Bio
Anna Elizabeth Du Plessis (PhD) is an experienced practitioner whose various research projects have examined educational leadership, professional development for teachers and school leaders’, preservice teachers’ professional experience, beginning teacher workforce and teachers’ lived experiences in relation to out-of-field teaching practices.
Her research interests include teacher education, teachers’ wellbeing, school leadership, healthy school communities as well as micro-education policies. She has been involved in AITSL, ARC and DET research projects under supervision of Prof Bob Lingard, Prof Merilyn Goos, Ass Prof Terry Lyons in addition to her own research projects. These projects investigated the implementation of the Australian professional standards for teachers, early career teachers teaching science and mathematics outside their field of qualifications and standard-based assessment in specific senior secondary school subject areas. Her research projects led to several publications in top tier journals, books and presentations at several international conferences.
Anna’s role as Senior Lecture and researcher at the Griffith University, Faculty of Education and Law build on her teaching experience. Prior to her career in academia and tertiary education Anna was a teacher for more than 20 years (primary, secondary and IB programs) of which 8 years were in school leadership positions. Her teaching experience stretched over three countries and across primary and secondary schools. This experience led onto the completion of a DEd and a PhD, these higher research degrees examined the continuing professional development of teachers teaching in out-of-field positions and the lived experiences of teachers and their leaders in relation to the out-of-field teaching practices in primary and high schools in transnational context.
Her research strength is demonstrated through a phenomenological inquiry that developed an in-depth understanding and awareness of the meaning out-of-field teaching practices has for teaching and learning spaces. Her transnational research projects implemented innovative qualitative research methodologies to accommodate the vast amount of data these research projects generated. Anna has a strong background in the social constructivist theory which she uses to add meaning to and insight into her research while she develops new theories and methodologies to search for approaches to inform policies that will support improvement of educational leadership, beginning teacher retention, the multi-layered meaning of the out-of-field phenomenon and as such the quality of education and effective implementation of different educational frameworks.
