Dr Amanda Edwards
Position
Lecturer - Teacher Education
Contact details
E: amanda.edwards@canberra.edu.au
T: +61 2 62012446
L: Building 6 Room D34
Biography
Amanda has worked in education for more than twenty years, with experience in rural and metropolitan communities in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. She has taught students from Year 1 to post-graduate level and has also worked in community education. In the past, Amanda has completed evaluations of several large-scale educational initiatives, including Building Learning Power in Bristol Education Action Zone, UK, a nationwide teacher training program in Sri Lanka and the Hotspots Fire Training Project in NSW, Australia. Amanda’s current and recent research explores the potential for more-than-human, relational understandings and perspectives to contribute to social, political and environmental justice.
Amanda’s research draws on critical theory, post-humanism and understandings of learning as wayfaring, using primarily qualitative methodologies. Areas of interest and expertise include:
- The complexities of young people’s dignity and resistance:
- Love, dignity and resistance in school and home education
- The environment and ableism: tensions in young people’s activism
- Spatial justice and rural knowledges:
- Recognition and validation of rural experiential knowledge and values
- The experiences of rural students in metropolitan education systems
- STEM, Science, Maths, Geography and Environmental Education and:
- Neoliberalism
- Aim-oriented rationalism
- Culturally relevant practice
- (Initial) Teacher education in relation to 1, 2 and 3 above.