As the world continues to change through technologies, natural and human-induced events or disasters and mobilities, the Global Childhoods Research Hub responds to the need for new structures and theorising of childhood, children’s capabilities and alternative research and policy narratives to create new possibilities.
A message from the Director
Professor Nicola Yelland shares the purpose and work happening in the Global Childhoods Hub
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Professor Nicola Yelland
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Professor Kylie Smith
Associate Professor Jeanne Marie Iorio
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Dr Ame Christiansen
Latest News
The focus of Global Childhoods Research Hub is on the lives and experiences of children from birth to 24 years of age across the world.
Global Childhoods at the Faculty of Education will position children’s lives, worldviews and futures at its core. It will connect childhood research and teaching in a clear and cohesive manner, bringing projects from leading academics, early career-researchers, research fellows and doctoral students together around interdisciplinary themes and research problems; including those related to equity, social justice and disadvantage, climate change and sustainability, contemporary learning ecologies, multimodal lives, education systems and children as activists.
This unique research hub contributes to and strengthen the internationalisation of research activity in the Faculty of Education and across the University. Researchers in the hub will collaborate with new and well-established global partners that have similar aims and scope and act as a conduit to stimulate new cutting-edge research projects. The hub is located at the Faculty of Education which has a global reputation for excellence in educational research and policy. The hub connects people and research problems to facilitate, mentor and activate dialogue and debate, and creates interdisciplinary partners to set innovative and forward-thinking research projects and publications.
Childhoods are not equal within nations and globally. The hub disrupts silo discourses that break up childhoods into age categories to understand the interconnections and disconnections of multiple childhood experiences in their contexts. As the world continues to change through technologies, natural and man-made events or disasters and mobilities the hub responds to the need for new structures and theorising of childhood, children’s capabilities and alternative research and policy narratives to create new possibilities.
Meet the people leading and collaborating in the Global Childhoods Hub.
A/Prof Jeanne Marie Iorio
Dr Li Ling
Dr Sarah Timperley
Miss Yvette Walker
Miss Junyi Luo
Elders as Teachers of Environmental Knowledge: Centering Climate Justice within Land and Country Education - Funded through International Network of Educational Institutions (35,000 USD) 2025-2026
Lead: A/Prof Catherine Hamm (UoM) - Co-PI & A/Prof Jennifer Brant (University of Toronto)- Co-PI
This study extends insights gleaned from a previous collaboration between the University of Toronto and The University of Melbourne entitled Fostering Ethical Relations (2024-2025) in which the urgency of Indigenous resurgence as core framework to address climate justice within Land and Country education became clear. Inspired by First Nations scholar, Dr Sue Atkinson’s work (2017) on First Nations self-determination in early childhood education, this project responds to her concept of ‘Elders as Teachers of Environmental Knowledge’. Atkinson (2017) shares that First Nations knowledges are central to caring for Country and Land, and as such must be foregrounded in learning about local places and the environment. Building from this idea, we assert that it is imperative to foreground First Nations perspectives in climate justice education. As such this project will involve place-based and virtual visits with Elders and Indigenous Knowledge holders through a process of storywork with the intention of co-developing curriculum guides for centering climate justice in Land and Country Education.
Global childhoods in the Asian Century: Connecting policy, educational experiences and everyday lifeworlds of children in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore
Lead: Nicola Yelland, Australian Research Council Project (DP180100325)
Conceptualising global childhoods enables and encourages a worldview of childhoods that is not universal and regards children as capable and agentic. Researching global childhoods recognises that children come to learning ecologies with a variety of funds of knowledge that can be built on by teachers in dynamic ways to encourage deep learning, engagement with ideas and multimodal forms of making meaning.
With funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) the project Global childhoods: Lifeworlds and educational success in Australia and Asia aims were to investigate the ways in which children’s orientation to educational success is shaped, and how this relates to Australian and Asian policy cultures. It adopted a mixed methods approach that incorporated a large-scale survey of students of 627 Year 4 students in three global cities (Melbourne, Singapore and Hong Kong) and included an ethnographic study of student lifeworlds in each location with data collected in both schools, homes and community. The research sought to understand the lifeworlds in the context of a holistic view of their education which occurs in a variety of locations; school, homes and in their communities. It sought to better understand how children’s different and multiple sociocultural networks are connected by their lives inside and outside of schools.
