
Our community of teacher educators conducts research, teaches and advocates in areas related to language, literacy and culture across the entire education system. We have specific expertise in school-age education as well as adult, community and higher education.
We have a rich experience gained from working with diverse language and cultural groups, including linguistic minorities, immigrant and refugee communities, transnational students, EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) /EFL (English as foreign language)/ESL (English as second language) students, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples. We are acutely aware of the politics of colonisation and assimilation and issues of educational disadvantage, and our work seeks to resist the disenfranchisement that these politics cause.
We explore how deficit framings – set against dominant assumptions about educational background, linguistic heritage, affiliation and expertise, and student and family capacity – create implicit and explicit barriers for engagement and success in multilingual educational communities in Australia and internationally. We identify ways to empower students, teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers and policymakers with critical awareness and resources in response to the challenges associated with language, literacy and culture in education.
Led by Dr Hoa Nguyen, Associate Professor Andy Gao, Dr Dennis Alonzo, Emeritus Professor Sue Starfield, Dr Lisa Gilanyi, Dr Hang Nguyen, Trang Hoang.
Online, monthly (complemented by face-to-face seminars pre- and post-COVID19)
Online monthly meetings including collaborators in Australia and overseas (complemented by face-to-face seminars pre- and post-COVID19)