Associate Professor Jessica Gerard works at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne where she researches the changing formations, and lived experience, of social inequalities in relation to education, activism, work, and unemployment.

Jessica holds two ARC Discovery projects on an investigation of the shifting practices of public schooling, school governance and parental citizenship in disadvantaged contexts and in the second project is on community activism and education policy reforms across Australia in the 1970s and 1980s (with colleagues Proctor and Goodwin). She is the co-author of several books including Learning Whiteness, Class in Australia Migrations, Borders, and Education: International Sociological Inquiries. She is a member of the Social Transformations and Education Research hub. She tweets at @Jess_Gerrard

Dr. Jessica Holloway is Senior Research Fellow and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow within the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University, Brisbane Campus. Her first academic position was as an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Kansas State University (USA). In 2016, she relocated to Melbourne to pursue a research-intensive postdoctoral fellowship within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University, where she conducted work on the relationship between accountability and educational leadership. 

Her current project (funded 2019-2022), ‘The Role of Teacher Expertise, Authority and Professionalism in Education’ investigates the role of education in modern democratic societies, with a particular focus on teachers and teacher expertise. She tweets @JessLHolloway

Gerard, J. & Holloway, J. (2023). Expertise. Bloomsbury.

In their new co-authored book Expertise published by Bloomsbury (2023), Gerard & Holloway explore how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerard & Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of ‘good teaching’. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

Gerrard, J. & Watson, J. (2023). The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come: Older Disadvantaged Job Seekers. SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE, 28(1), pp. 21-36. doi:10.1177/13607804211009534

Hogan, A., Gerrard, J. & Di Gregorio, E. (2023). Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school. The Australian Educational Researcher. 50, 763–780. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00524-5

Holloway, J. (2021). Metrics, Standards and Alignment in Teacher Policy Critiquing Fundamentalism and Imagining Pluralism. Springer Nature. 

Holloway, J. & Louise Larsen Hedegaard, M. (2023). Democracy and teachers: the im/possibilities for pluralisation in evidence-based practice, Journal of Education Policy, 38(3), 432-451, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2021.2014571

Marom, L. (2019). Under the cloak of professionalism: covert racism in teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(3), 319-337, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2018.1468748

Smith, W.C., Holloway, J. (2020). School testing culture and teacher satisfaction. Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability, 32, 461–479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-020-09342-8

Sripraakash, A., Rudolph, S. & Gerard, J. (2022). Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State. Pluto Press.

Gabrielle Zolezzi is a classroom teacher with experience working in both the public and private sectors of education. In her first six years of teaching, she has moved between full-time classroom teacher roles to positions on her school executive, shaping her holistic view and understanding of our education systems. Gabrielle has led, designed, and implemented whole-school programs focused on encouraging agile thinking and 21st century skill development and is the current recipient of a grant to research further into this area.

Show notes

Beames, J. R., Christensen, H., & Werner-Seidler, A. (2021). School teachers: the forgotten frontline workers of Covid-19. Australasian Psychiatry, 29(4), 420-422.

Dabrowski, A. (2020). Teacher wellbeing during a pandemic: Surviving or thriving? Social Education Research, 2, 35-40, 10.37256/ser.212021588

Heffernan, A., Longmuir, F., Bright, D., & Kim, M. (2019). Perceptions of teachers and teaching in Australia. Monash University. Monash University. https://www.monash.edu/thank-yourteacher/docs/Perceptions-of-Teachers-and-Teaching-in-Australia-report-Nov-2019.pdf

Hunter, J. (2021). High Possibility Classrooms: Integrated STEM learning in research and practice. New York: Routledge.

Keller-Schneider, M., Zhong, H. F., & Yeung, A. S. (2020). Competence and challenge in professional development: teacher perceptions at different stages of career. Journal of Education for Teaching, 46(1), 36-54.

Morrison, A., Rigney, L. I., Hattam, R., & Diplock, A. (2019). Toward an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy: A narrative review of the literature. University of South Australia.

Randall Mumbulla is a final year teacher education student in the Bachelor of Education (Primary) Program at the University of Technology Sydney. Randall was also one of the winners of the recent ‘If I was Prime Minister’ essay competition, run by the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF) with the award being presented to him by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.

In this second episode of Talking Teachers, we speak with Randall about this award and his experiences as an Indigenous teacher education student.

Show notes

Lorenza, L., Carter, D., Baguley, M., de Bruin, L., Levido, A., Meiners, J., Zouwer, N.,Booth, E., & Stanton, L. (2023). Stage 1 Initial Findings Report for the Emerging Priorities Program. An examination of primary teacher, student and parent experiences of arts learning online during COVID-19 lockdown. CQUniversity. https://figshare.com/articles/online_resource/Stage_1_Initial_Findings_Report_for_the_Emerging_Priorities_Program_An_examination_of_primary_teacher_student_and_parent_experiences_of_arts_learning_online_during_COVID-19_lockdowns/23699763

Lowe, K., & Galstaun, V. (2020). Ethical challenges: the possibility of authentic teaching encounters with indigenous cross-curriculum content?. Curriculum Perspectives, 40, 93–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-019-00093-1

Moodie, N. (2019). Learning about knowledge: threshold concepts for Indigenous studies in education. The Australian Educational Researcher. 46, 735–749. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00309-3

Thomson, A. (12 December 2022). Indigenous voices: why we urgently need windows and mirrors, EduResearch Matters blog, https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=15464