Victoria Whitington is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Education Futures at the University of South Australia, and an adjunct senior member of the UniSA Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion. She worked for many years teaching and researching in the early childhood field, and has been Lady Gowrie Child Centre Board Chair since 2000. She is currently South Australia's Presiding Member of the the Child Development Council.
Whitington’s research has three major elements. (1) children’s wellbeing, particularly children who live in low SES circumstances, including Aboriginal, diverse and refugee communities. She has an ongoing partnership with Communities for Children, the Salvation Army and the Schools Ministry Group that has involved a series of funded projects to develop ‘The Wellbeing Classroom’, an approach now employed in over 50 classrooms across the state, and recently comprised an evaluation of a whole school wellbeing approach, with accompanying publications, reports and refereed journal papers. (2) Whitington has conducted research concerned with creating rich learning environments for young children via educator inquiry to reimagine early childhood, and has collaborated with external teams to progress state government and cross-state funded projects in this area, as well as publishing with partners, and research students. (3) Whitington has worked on early childhood workforce issues arising from the 2007 Australian National Quality Agenda These funded projects arose as part of the implementation of the federal and state government policies regarding improving workforce qualifications, and the pathways to them, including in-service programs for those in the early childhood field to become four year degree teacher qualified.
In sum, Whitington’s research, which has been published in key national and international journals has made a substantial contribution to how educators, teachers and education settings support children’s wellbeing, to supporting how teachers and educators reimagine early years learning environments, and to workforce planning policy implementation.