Learning with Place
Co-leads: Dr Catherine Hamm and Associate Professor Jeanne Marie Iorio
Learning with Place (© The University of Melbourne) began as Out and About: Generating New Pedagogies for the Anthropocene, a qualitative research project responding to the lack of relationship between humans and the planet, evident in the human-induced calamitous state of the environment This research supports children and teachers to build deep relationships with their local places and the more-than-human (flora, fauna, landforms, waterways, animals, insects) to work towards positive climate action. Data from the project activates pedagogical intentions that focus on understanding children as citizens of the now (Rinaldi, 2006), creating teaching practices that respond to the current state of the environment.
Generated from Out and About includes the Learning with Place framework. Learning with Place is an innovative framework which activates a process for change. Specifically, the framework foregrounds the local environment as an active place to inform practices, policies, and decision-making with the long-term goal of generating changes in climate action attitudes and behaviours across multiple disciplines/fields
In 2023, the Learning with Place research project received Proof of Concept (POC) Funding (UoM). Funding through POC supports a pathway and outcome of commercialisation of Learning with Place to market and distribution so it can benefit society. Specifically, the POC funding supports creating and validating a children’s television series Walking with Lilly and related products – game, book, and app – and a subscription service for Playing with Place, an outdoor education program. Walking with Lilly pilot is a collaboration with the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and includes live action and animation (going to pitch at networks in 2025). The pilot has been the source of multiple student experiences and mentoring of faculty in the VCA and Faculty of Education. Following post-production, the Business School marketing students will create a social media campaign.
Key Publications
- Iorio, J.M., Hamm, C., Cooper, J., Parnell, W., Smith, K.., Crowcroft, P., Yelland, N, Molloy-Murphy, A.,(2023) Learning with Place as a catalyst for action. Pedagogy, Culture & Society.
- Iorio, J.M. & Hamm, C. (2021). Learning with Place. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Global Childhoods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Hamm, C. & Iorio, J.M. (2019) Place in Early Childhood Teacher Education. In: Peters M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Teachers Education. Springer, Singapore.
- Iorio, J.M, Coustley, A., & Grayland. (2018). Practicing Pedagogical Documentation: Teachers making more-than-human relationships and sense of place visible. In N Yelland and D Bentley (Eds.) Not lost in translation: Connecting reconceptualist early childhood ideas with practice. New York: Routledge.
The secret underground
Lead: Dr Angela Molloy-Murphy
The secret underground: A glow world experience was an interactive installation inviting children and their companions to reconsider the often unseen world of the more-than-human. This installation was created based on the premise that, although human activity visibly slows down in North America in the winter, the underground world is vibrant and bustling with action. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, this mysterious subterranean landscape includes burrowing animals such as squirrels, moles, and rodents, but also insects and archaea, bacteria, microbes, algae, fungi and more...legacies, memories, spirits, and processes such as crystallisation, decomposition, and decay.
For the 2022 Portland Winter Light festival, creative partners Angela Molloy Murphy, Katie Shook of Mudland, Michelle Loberg, Reese Bowes, and Friends of the Secret Underground, a collective of children ages 4-16, designed a multimodal exhibit using video, light, and sound to simulate an underground world. This immersive installation was part of an academic research project with the University of Melbourne engaging posthumanism and the new materialisms in a participatory, arts-based inquiry regarding children’s relations with place. In this moment of urgent planetary and humanitarian crises, children have much to offer. It is in this spirit that the collective Friends of the Secret Underground will gather again for collaborative, place based, research and writing.
Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell
23 April 2026
Children’s participation and co-creation in cultural organisations
Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Cultural Inquiry. Sharing inspiring examples of his work establishing children's boards in museums all over the world, Jose will unpack the concept of the children's board as explored in his recent research "Children’s Boards in Museums". The book is essential reading for academics and students who are engaged in childhood studies and interested in museums, the arts, and cultures that push beyond an image of the child as a passive consumer.
