About
60
Publications
9,829
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
184
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Current position
- Honorary Senior Lecturer in Adult and Vocational Education
Additional affiliations
January 2005 - October 2020
Publications
Publications (60)
Workplace experiences are central to adults’ learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults’ learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and enrichi...
The chapter reports a study that explored the diverse understandings and experiences of teacher leadership among members of a geographically dispersed and culturally diverse research group. Phenomenography as a methodological approach was used to illuminate the variation in the way members of the International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) res...
This paper reports a phenomenographic study exploring diverse understandings and experiences of teacher leadership among 12 members of the International Study of Teacher Leadership research team comprised of 20 academics located in 10 countries. Mind mapping and semi-structured, online interviews were used to explore the ways that the participants...
Heralded by the release of government policies such as Vision 2021, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has joined the worldwide impetus for the integration of Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) into its K-12 education system as a central plank of reforms to its economy and education system. This presents challenges for schools in both publi...
Increasing numbers of diverse learners are seeking Vocational Education and Training (VET) opportunities to develop the skills and capabilities they need to negotiate the challenges of living, learning and working in an increasingly globalised and uncertain 21st century world. The ability to successfully navigate career pathways and transitions is...
This paper reports preliminary findings from a study investigating the culturally diverse understandings, experiences and perspectives of teacher leadership among the membership of an International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) research team comprised of 20 academics working in universities in Australia, Canada, Latin America, South Africa, Ta...
Australia is one of the most culturally diverse nations in the world, yet two recent reports from the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC, 2016, 2018) highlight a disturbing lack of cultural diversity among the senior leaders of Australia’s larger public and private sector organisations and institutions, and in particular, in universities. The...
In Australia, in spite of a policy commitment at the national level to an investment in national broadband internet infrastructure across the country, the problem of an enduring digital divide – along with the probability of an associated learning divide – persists, particularly for so-called disadvantaged groups in rural and regional communities....
The ‘Community Enrichment Program’ enabled technology training for selected aged care volunteers in Stanthorpe, Queensland, so that they may assist frail or otherwise debilitated aged care residents to use computer tablets for personalised learning activities. A main aim was to enhance the quality of life for residents and recipients of aged care s...
GraniteNet is a Community Informatics and Learning Community initiative that began in 2006 as a collaboration between USQ researchers and members of the rural community of Stanthorpe, a small town located in the Southern Downs region of Queensland, Australia. The project’s vision was the development of a sustainable community-designed, owned and ma...
Education plays a critical role in preserving social cohesion and democracy by enabling individuals to contribute to, and participate fully in, civil society (Kalantzis & Cope, 2001). How, then, do community educators use their influence to equip individuals with the capacity to actively participate in rural community life in a network society and...
GraniteNet is a Community Informatics project which began in 2006 as a research and development collaboration between university researchers and members of the rural community of Stanthorpe, a town of approximately 10,500 residents located on the Granite Belt in the Southern Downs region of Queensland, Australia. The vision for this Participatory A...
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts extends current understandings of what capacities and capacity-building are and of the dimensions that maximise their prospects of success in current educational policy-making and provision. It does this by exploring how capacity-building is implemented among nine groups of research participant...
Educational Learning and Development: Building and Enhancing Capacity explores the topic of educational learning and development in order to examine issues that are impacting, either positively or negatively, on current research in this area. This is explored through ten groups of research participants from various countries, including circus famil...
In a knowledge economy, formal processes of education have long been equated with power. However, learners’ lifelong and lifewide learning increasingly occurs within the context of transnational and distributed knowledge-as-power. This chapter engages with three sets of data in its exploration of how learning may be both personal and agentic. It ca...
Professional learning and development hold potential for transformational growth and change for educators, and for enhancing their capacities to build the capabilities of learners. Realising this potential requires an appreciation of the philosophies, theories and practices surrounding professional learning and development and how these may progres...
In a knowledge economy, formal processes of education have long been equated with power. However, learners’ lifelong and lifewide learning increasingly occurs within the context of transnational and distributed knowledge-as-power. This chapter engages with three sets of data in its exploration of how learning may be both personal and agentic. It ca...
Contemporary capacity-building assumes varied forms and generates varying degrees of effect and effectiveness. It is therefore useful and important to articulate a scholarly programme for researching capacity-building in its multiple manifestations. This chapter outlines that scholarly programme in three dimensions. Firstly, a concise account is pr...
This chapter explores the relationship between consciousness and capacity-building in current educational settings. In particular, it elaborates the distinctive associations between varying levels and states of consciousness on the one hand and the potential to enhance individual and group learning and teaching capabilities on the other. The author...
