David Clarke Memorial Lectures
The David Clarke Memorial Lecture commemorates Professor Clarke's life and significant contributions to learning and teaching.
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Exploring New Understandings of Teaching and Learning Science and Maths
On Wednesday 29th of October, Professor Russell Tytler delivered the 2025 David Clarke Memorial Lecture.
Tytler's lecture honoured the work of his longtime colleague, Professor David Clarke, advocating for the use of multiple, complementary perspectives to understand how students learn. He critiqued narrow views of education models that can reduce the multifaceted process of learning into isolated, measurable components and proposed a more complex, practice-based framework for deep learning. Tytler argued that classroom learning involves intricate interactions between students’ experience and ideas, and the cultural traditions that define the disciplines, and therefore cannot be fully understood by focusing only on a narrowly conceived ‘science of learning’. He further reiterated that deeper disciplinary knowledge confers flexibility in learning and cannot be achieved by merely manipulating abstractions.
Russell Tytler is Deakin Distinguished Professor and Chair of Science Education at Deakin University. He researches student reasoning and learning through multimodal disciplinary languages, socio scientific issues and reasoning, school-community partnerships, and STEM curriculum policy and practice.
Professor David Clarke
Professor David Clarke became a valued member of the Faculty of Education in 1994, dedicating his expertise and passion to the institution until his passing in 2020. He was internationally well known for his establishment and leadership of a substantial, extensive, innovative research programme in video-based classroom research involving more than 20 countries. He founded the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR) in 2003, a facility unique in its support of the generation, storage and collaborative analysis of complex classroom data. Under the leadership of Professor Clarke, the ICCR hosted a number of internally and externally funded research projects supporting an extensive international network of researchers.
For most of his educational research career, spanning almost 40 years, Professor Clarke focused on moving the field towards greater, critical self-reflection, and increasingly sophisticated research designs as well as research tools for understanding complex teaching and learning practices in different parts of the world. These lectures honour the life of Professor Clarke and his substantial contribution to the Faculty and the research and education communities around the world.