Jayne Osgood
24 February 2026
Transdisciplinary Ecopedagogies
Teaching eco-critically means to understand and take issue with human exceptionalism and the complex aspects of environmental issues from local to global perspectives and knowledges, as well as through the scholarship of multipledisciplines. In this seminar Professor Osgood explores why it is essential to detemmine actions for lasting changes toward environmental wellbeing and planetary survival.
Mara Krechevsky and Ben Mardell
5 November 2025
"The Leaf People": An exercise in collective imagination
In this presentation, Mara Krechevsky (Project Zero, Harvard University) and Ben Mardell (Newtowne School Cambridge, MIT) share examples of speculative fiction and world building with young children, leading an exercise in collective imagination.
Bill Cope
1 July 2025
Generative AI in Education: Implications and Applications
In this seminar Professor Bill Cope explores Generative AI in Education: Implications and Applications. The session includes a demonstration of CyberScholar - an AI supported writing space and experimental learning environment that establishes a dialogue between artificial and human intelligence or “cyber-social learning” in which fundamentally different intelligences work in symbiotic relation.
Global Childhoods Graduate Research Symposium
June 25, 2025
Global Childhoods Graduate Research Symposium
This half-day symposium showcased graduate researchers from the Global Childhoods Research Hub. Each presentation included provocations for supportive and collaborative discussion, drawing together the threads of possibility emerging from the hub while creating transdisciplinary research relationships. Papers in progress were presented but not recorded. They included University of Melbourne Graduate Researchers at various stages of candidature: Viki Wang, Maya Starr, Dr Melina Mallos, Kylie Payman, Sonia Pranatha, Malini Chidambaram and Pete Crowcroft.
Will Parnell
22 May 2025
Finding our way into the Hundred languages of children
In this engaging conversation Professor Parnell introduces his work with the Inventing Remida Portland Project and Helen Gordon Center. Sharing recent experiences with teachers and children working in a digital atelier Will situates a culture of reuse, rethinking children’s digital worlds, and engaging with notions of documentation for equity and justice.
Nikki Rotas
2 April 2025
Non-Canonical Philosophy with Children
In this seminar Dr Nikki Rotas shares her research in Toronto, Canada which employs Non-Canonical Philosophy as conceptual and methodological research-creation to enable inclusive exploration of philosophy with children.
Global Childhoods Research Symposium Opening Remarks– Nicola Yelland & Ame Christiansen
20th February 2025
Creating Research Possibilities: Collaborative Futures
Bringing together international researchers from the Global Childhoods Research Hub, the Symposium featured Big Ideas Talks- short sessions exploring big ideas and even larger possibilities. Nicola Yelland and Ame Christiansen introduced the symposium, highlighting the future of early childhood research across diverse global contexts.
Andreas Jacobsson
Intercultural Dimensions for Global Childhoods
Andreas Jacobsson, PhD film studies, senior lecturer in child and youth studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Jacobsson is co-convener of the Global Childhoods research group at the University of Gothenburg. Jacobsson’s research interests include global childhoods, early childhood education, (audiovisual) media, childhood, and interculturality.
Anette Hellman
Intersections on childism, competence, and innocence. Norms on children’s active participation and bodily integrity in Swedish Preschools
Anette Hellman, Senior lecturer and Associate professor in the Faculty of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.Her research interests include issues related to critical childhood studies and social justice in education. Hellman was the national project leader in Sweden for the project “Learning Spaces for Inclusion and Social Justice: Success Stories from Immigrant Students and School Communities in Four Nordic Countries” founded by Nordforsk. Hellman is the national president of OMEP in Sweden, especially engaged in issues such as young children’s education and wellbeing. She is also the director of the Global Childhoods research group at the University of Sweden and has written extensively in the research field of gender, care, and ECEC.
Nerita Waight
Victorian Statewide Treaty and Indigenous Childhoods
Nerita Waight is a Yorta Yorta and Narrandjeri woman with Taungurung connections. Nerita is the CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service. Nerita was first employed at VALS in 2014 as a civil lawyer. Prior to becoming CEO, Nerita had experience across several teams in the organisation including family and children’s law, as well as policy and advocacy.