Contemporary scholarship should equip practitioners, policy-makers and researchers with ideas and insights to be able to identify new and potentially transformative educational futures that enhance capacity-building and share the fruits of that capacity-building as widely as possible. This chapter takes up that challenge by using a synthesised anal...
Resilience is generally considered to be a capacity to act and adapt in the face of adversity or constraint, and is the result of a complex interplay of risk and protective factors. Initially focused on the individual, the resilience concept and research have extended to groups such as teams and communities. In this chapter, we examine conceptualis...
Residents in regional and rural communities remain distant from many of the affordances and opportunities associated with urban centres of population. Conversely, regional and rural residents have been characterised as being particularly resilient owing to having to adapt to changing circumstances. Against this backdrop, it is crucial for those res...
The multiple forms of capital represent a powerful framework for understanding certain approaches to capacity-building. This chapter explores how particular groups of learners and educators exhibit specific forms of capital and how the participants in the associated research projects gain access to and mobilise those forms of capital to generate ce...
The multiple theoretical understandings related to the concepts of diversity and identity provide useful frameworks for exploring capacity-building in a range of complex and, at times, highly contested contexts. This chapter explores how participants in a number of education research studies make sense of diversity and identity as they seek to buil...
Effective knowledge sharing is crucial to the long-term capacity-building of learners, in order to ensure the sustainability of individuals, teams and communities. This chapter explores three sites of knowledge sharing practices: circuses in the Netherlands; an Australian senior secondary art classroom; and an Australian university education resear...
Fostering capacities by encouraging creativity is a critical role undertaken by educators in a diverse range of learning contexts. Creativity is seen to be an essential skill for twenty-first-century living and enhances the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Documentation of creative learning provides important insights into the potentia...
The concluding chapter of this book challenges the reader to engage with the ‘hot topics’ and ‘wicked problems’ presented throughout the chapters on the topic of educational learning and development and the potential for capacity-building for both educators and learners. The new perspectives generated by interrogation of this topic enable the reade...
Collaboration is often promoted as an important strategy to enhance capacity-building. In the education sector it draws upon long-standing practices of social constructivist learning and teaching, which value working and learning from others. This chapter examines the collaborative process through the shared experiences of individuals and groups in...
Leadership can be multi-faceted and multidirectional. Developing leadership capacity requires consideration of a variety of leadership models and reflection on an individual’s and group’s capacity and the contexts in which they are working. Professional development is required for leaders at all levels to enhance capacity, increase networking oppor...
The multifaceted interplay between changes and continuities has a complex relationship with the opportunities for, and strategies of, capacity-building. This interplay is evident also in efforts to promote long-term and sustainable educational learning and development within and across specific educational sites. This chapter examines this interpla...
In a world of rapid technological advances, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in educational contexts has grown exponentially. Similarly, the form and focus of research into ICTs for lifelong, life-wide learning and development and the resultant contributions to the literature are extremely diverse. This chapter brings a...
An ongoing challenge for instructional and syllabus designers and teachers and facilitators who seek to implement these curricula is finding and maintaining an appropriate balance between differing learning and teaching styles. Differences in cultural and language backgrounds, previous learning and teaching experiences, and the personal characteris...
The study of individual differences is concerned with understanding the variations from person to person, such as through personality and cognition and how these differences are related to human behaviour. Fundamental to the study of individual differences has been the measurement of variation utilising a range of assessment and evaluation techniqu...
Beliefs and practices of formal, non-formal and informal learning have undergone radical changes since the late nineteenth century, when didactic instruction gave way in many societies to learner-centred methods. From the late twentieth century, global competition and a shift to neoliberalism have informed the commodification of education. Data fro...
Educational learning and development is evidenced in a range of sectors and is of interest to a range of stakeholders, particularly in regards to its capacity-building potential. This introductory chapter seeks to conceptualise and contextualise this area in the following three ways. The first section will present various approaches taken in concep...
Emerging from the ashes of the original, disused community website, GraniteNet "Phoenix" was reinvented in 2006 through a research and development partnership between the University of Southern Queensland and members of the Stanthorpe community who were passionate about harnessing the possibilities presented by emerging Information Communications T...
If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...
If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...
It is vital for research teams to assess their activities and outcomes as they grow in confidence and momentum if their capacities are to be enlarged and sustained. The authors use this chapter to conduct a theoretically framed evaluation of the first three years of operations of the research team that they constitute. Attention is given simultaneo...
