LEaRN's finishing PhD researchers in 2020

In 2020, we are excited to see many of our graduate researchers finish their PhD project!

The year 2020 has been a memorable one by all means, and even more for our team at LEaRN as we observe our graduate researchers finish their PhD journeys.

Since March, Ethel Villafranca has passed her PhD. Her thesis, Curated Learning: A Pedagogical Approach to Maximising Learning Environments for Students’ Deep Learning, resonated with one examiner in particular who worked as a museum educator early in their career, stating: "This work needs to be shared widely, most of all to enrich the learning experiences of young people.” The thesis will be made publicly accessible via The University of Melbourne’s digital repository, Minerva. We congratulate Ethel, the first of the ILETC PhD candidates to complete her research, on her hard work and well-deserved result.

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We are pleased to congratulate Dion Tuckwell on successfully presenting his PhD completion seminar in April and wish him well as he finalises his thesis. Dion’s doctoral research asks: how might design learning give form to the social imagination of teacher practice? He positions co-designing as a capacity-building practice that may help teachers make sense of the changes in teacher practice brought about by disruptive 21st-century ‘innovation’. Dion’s research focuses on the shifting paradigm of designing; from the making of material artefacts to an expanded view of ‘making’ as a component of transformation—the making of change. This practice-led research has facilitated generative conversations with stakeholders, re-positioning the expertise of the designer and design research.

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Chris Bradbeer at completion seminar on 29 June 2020

Chris Bradbeer at completion seminar on 29 June 2020

More recently, our ILETC Project Research Fellow and Associate Principal of Stonefields School, Chris Bradbeer, on his PhD completion seminar – successfully delivered via Zoom at the end of June. Chris’ research investigates teacher collaboration in Innovative Learning Environments. Chris argues that teacher collaboration is the product of working together, teaching together, and being together - accentuated by and embodied in space, spatiality, and qualities of the environment. This thesis and Chris’ engagement with ILETC will help translate the important research that the project has been delivering in the last three years into real-life applications.

Mark Osbourne will also soon be conducting his PhD Completion Seminar, ‘Change leadership when transitioning to innovative learning environments’. Mark’s practice-led research employs an analytic autoethnographic methodology to answer the question 'What practices are most likely to lead to the successful implementation of ‘innovative learning environments’ in schools?' Findings include a set of essential leadership practices school principals should employ to prepare, implement and sustain such a transition, including building urgency and readiness, supporting first- and second-order change, engaging with resistance, and embedding change into organisational culture in order to prevent regression. We welcome you to attend this momentous event scheduled for Friday 24th July at 1pm via Zoom.