Noreen Naseem Rodriquez
Creating Transformative Possibility in Schools and Communities through Asian American Studies
Noreen Naseem Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education and Educational Justice in the Department of Teacher Education and core faculty in the Asian Pacific American Studies and Muslim Studies Programs at Michigan State University. She is co-author of Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators with Katy Swalwell and Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms with Sohyun An and Esther Kim. Before becoming a teacher educator, Noreen was a bilingual elementary teacher for nine years.
John Tobin
Children’s Rights in International Law
Professor John Tobin is the Francine V McNiff Chair in International Human Rights Law in the Melbourne Law School, Co-Director of Studies for the Human Rights Program in the Master of Laws & Co-Director of Research in Human Rights within the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. His research interests cover the broad field of international human rights law but he has a particular interest in children's rights and the right to health.
Kate Coleman & Sarah Healy
Workshop on Creative Educational Practices
Dr. Kathryn Coleman is associate professor in Visual Arts & Design Education at the Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne. Her research into practice includes creative practices, practices of identity, knowledge as practice and digital practices. Artist-researcher-teachers have different ways of understanding knowing and they explore ideas as a living inquiry, chasing ideas and running with concepts until they make something that opens a new space.
Dr Sarah Healy is co-lead of SWISP Lab (Speculative Wonderings in Space and Place) with Associate Professor Kate Coleman. Sarah is a speculative a/r/tographer and works across creative and art education ecologies. She is an inaugural Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne and elected World Councillor for The International Society for Education Through Art (InSEA) in the Global South. As a non-governmental organization and official partner of UNESCO, Sarah’s leadership in the region seeks to promote and advance education through art, design, and crafts in Southeast Asia and Pacifica. Sarah is best known for her contributions to the fields of critical affect studies, data creation, digital methods, and post-humanities.
Gabriella Pataky
Risks and Responsibility in the Light of Education trough Art related Early Childhood Development
Gabriella Pataky Ph.D. is the head of the Department of Visual Education and the director of the Art Teacher Master’s Program at Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Primary and Preschool Education (ELTE TÓK), working at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest as well. As a founder of the 3612+ Visual Skills Lab, the aim of her enthusiasm is to continuously renew art education, assist in its adaptation to current professional and social requirements, support the decision-making process in educational matters as well as accumulate and spread knowledge concerning art education and its environment.
Ame Christiansen
Emerging insights from the Early Childhood Teacher and Educator Neurodiversity Project
Dr Ame Christiansen is an Early Career Researcher and lecturer in the Early Childhood Studies Academic Group and Global Childhoods Research Hub at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis 'Reconceptualising disability and inclusion: Enacting relational ways of knowing, being and doing with Bush Kinder' was awarded the John Smyth Award for research excellence in the Doctor of Education in 2024. Ame's teaching and post-qualitative research rethinks dominant conceptions of ‘inclusion’ and ‘disability’ in early childhood studies, by engaging with post-foundational, new materialist and critical post-humanist onto-epistemologies.
Eyueil Abate
Training and the Competence of Teachers Providing Education in Emergency in Contemporary Ethiopia
Dr. Eyueil Abate is an esteemed Assistant Professor at Kotebe University of Education, where he serves as the Director at the Institute University of Education. With a dedicated career spanning over 18 years in education, Dr. Abate has made significant contributions at various educational levels, from primary education to university instruction. Having earned his Ph.D. from Addis Ababa University, Dr. Abate specialized in Curriculum Design and Development, focusing particularly on the challenges and needs of refugee education. His research delves deeply into the complexities of war and conflict-related trauma affecting children, allowing him to bring a vital understanding of these pressing issues into his educational practices and curricula.
Mariana Souto-Manning
18th February 2025
Whose Childhood Counts? Reclaiming and Redefining Childhoods Beyond Limiting Narratives
Professor Mariana Souto-Manning guides listeners in reimagining childhoods that embrace every child's full humanity, charting a transformative path toward pluralistic, liberated childhoods rooted in justice, equity, and freedom.
Alison Clark
2nd Oct 2024
Reasons to be slow: Challenging the intensification and acceleration of childhood
Taking inspiration from the slow movement, the two year study ‘Slow knowledge and the unhurried child’ explored alternatives to the increasingly measured and tested cultures of acceleration in Early Childhood Education and Care.