"Constructing Capacities: Building Capabilities through Learning and Engagement" explores several contemporary manifestations of individuals, groups and communities participating in varying types of learning and thereby engaging effectively and productively with their contexts and environments in order to build and develop their multiple capacities...
The GraniteNet Project is a research and development collaboration between the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and the community of Stanthorpe – a rural community of just over 10,000 people located within the university’s regional catchment area. The vision of this Community Informatics project, which commenced in 2007 and is now in i...
This chapter elaborates possible implications of the experiences of writing this research book for the development and sustainability of the authors as a productive and supportive research team. The preceding chapters have explored several different dimensions of research collaborations and in the process have enacted specific elements of collabora...
The questions of ethics in collaborative research derive fundamentally from the collaborating researchers’ respective worldviews and value systems. Developing appropriate and effective answers to those questions depends partly on the researchers’ willingness and capacity to make explicit and hold up for examination otherwise unconscious and hence u...
It is much easier to talk and write rhetorically about the benefits of collaborative research than it is to enact those benefits in the actions and outcomes of a sustainable research team. This is hardly surprising: all manner of obstacles confront those seeking to conduct and publish research in contemporary Australian universities. Some of these...
Sustaining Synergies: Collaborative Research and Researching Collaboration explores the experiences, expectations, potential pitfalls and possible outcomes of team-based education research and publishing. It addresses vitally important questions for those engaging in collaborative research, including:
• What are the different forms that can be take...
The GraniteNet Project is a research and development collaboration between the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and the community of Stanthorpe - a rural community of just over 10,000 people located within the university's regional catchment area. The vision of this Community Informatics project, which commenced in 2007 and is now in i...
Rural communities such as Stanthorpe on Queensland’s Southern Downs, in Australia, are familiar with turbulent environmental, social, technological and economic change and the adversity that frequently accompanies such changes. The capacity of individuals and communities to bounce back from adversity is referred to as resilience. Participation in l...
This paper reports an exploration into critical success factors for the sustainability of the partnership between the University of Southern Queensland and the Stanthorpe community during the GraniteNet Phoenix Project--the first phase of a three-phase participatory action research project conducted during 2007-2008. The concepts of learning commun...
This paper reports the results of a participatory action research (PAR) evaluation conducted with the members of the Granite Belt Learners Group in their rural 'learning community' in South East Queensland, and presents an action research and evaluation framework to guide the community on the next stage of its journey.
Three fields of specialisation making up the landscape of adult education research are the regeneration of regional communities, the changing work of academics and the identities of teachers in Australia. Using the conceptual resources of place, space and inner terrain as lenses – in combination with the ethnographic notions of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ fo...
This chapter explores constraints and capacities in enacting leadership that seeks to mobilise change in educating teachers for Further Education and Training (FET), a complex and contested fields intersecting Technical and Vocational Education and Training. FET curriculum is located at the crossroads of competing expectations and priorities by mul...
Constructing new learning futures is an ongoing challenge and opportunity for contemporary learners and educators alike. A crucial element of that construction is making meaning by and for all participants in the educational enterprise. Such meaning making depends in turn on the performance of practice – that is, on the regular, repeated enactment...
Community engagement, along with personal fulfilment and economic resilience, is an integral element of lifelong learning (Global Learning Services, 2001). This paper reports the processes and outcomes of a collaborative community engagement research project undertaken by university researchers, local and state government and community partners tha...
Drawing on criticality, critical theory and the humanist tradition in education, the authors explicate several issues in evaluating and redesigning the postcompulsory teacher education professional experience at USQ. The challenge rests with developing partnerships, pathways and andragogies that simultaneously fulfil stakeholder expectations and pr...
This paper interrogates options in redesigning the further education and training teacher education programs at the University of Southern Queensland in relation to student engagement as influencing quality assurance. Critical understandings of lifelong learning are proposed for framing FET futures that maximise student engagement and quality assur...
Learning, an international, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on issues and trends in pedagogies and learning in national and international contexts. © Copyright of articles is retained by authors. As this is an open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. Abstract This p...
The aim of the project reported here was to undertake a consultation process throughout rural and remote south west Queensland to identify and map adult and community education (ACE) provision. Consultations were conducted in 11 remote communities, and the report documents an immense amount of provision and identifies many ways in which the provisi...
Learning communities are increasingly posited as vehicles for reflecting on and harnessing successes in lifelong learning and for framing equitable, productive and transformative futures that will generate substantial and sustainable outcomes for all their members. In view of these claims, it is timely to hold learning communities up to scrutiny in...
