Professor Lyn Yates

Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Foundation Professor of Curriculum

Lyn Yates has backgrounds in history, sociology and philosophy, including a PhD on Curriculum Theory and ‘non-sexist education’. She has worked extensively on issues related to education policy and practice, curriculum inquiry, research methodology in education, gender, class and identity. Her work has included qualitative and longitudinal empirical studies in schooling and higher education as well as many essays and conceptual contributions to the field. She is particularly interested in formal education systems and practices (ie schooling and higher education) as fields of both possibility and inequality. Her past publications include The Education of Girls (ACER 1993); Reconstructing the Lifelong Learner (with Mark Tennant et al, Routledge 2003); What does good education research look like? (Open University Press 2004); Making Modern Lives (with Julie McLeod, Suny Press 2006); Curriculum in Today’s World (with Madeleine Grumet, Routledge 2011); Australia’s Curriculum Dilemmas (MUP, 2011); Knowledge at the Crossroads? (with Peter Woelert, Vic Millar and Kate O’Connor, Springer 2017).

Research projects

Lyn is currently in the final stages of an ARC project entitled Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers with Larissa McLean Davies, Brenton Doeke, Philip Mead, Wayne Sawyer. The book from this project, with Routledge, will be published in 2022. The project continues Lyn’s work on different forms of knowledge in education and builds on her previous project on history and physics and the current over-regulation and narrowing of education in both schools and universities.