Our community of teacher educators conducts research, teaches and advocates in areas related to language, literacy and culture across the entire education system. We also research and teach children’s literature, multimodal digital literature and advocate for multimodal literacy education to prepare children for compelling literacy skills in the digital era. We have specific expertise in school-age education as well as adult, community and higher education.
We have a rich experience gained from working with diverse language and cultural groups, including linguistic minorities, immigrant and refugee communities, transnational students, EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) /EFL (English as foreign language)/ESL (English as second language) students, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples. We are acutely aware of the politics of colonisation and assimilation and issues of educational disadvantage, and our work seeks to resist the disenfranchisement that these politics cause.
We explore how deficit framings – set against dominant assumptions about educational background, linguistic heritage, affiliation and expertise, and student and family capacity – create implicit and explicit barriers for engagement and success in multilingual educational communities in Australia and internationally. We identify ways to empower students, teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers and policymakers with critical awareness and resources in response to the challenges associated with language, literacy, literature and culture in education.
Themes and signature projects
Research team – who we are
Current activities
Partners and collaborators
- UNSW Gonski Institute for Education, opens in a new window
- UNSW Division for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, opens in a new window
- NSW Department of Education and Training, opens in a new window
- NSW ATESOL, opens in a new window
- Australian Council of TESOL Associations, opens in a new window
- Refugee Education Special Interest Group, opens in a new window
- AARE Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education Special Interest Group, opens in a new window
Courses and programs
- Master of Teaching, Bachelor of Education,
- Master of Education, Graduate Certificate of Education (TESOL)
- Master of Educational Leadership
- MEd (Research), EdD, PhD