Dr Barbara Garrick
Dr Barbara Garrick is a lecturer who teaches in both undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programs in the School of Education and Professional Studies. Barbara has specific interests and skills in middle school education. Barbara was a member of a team that began the first dedicated middle schooling degree program in Australia. Barbara has continued her interest in this exciting field through a number of publications that address transitions in the middle years, diversity in the middle years and middle years’ pedagogy. Barbara has also supervised higher degree students in these areas. Barbara uses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to research middle school education, the sociology of education, vocational education training in schools, diversity education and internationalisation policies particularly as these relate to the middle years of education.
Dr Kath Glasswell
Dr Kath Glasswell is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Gold Coast campus. She is an international expert in instructional change and collaborations with schools for innovation in literacy instruction. She is a stellar research-practitioner who bridges the complex theory-practice divide in modelling whole school literacy improvement in disadvantaged communities. She has undertaken instructional innovation and school change initiatives in diverse urban communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Her current research initiative, Smart Education Partnerships, is a large ARC funded project that is significantly accelerating literacy achievement in Logan City schools in Queensland. The partnership's schools recently won the State of Queensland's Showcase Award for excellence in the Middle Years of Schooling. You can read her work in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Phi Delta Kappan, Language Arts, Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education and The Reading Teacher.
Dr Peter Grainger
Dr Peter Grainger has two major disciplines, Applied Linguistics and Assessment in Education. He has published in peer reviewed international journals on assessment, curriculum design and Japanese language learning. He has been involved in various significant language curriculum and assessment design projects during that time, including a national project to develop curriculum guide lines for Japanese and a government project to retrain teachers to become Japanese teachers. He recently completed a PhD related to language learning strategies for JFL learners in Australia. Peter worked for the Queensland Studies Authority as a Principal Project Officer, coordinating major projects in Languages and Middle School Assessment.
Dr Jayne Keogh
Dr Jayne Keogh is a lecturer who teaches in both undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programs in the School of Education and Professional Studies. She teaches courses focussing on the middle years of schooling, and in professional experience and practice. She also supervises higher degree research students. Jayne is a qualitative researcher who uses a number of research approaches, including ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, discourse analysis and narrative theory. She takes an interest in the interactive co-construction of institutional relationships and structural arrangements, and has particular knowledge in the areas of parent-teacher (home-school) relationships, of workplace arrangements and positioning practices affecting casual (sessional) academic staff, of pre-service teacher relationships with their mentor teachers, and of the beginning teacher induction process into the profession.
Dr Katherine Main
Katherine is a Lecturer and Program Leader in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University. She teaches middle years foundation and specialisation courses in the Bachelor of Education (Primary) as well as middle years postgraduate courses. Her research interests centre on middle years reform and organisational culture with a focus on teacher efficacy, teacher teams and team practices. Katherine is passionate about the middle years of schooling and researches, publishes and provides professional development in that area. She is also a sub-editor (refereed section) of the Australian Journal of Middle Schooling.
Professor Donna Pendergast
Professor Donna Pendergast is Head and Dean, School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University.She has conducted a number of national research projects related to school education including: Beyond the Middle: Literacy and numeracy in middle schooling; Lifelong Learning and Middle Schooling; and the Longitudinal Study of Teaching and Learning in Queensland State Schools, Middle Years. Donna has served on many advisory panels, including providing advice to the Director General and to the Minister for Education on issues related to middle schooling, for more than a decade. She has several books published of relevance to contemporary teacher work, including The Millennial Adolescent; and Groovy Chicks and Blokey Blokes. Donna’s book, Teaching Middle Years received an award as an outstanding academic publication in 2006 and in 2010 had a second edition launch. It is used widely in universities and schools in Australia as a mandatory aspect of pre and inservice teacher education. Donna teaches in the areas of adolescent culture and middle schooling philosophy and practices.
Dr Wayne Usher
Dr Usher’s research interests include school and community health and physical education. His past and current research examines 21st century pedagogical approaches that engage the teacher/interventionists and the student/audience in the co-construction of meaning, value, and knowledge associated with school/community health education. He gives specific attention to modern communication technologies and how they are creating a paradigm shift surrounding traditional barriers of power and information dissemination. Other areas of research include medical education, general practitioners, the internet, WWW and social media applications. Current research includes online health information and the impacts of health websites on the health practitioner and e-health consumer relationship.