Featured research, alumni, research partners and projects

The QTU has a proud history of partnering with education researchers who are current members of the QTU or QTU alumni now contributing to the field of educational research in tertiary education. We are also proud to work in solidarity with national and international researchers whose work aligns with the values of the QTU.

Featured research

The QTU congratulated Greg Thompson and Anna Hogan  on their new book Teaching and Time Poverty: Understanding workload and work intensification in schools. The QTU has been proud to partner with the Time-Use, Time Poverty and Teachers’ Work research project that has been investigating workload and work intensification in Queensland schools. Greg and Anna are friends of the QTU and have regularly updated members on the project.

In Teaching and Time Poverty, Greg Thompson and Anna Hogan bring together international perspectives on teacher time poverty, drawing on theoretical and empirical work to underscore the growing complexity of teachers’ work and how this impacts job satisfaction, stress and feeling that there is never enough time to accomplish all that needs to be done. Many policy solutions misdiagnose the problems of teachers’ work, simply suggesting it is an issue of workload. The chapters investigate issues of work intensification, finding that teachers are not only working longer, but also working harder as they manage more complex classrooms and policy mandates.

For more on the Time Use, Time Poverty and Teachers’ Work research project, including more of the team’s research outputs, click here.

Members, alumni and research partners

Associate Professor Anna Hogan

Associate Professor Anna Hogan, Queensland University of Technology, is an ARC DECRA research fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership. She is a Senior Lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy within the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice. Anna's research interests broadly focus on education policy and practice. Specifically, she investigates the commercialisation and privatisation of schooling and has published widely on these topics. Anna has worked closely with school systems and teachers’ unions in relation to these issues, including Education International, the Australian Education Union, and the Queensland Teachers Union. Anna is Associated Editor of Critical Studies in Education.

Dr Jessica Holloway

Dr Holloway, Deakin University, has more than 10 years of teaching experience, including middle grades English/language arts and university-level teacher and principal preparation courses. Dr Holloway earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation, with a concentration in research methods, from the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (USA) in 2014. Dr Holloway is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow within the Strategic Research Centre - Research for Educational Impact (REDI). Her current DECRA project, “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.

Emeritus Professor Bob Lingard

Emeritus Professor Bob Lingard, University of Queensland, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK. Emeritus Professor Lingard has an international research reputation and has published widely in the sociology of education and education policy. He has made regular contributions to QTU conferences and has authored or edited 25 books and published more than 150 journal articles and book chapters.

Emeritus Professor Allan Luke

Emeritus Professor Allan Luke, QUT, is an educator, researcher, and theorist studying literacy, multiliteracies, applied linguistics, and educational sociology and policy. Emeritus Professor Luke has written or edited 17 books and more than 250 articles and book chapters, and has regularly contributed to QTU conferences and journal articles, including a comprehensive empirical study of Indigenous school reform, funded by the Australian Commonwealth government.

Dr John McCollow

Dr John McCollow was an Assistant Secretary at the QTU with research and industrial responsibilities. Dr McCollow also worked as a federal research officer with the Australian Education Union and is a TJ Ryan Foundation researcher. His research interests include curriculum, educational policy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, the funding and organisation of education, vocational education and training, and public sector industrial relations. Dr McCollow is a life member of the QTU.

Dr Amanda McKay

Dr McKay, Monash University, previously worked as a school principal and principal coach and mentor for Queensland’s Department of Education and was a member of the QTU. Amanda’s key research areas include leadership, social justice, and policy enactment. Her research focuses on the contemporary challenges of principals’ work, and what that means for how we can better attract, support, and keep school leaders within the profession.

Associate Professor Reece Mills

Reece Mills is an Associate Professor of Education at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He commenced his career in Education as a secondary school science teacher before being appointed at QUT. Reece has previously been a Bachelor of Education (Primary) Course Coordinator and a School Research Ethics Advisor. His research aims to create socially and ecologically sustainable futures through education. Reece's research foci centre around his values (sustainability), discipline area (science education), and practice (Initial Teacher Education). He presently holds two Australian Research Council (ARC) grants investigating teacher shortages.

