Who are the thinkers behind CLUes?

Creative Learning Units have benefitted from the input of many people, and the list keeps growing.

The main protagonist has been John Quay, but John acknowledges wholeheartedly that CLUes have been a collaborative and collegial undertaking involving many at the University of Melbourne and beyond.

Teaching

As described in the post speaking to the beginnings of CLUes in Creative Physical Education the early days of CLUes involved Jacqui Peters and Jane Dawson. Jacqui and Jane worked with John in teaching the Health and PE subjects that were part of the Master of Teaching Primary. More recently this has involved Abbey Boyer, Lee Anton-Hem and Gavin Healy. These university subjects incorporated CLUes.

In 2010 John Quay was fortunate enough to be invited to visit Finland, to share the work on Creative Physical Education, by Sami Kalaja who was at the time Principal of Kilpinen School in Jyvaskyla. Here he also met Jon Salminen, a teacher at Keski-Palokka primary school in Jyvaskyla, and Juha Kokkonen at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. This relationship has continued, with the details of this development contained in a journal article:

Quay, J., Kokkonen, J., & Kokkonen, M. (2016). Finnish interpretations of creative physical education. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 7(2), 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/18377122.2016.1196115

This work in Creative Physical Education, and further thinking about broader unit planning, was augmented by investigations John was conducting as part of his doctoral study, as detailed in the post about the origins of CLUes in being-doing-knowing.

The teaching of this theoretical work in university subjects, and the evolution of the unit planning framework that was to become Creative Learning Units, has been supported by Maurizio Toscano, Harry Galatis, Jason Pietzner, Adam Brodie-McKenzie, David Browning and other university staff who collaborated with John in teaching cognate subjects in the Master of Education course.

Publishing

Loren Miller worked with John Quay and David Browning (with further support from Adam Brodie-McKenzie) to identify school structural reforms that would work hand in hand with Creative Learning Units which are aimed at teaching practice, providing a comprehensive approach to education innovation. This resulted in a publication through the Centre for Strategic Education (for a copy of this publication please contact John Quay).

Two journal articles have been published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, which is a journal of high international standing in the educational field. These articles were driven along by John Quay, with input from a number of colleagues – as can be seen in the author lists.

Quay, J., Miller, L., Browning, D., & Brodie-McKenzie, A. (2022). Dewey’s Education through Occupations as Being-Doing-Knowing: An Introduction to Teacher Planning with Creative Learning Units. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54(5), 632-646. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2022.2070716

Quay, J., Williams, B., Pietzner, J., Boyer, A., Browning, D., & Brodie-McKenzie, A. (2023). Vygotsky’s perezhivanies with Dewey’s occupations: Improving integration of teaching and assessing via creative learning units. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2023.2242914

Further to this, a magazine article, written by John Quay, attempts to convey challenging aspects of the educational situation for which CLUes offer a possible response.

Developing the CLUes web-application

The development of the web-application really began when word document templates were initially designed and evolved through teaching university subjects in the Master of Teaching and Master of Education courses.

John Quay, Loren Miller, David Browning and Adam Brodie-McKenzie all supported the initial thinking behind the web-application development. In addition, a colleague of Loren Miller who has experience in web-site construction, Andrew MacDonald, was important in helping pinpoint how to set up specific elements of the web-application to support teachers attempting to process through the CLUes processes.

This thinking was brought to life by students in the Master of Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, aided by staff involved with software development.

This page will continue to be developed.