Dr Wendi Beamish
Dr Wendi Beamish teaches across the special education and early childhood programs. She has a strong practitioner background in early childhood education and intervention. Wendi teaches and researches in the areas of early childhood intervention (focus on autism and program quality), transition to school, behavioural support, and social-emotional competence. She is the School’s researcher attached to the Queensland Autism Specific Early Education and Care Centre at the Nathan campus.
Dr Fiona Bryer
Dr Fiona Bryer is a senior lecturer. She is an educational and developmental psychologist in the Australian Psychological Society and registered with the Psychology Board of Australia. She has worked as a teacher educator for over 35 years. She has co-authored two Wiley texts on educational psychology for Australasian audiences in 2009 and 2012. She edited The Australian Educational and Developmental Psychologist in the 1990s and continues to review for education journals in Australia and overseas. Her teaching has shifted progressively towards a focus on effective teaching strategies for class-wide behavioural support. Her research interests have also been focused on research-informed practice in teaching.
Dr Mike Davies
Dr Mike Davies is the cluster leader in Special Education and Program Convenor of the Bachelor of Education – Special Education. He is a psychologist who has lectured in tertiary institutions for over 30 years, across a broad range of courses in the areas of development, behaviour, learning, and interpersonal skills. Currently he teaches Interpersonal and Counselling Skills, and Consultation and Collaboration for Special Educators in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. His teaching philosophy is constructivism, and his teaching style is to be facilitative, empowering, and solution-focused, helping students bring their understandings to a critical consciousness, identifying their competencies and attributes, and discussing and supporting them to construct new schemas of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. He has supervised 10 Higher Degree students to completion and currently supervises 6 PhD, 2 EdD and 2 Masters candidates. He has a strong research profile across interconnecting research themes of Transitions, Stress and Coping, Social Skills, and Inclusive Practices. His accumulated research and writing efforts have produced a lifetime summary of research that includes 51 publications, and many include research into teaching.
Dr Yoon-Suk Hwang
Dr Yoon-Suk Hwang is a lecturer in special education in the School of Education and Professional Studies. Her teaching in undergraduate and postgraduate courses includes communication and autism spectrum disorders, understanding and enhancing communication of learners with diverse needs, philosophical issues in disability and society, and engaging learners with diversity. As a teacher and researcher Yoon-Suk has focused on listening to the voices of learners with various disabilities, particularly those with autism spectrum disorders, and their carers and teachers. She is interested in grounding her teaching and research practice on both her teaching experience, in an inclusive education setting, and educational theory and philosophy.
Dr Amanda Webster
Dr Amanda Webster completed her PhD in Special Education at Macquarie University in 2009 with a thesis focusing on social relationships between children with developmental disabilities and peers in inclusive settings. This research was conducted in schools in Alice Springs and included children in preschool and primary schools including a number of Indigenous students. Prior to coming to Griffith University at the beginning of 2011, she has been a school leader and special educator in both inclusive and special school settings. While working in Alice Springs she obtained and ran several Commonwealth Projects to develop pedagogies for students with diverse needs and their families. Two of these contributed to the development of the Northern Territory Teaching and Learning Framework. She also worked with two teams to examine needs of Indigenous students with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families and developed a framework for a functional curriculum for students in special schools. Her areas of interest include curriculum for students with ASD and developmental disabilities, social relationships, play-based learning, and Indigenous perspectives of disabilities.
Dr Gary Woolley
Dr Gary Woolley is a lecturer in special education and the program convenor for the Graduate Certificate and Masters degree. He has had a broad primary and high school teaching experience in public and private school systems for over 30 years. He has published widely and taken part in several national research projects in literacy and inclusive education. His book, Reading Comprehension: Assisting Children with Learning Difficulties was published in 2011. In the same year he was awarded an Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award for his contribution to the research activities of the University. Gary’s particular professional interests include reading comprehension difficulties, memory, cognition, learning engagement, and English as a second language.