Our Research

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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.

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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.
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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.