Lorna Arnott
5th June 2024
Methodologies to support children's participation in research
Based on her edited book Research through Play: Participatory Methods in Early Childhood, this presentation offers insight into research with very young children using play inspired methods and methodologies. As progress is made in children’s rights and the understanding that children are capable and competent, children should be included in research data; particularly data pertaining to them. Data collection processes require nuanced and reflexive approaches which maintain high ethical standards and research rigor. Come hear Dr Arnott share examples of research approaches with children, articulating tensions and dilemmas in conducting this work.
Sarah Pink
8th April 2023
Design Ethnographic Filmmaking
In this talk, Sarah discusses the practice of design ethnographic filmmaking, through the examples of her recent documentary film projects.
Sarah positions design ethnographic filmmaking as part of a new futures focused agenda for the social sciences, and her talk also advocates for a shift in the way in which we engage in the futures space, in relation to other academic disciplines and non-academic stakeholders. Such a movement, Sarah will argue, is necessary for the social sciences to be able to participate in shaping the agendas and pathways towards possible futures that are so much needed.
Kate Coleman and Sarah Healy
19th October 2023
Young People in Anthropogenic Times: Expanding Definitions of Childhoods, Pluricultural Climate Stories and Knowledge Mobilisation
This seminar introduces SWISP Lab, a research lab directed by Kate Coleman and Sarah Healy that is located within the Global Childhoods Research Hub, and its global climate project called HAK.io. The project seeks to collaboratively practice with youth – as defined by the UN – to produce a pluricultural approach to climate education. We do this by hacking the Anthropocene beginning with climate stories, often not just of individuals but entire communities and families, which provide insight into the complex relations between humans, technology and the land.
Marek Tesar
8 March 2023
Professor Marek Tesar presented a theorisation of global childhoods, addressing philosophies, theories, pedagogies and methodologies that shape this field. He focused on global and local discourses and charted current challenges and opportunities of global childhoods scholarship and practices.
Mariana Souto-Manning
1 December 2022
Professor Mariana Souto-Manning explores the commitment to pursue justice and foster belonging in early childhood teaching and teacher education as a moral and ethical imperative for our profession.
Eugenia Arvanitis
27 July 2022
Associate Professor Eugenia Arvanitis presented current research data on refugees’ narratives in Greece and engaged in dialogue with her Australian colleagues so to establish a common understanding on relevant issues.
Ian Hamm and Nerita Waight
1 June 2022
Nerita Waight and Ian Hamm started our seminar series off to present ways in which they work to elevate social justice and equitable representations of Aboriginal people on boards and other high-level governance, through strategic action, advocacy and mentoring.
International Advisory Board
Name | Institution | Country |
| Dr Lorna Arnott | Strathclyde University | Glasgow Scotland |
| Associate Professor Anne Bourke | Memorial University of Newfoundland | Canada |
| Professor Deevia Bhana | University of Kwazulu-Natal | South Africa |
| Dr Cassie Brownell | Toronto University Ontario Institute for Studies in Education | Canada |
| Professor William Cope | University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign | USA |
| Dr. Su Corcoran | Manchester Metropolitan University | UK |
| Dr Nikki Fairchild | University of Portsmouth | UK |
| Prof Rosie Flewitt | Manchester Metropolitan University | UK |
| Professor Andrew Gibbons | The University of Auckland | NZ |
| Dr Annette Helman | The University of Gothenburg | Sweden |
| Professor Mary Kalantzis | University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign | USA |
| Professor Kristiina Kumpulainen | Simon Frazer University | Canada |
| Professor Li Hui | Education University of Hong Kong | PRC |
| Professor Jackie Marsh | The University of Sheffield | UK |
| Professor Emeritus, Peter Moss | University College, London | UK |
| Professor Will Parnell | Portland State University | USA |
| Professor John Potter | University College, London | UK |
| Professor Michelle S. Perez | University of North Texas | USA |
| Professor Mathias Urban | Dublin City University | Ireland |
| Professor Mariana Souto-Manning | Erikson Institute of Early Childhood | USA |
| Professor Zhu Yan | University College London | UK |
| Dr Jon Wargo | Boston College | USA |