Dr Ken Boston began his professional career as a university lecturer, after being awarded his PhD in Earth Sciences. He then went into the education bureaucracy to go on to a distinguished career in Australian and international education. Dr Boston is a former Director-General of Education in South Australia and New South Wales, a former Director-General, Education and Training and Managing Director, TAFE NSW and former CEO of Britain’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. He was also a Gonski school funding reforms panellist.

Show notes

ABC Radio National interview with Dr Boston on 6th June 2023 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/archived/edpod/dr-ken-boston/3057944

Boston, K. (September, 2016). What Gonski really meant, and how that’s been forgotten almost everywhere. Inside Story. What Gonski really meant, and how that’s been forgotten almost everywhere 

Boston, K. (February, 2017). Gonksi at five. Vision or hallucination. Inside Story. Gonski at five: vision or hallucination? 

Hare, J. (May 2022) Gonski has been politicised, bastardised and cherry-picked: Ken Boston

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/gonski-has-been-politicised-bastardised-and-cherry-picked-ken-boston-20220217-p59x8w

Jo Lampert is a Professor of Social Inclusion and Teacher Education and Director of the Commonwealth and State supported NEXUS alternative pathway into teaching. NEXUS is a community-engaged teacher education program designed to prepare culturally diverse, high-quality teachers for metropolitan, regional, and rural secondary schools in Victoria, many of which are hard-to-staff. Jo was founder and co-director of the National Exceptional Teacher for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS) program for ten years prior to moving to La Trobe University in 2017 – where over the past 5 years she developed NEXUS. In 2022 she took up a professorial role in teacher education for social transformation at Monash University.

Over the past twenty-five years, Professor Lampert’s internationally recognised research has included Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, teacher education for high poverty schools and community-engagement in teacher education. She has been CI on many Australian Research Council grants including a current Indigenous Discovery on co-design and educational policy. She has research collaborations in Canada, the US, the UK, Hong Kong, Spain, and Brazil and is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Teacher Education. With a background in literary studies Professor Lampert is known for her research in children’s books about September 11, 2001. She tweets @jolampert

Show notes

Kettle, M., Burnett B., & Lampert, J (2022).  Conceptualising Early Career Teachers’ Agency and Accounts of Social Action in Disadvantaged Schools, Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 47(8):1-17.

Lampert, J. (11 August 2022). Why that one tweet went viral (and what we must do now to fix “teacher shortages”) EduResearch Matters blog, https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=14048

Lampert, J., Mcpherson, A., & Burnett, B. (1 May 2023). Teacher shortages: Is teaching family-friendly now? EduResearch Matters blog, https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=16599

Shay, M., Sarra., & Lampert, J. (2023). Indigenous education policy, practice and research: unravelling the tangled web, Australian Educational Researcher, 50(1):73-88

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.