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

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.