values

'Many who are first will be last and the last will be first’ (Matthew 19.20) is a key teaching of Jesus Christ that works as a personal guidepost. I believe that all human beings have an intrinsic beauty, dignity and worth that is separate from their social status. This personal conviction shapes my practice as a teacher and a researcher, driving my examination of social structures and discourses that produce hierarchical identities and relationships. The social organization of education, as we may have experienced, is a critical contributor in this process. However, education (in its myriad forms and across various sites) is a wonderfully unpredictable process, with the potential to simultaneously reproduce and/or transform existing social structures. The possible futures we imagine are central to the practice of education. This is what makes this field particularly exciting for me.

I am also keenly interested in making connections between research practice and welfare initiatives for the socially marginalized. In my teaching, I hope to help students reflect on their personal backgrounds and understand their experiences of privilege or deprivation, using that as a starting point for exploring how one may use the available resources to solve problems with one’s local community.

In my teaching and research, my aim is to be as transparent as possible, doing work with integrity and with harmony between my words and my life.