Associate Professor Amanda McGraw-Pleban
Associate Professor, Education
Dr Amanda McGraw-Pleban is a narrative researcher fascinated by the complicated stories teachers (and pre-service teachers) tell about their work and those that young people share about their experiences at school. Dr McGraw-Pleban uses a range of methods to tap into life stories including extended conversation, and visual and shared analysis of artefacts.
Amanda’s research interests include a focus on teaching reading and writing in English, dispositions in teaching, school/university partnerships, and teacher professional learning. She has expertise in developing communities of practice involving practising teachers who use practitioner inquiry to learn deeply about teaching and learning processes.
A recent six-year project, working in partnership with the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, focused on the teaching of reading in English. Another ongoing partnership with the Art Gallery of Ballarat focuses on artful writing. For Amanda, research and professional learning are human, creative processes that serve to invigorate.
Intellectual freedom and teaching performance assessment in Australia
Collaboratively designing a national, mandated teaching performance assessment in a multi-university consortium: Leadership, dispositions and tensions
Finding passion and purpose in the teaching of reading in secondary school English through critical readings of practice: A huge kind of spider web
We argue in this paper that the experience of reading is an intricate and dynamic weaving of...
Thinking Dispositions for Teaching: Enabling and Supporting Resilience in Context
Learning and teaching activities and assessment approaches to build reading capabilities
Reading is cognitive, emotional and embodied experience. It is responsive, dynamic and fuelled by...
Reading in English Classrooms: A Developing Culture of Disenchantment
Based on a three-year project conducted in Australian secondary schools, this paper captures a...
Thinking dispositions as a resource for resilience in the gritty reality of learning to teach
While there is agreement that dispositions and resilience enable teachers to negotiate the...
Why That Question? Reimagining Classroom Reading Activities from the Basis of What We Understand about Engaged Reading
The authors offer a series of strategies around re-engagement of students in reading, framed by...
Freedom and constraint in teacher education: Reflections on experiences over time
Teacher education programs in Australia increasingly comply with new and narrowing...
Selection and rejection in teacher education: qualities of character crucial in selecting and developing teacher education students
The focus of recent Australian political and media reports on the selection of candidates for...
Mentoring for pre-service teachers and the use of inquiry-oriented feedback
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of feedback offered by school mentors...
Reading as an imaginative act
The teaching of reading provokes heated discussion, particularly when the reputations of...
Reading as an Imaginative Act: strategies for reading
Reading is cognitive, emotional and embodied experience. It is responsive, dynamic and fuelled...
Site-based teacher education as a context for attending to the complexity and person-centred nature of teaching and learning: A narrative inquiry involving teacher educators from australia and the United States
While research suggests that those who graduate from site-based teacher education programs are...
Activating teaching dispositions in carefully constructed contexts: Examining the impact of classroom intensives
The current policy stance in Australia which seeks to produce ‘classroom ready’ teachers...
Dispersed narratives and powerful teacher education
Careful attention to experience is often the starting point for narrative inquiries into teaching...
Layered stories as opportunities to show and engage in learning
We meet regularly in this space to discuss Susan's learning as she progresses through a...
Self and Community: The Impact of ISATT on the Professional Learning, Teaching and Research of Members in the Asia-Pacific Region
Shoving our way into young people's lives
This paper uses Sizer and Sizer's concept of 'shoving' to examine the school experiences of a...
New teachers, new teaching
On the brink
Young people as powerful learners
Struggling to make a difference in an imperfect world
Becoming enquirers into professional practice