Michael Reibel

Mr Michael Reibel currently works as an Instrumental Music Teacher while studying for his PhD at Monash University and is a QTU member. Michael’s research areas include children’s education, teacher perspectives, teacher knowledge and understandings, teacher education, playing-related musculoskeletal injuries, discomfort, and problems. His project ‘Injury awareness and prevention in beginner instrumental music programs: Teacher perspectives, knowledge and understandings’ aims to enhance the quality of future teacher professional development and education, and to advocate for improved teaching and learning conditions. This research will contribute new knowledge to the under researched areas of children’s’ playing-related issues and Teachers’ knowledge and understandings of injury awareness and prevention.

Associate Professor Madonna Stinson

Associate Professor Madonna Stinson, Griffith University, is an experienced teacher educator, researcher and teacher, having worked across all sectors of schooling from early childhood through to senior secondary, including over ten years as a head of department in Queensland state high schools. In addition, she worked for the QCAA (then QSCC) as a principal writer of the P-10 Arts Curriculum and was a lead researcher for the Age Appropriate Pedagogies project for EQ, and the yconnectproject.com. A/P Stinson has published, extensively, on creative approaches to curriculum design, pedagogies and language learning. Madonna was a member of QTU throughout her teaching career and is a current member of NTEU.

Associate Professor Lisa van Leen

Associate Professor Lisa van Leent is an academic in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership within the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice at QUT. Their research interests concern social justice in education with a focus on teachers' pedagogical practices, genders and sexualities, teacher attraction and retention, the purpose of schooling. Lisa has extensive experience as a primary classroom teacher. They completed their doctoral study, titled “Primary School Teachers’ Conceptions of Pedagogical Responses to Concepts of Diverse Sexualities” at Queensland University of Technology. Lisa's future research interests involve developing socially just pedagogical practices with teachers regarding diverse genders and sexualities.

Professor Simone White

Simone White is Professor and Dean of the School of Education at RMIT. She is a leading expert in teacher education and professional learning, focusing on the best ways to prepare teachers for diverse contexts, in particular rural, regional and remote. Her research explores the fields of teacher education policy, teacher learning, professional experience and building and maintaining university-school/community partnerships. Simone is a Past President of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) and currently Vice President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE). Simone has been involved in a number of teacher education research projects and recently awarded 3 ARC projects (with colleagues from across Australia) focusing on supporting the teaching workforce and teacher shortage. Through her collective work, Simone aims to connect research, policy and practice in ways that bring together and break down traditional borders between academics, policy makers, communities and practitioners.

Professor Annette Woods

Professor Annette Woods, QUT, teaches and researches in the areas of literacies, pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, social justice and school reform. Before entering academia she taught in before school settings, primary schools and adult literacy contexts, including primary schools in Logan and Ipswich. Her recent research projects include an investigation into learning to write in the early years of school, and an investigation of the possibilities of using young people's home language as a foundation for school learning. She is a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child led by QUT

Projects

Here’s a list of some of the Australian Research Council (ARC) linkage projects that the QTU has supported.

Work intensification

In 2019, the QTU Executive endorsed an ARC partnership with the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation and researchers from Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland, University of New South Wales, and University of Sydney. The project will investigate measurements of teacher workload and work intensification, and strategies to deal with workload, including the use of digital tools.

A legally-informed intervention for schools to prevent and intervene in cases of cyberbullying

In 2017, the QTU partnered with Queensland University of Technology researchers, the Independent Education Union, and other stakeholders to investigate the perspectives of cyberbullying among education department officials, parent representatives, secondary school staff and students, and to understand existing school response strategies to incidences of cyberbullying. 

 Rethinking the literacy capabilities of pre-service primary school teachers to meet professional expectations for the 21st Century

In the years 2013-2015, the QTU partnered with researchers from University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, University of Sydney, Wollongong University, and Deakin University to investigate how pre-service primary teachers demonstrate their literacy capabilities in dealing with evolving forms of texts and literacy practices.

 URLearning/digital learning and print literacy: a design experiment for the reform of low-socioeconomic, culturally diverse schools/Waterford West literacy project 

In the years 2009-2012, the QTU partnered with Queensland University of Technology researchers, in an ARC project to design and implement models for the use of digital media and technologies in a low socio-economic, suburban primary school with a diverse student population (including Indigenous students). 

What teachers do with the official curriculum research project

In 2011, the QTU partnered with Queensland University of Technology researchers, the Queensland Studies Authority (as it was known then), and other stakeholders to investigate teachers’ reported use of the official curriculum documents as they related to teacher experience and training, teaching contexts, and systemic support provisions.