I am a Professor of the Learning Sciences. I lead a team who investigate how education can help people develop the complex capabilities needed to achieve healthy and thriving communities, and a future-oriented workforce.
 
We conduct our research through multiple research-practice partnerships that, collectively, we call our Education Futures Academy. We are educational designers and leaders as well as researchers. We get involved and we work with our partners to achieve research-informed transformation, while also informing policy and practice elsewhere.
 
Our primary means of engaging with partners is through the development of Pragmatic Adaptive Leadership. We help educational leaders—including classroom teachers as leaders of learning—develop the capabilities they need to drive transformative, research-informed practice in their schools. Our methods for doing this include the development of communities of practice and learning networks; and the provision of micro-credentialed and graduate degree level leadership training through to the PhD. We develop leaders’ ability to understand and design action that responds to the extended nature of learning systems. In short, we bring systems thinking and design thinking to bear on some of the big educational challenges in the specific ways those challenges present in our partners’ contexts.
 
We also work with our partners to develop innovative and robust ways of accounting for the creative, social, political, and economic value that is created by changes in the practices of their site. Our methods capture value that is individual, collaborative and collective. Our approach supports schools to become learning organisations. We cultivate leadership practice that enables novel ways of being and doing, grounded in contextual realities and conditions.
 
Strategically, our work contributes to Australia’s National Research Priorities of Transitioning to a Net Zero Future and Supporting Healthy and Thriving Communities; and to Adelaide University’s associated signature research themes of Personal and Societal Health and Sustainable Green Transition. The challenges our society is facing in these areas are not merely technical. They demand that people find new ways of working, and new ways of working together. These demands are fundamentally transforming what our society needs from its schools, colleges and universities. Our research supports this transformation.
 
Theoretically, our work draws on theories of practice and theories of complexity. We understand learning as something that is deeply enmeshed in and informed by our physical, social and historical context; and as an emergent feature of our interactions with that world. It occurs through extended systems of socially and materially mediated activity. Notably, we understand humans to also be complex and evolving systems ‘nested’ within a complex and evolving context. We are interested in understanding what education looks like when we appreciate that people are not perfectly rational actors but have emotions and purpose, and that they experience and act in the world as embodied, situated beings.