistic and pedagogical activities that will assist all learners as they engage in learning with the land. Circles of inquiry will emerge and guide their work with local youth. The work will be shared at a conference in 2023.

Amount: $200,000

Floods and Me: Education in a changing climate

• Lead Researchers: Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles
• Co-Investigators: A/Professor Louise Phillips; Dr Liberty De Rivera; Simone Blom; Dr Melissa Wolfe; Dr Lisa Siegel; Professor Lexi Lasczik; Dr David Rousell (RMIT); Dr Blanche Verlie (RMIT); Professor Lauren Rickards (RMIT)
• Funding Provider: Vice Chancellor flood funding award

Project Summary: This project aims to understand children and young people’s flood experiences and its impact on their education. The devastating February 2022 floods in the Norther Rivers saw many early childhood education settings and schools either deemed unsalvageable, temporarily closed, or significantly disrupted. While the immediate priority was to ensure ‘education’ continued across the Northern Rivers, the impact on children and young people and their education is not well understood. As the education sector rebuilds itself across the Northern Rivers, this seed project will bring children and young people’s voices to the fore through the co-design of a draft ‘Floods + Me Education Framework’ and ‘Floods + Me Community Exhibition’.  

Amount: $25,000

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

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

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

Supporting teachers and teaching in flexible and non-traditional schools

• Lead Researcher: Associate Professor Glenda McGregor (GU)
• Co-Investigators: Dr Aspa Baroutsis (SCU), Professor Martin Mills (QUT)
• Partners: Australian Association for Flexible and Inclusive Education (AAFIE), Jabiru Community College (Brisbane), Youth Inc. (Adelaide)
• Scheme: Australian Research Council – Linkage Projects (LP190100398)

Project Summary: This project aims to address an important gap in the research literature pertaining to the conditions and contributions of staff undertaking teaching duties in Australia’s flexible/non-traditional schooling sector. This study expects to generate new knowledge of the experiences and needs of teaching staff as an underrepresented segment of the workforce. It draws upon a mixed-methods approach which includes innovative ethnographic methods used to foreground the voices of staff educating our most marginalized youth. Expected outcomes of this research include significant benefits for sponsors and principals of, and teachers in, flexible/non-traditional schools in the form of research-based recommended practices and management frameworks.

Visit: Teachers and teaching in non-traditional schools website

Amount: $265,831 

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

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

Learning about climate change through public spaces

• Lead Researcher: Dr Angela Turner
• Partner: Nambucca Shire Council
• Scheme: The Dawkins Park Reserve Project, Nambucca Shire Council

Project Summary: This project will implement measures to improve water quality through energy-efficient water aeration and develop an interactive environmental education precinct outlining the measures and how they build resilience to climate change. The education program will be developed with Southern Cross University, local schools and local community groups.

Amount: $95,000

Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational storytelling across historical and cultural routes of significance

• Lead Researcher: Dr Rita Irwin
• Co-Investigators: Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Associate Professor Alexandra Lasczik, Katie Hotko
• Scheme: Partnership Development Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SHRCC)

Project Summary: The Mapping A/r/tography partnership builds upon and extends an international community of practice by establishing seven sites for the study of historic contemporary cultural routes of significance while employing movement (walking/hiking/trekking) based research practices within culturally conceived a/r/tographic perspectives: Canada's Trans Canada Trail (three sites), China's Silk Road, Japan's Kumano Kodo Trail, Spain's Camino de Santiago, and Australia's Gondwana Subtropical Rainforests.  We are the only Australian partner. Using a distinctly new template for approaches to public pedagogy, this partnership responds to the vital need for innovative models of learning, teaching, and scholarship that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practice) by drawing on a transnational coalition of scholars, students, artists and writers in education.

Amount: $200,000

CC+Me Research Program

• Chief Investigators: Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (Lead CI), Dr David Rousell (Co-Lead); & Dr Maia Osborn, Dr Helen Widdop-Quinton, Thilinika Wijesinghe (co-investigators)
• Funding Provider: NSW Environmental Trust, Australian Association for Environmental Education & Manchester Metropolitan University

Project Summary: CC+Me is an international research program involving children and young people researching climate change and co-designing and co-publishing climate change education programs, curriculum and research outputs.

Visit Climate Change and Me website.

View and interact on the Climate Action Adventure! App

Amount: $100,000+

Youth4Landcare

• Chief Investigators: Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (Lead CI), Associate Professor Lexi Laszcik, Adjunct Dr Marianne Logan, Dr Maia Osborn, Dr Lisa Siegel
• Funding Provider: Australian Government Department of Science, Innovation and Industry

Project Summary: This project is about increasing young people's participation in Landcare Reserves on Tamborine Mountain. Landcare reserves on Tamborine Mountain are interwoven in communities, yet children and young people's awareness of and participation in these sites is largely unknown. The project is about working with children and young people as co-researchers in understanding young people's perspectives and experiences of Tamborine Mountain Landcare reserves.

From that research footing, SCU researchers and co-researchers will co-design resources to position these sites as everyday neighbourhood spaces in order to increase participation.

This project is highly significant because of national and international research reporting rapid declines in young people's participation in natural environments.

Visit the Youth4Landcare website

Amount: $49,000