Teacher expertise

Associate Professor Jessica Gerard works at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne where she researches the changing formations, and lived experience, of social inequalities in relation to education, activism, work, and unemployment.

Jessica holds two ARC Discovery projects on an investigation of the shifting practices of public schooling, school governance and parental citizenship in disadvantaged contexts and in the second project is on community activism and education policy reforms across Australia in the 1970s and 1980s (with colleagues Proctor and Goodwin). She is the co-author of several books including Learning Whiteness, Class in Australia Migrations, Borders, and Education: International Sociological Inquiries. She is a member of the Social Transformations and Education Research hub. She tweets at @Jess_Gerrard

Dr. Jessica Holloway is Senior Research Fellow and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow within the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University, Brisbane Campus. Her first academic position was as an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Kansas State University (USA). In 2016, she relocated to Melbourne to pursue a research-intensive postdoctoral fellowship within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University, where she conducted work on the relationship between accountability and educational leadership. 

Her current project (funded 2019-2022), ‘The Role of Teacher Expertise, Authority and Professionalism in Education’ investigates the role of education in modern democratic societies, with a particular focus on teachers and teacher expertise. She tweets @JessLHolloway

Gerard, J. & Holloway, J. (2023). Expertise. Bloomsbury.

In their new co-authored book Expertise published by Bloomsbury (2023), Gerard & Holloway explore how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerard & Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of 'good teaching'. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

Gerrard, J. & Watson, J. (2023). The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come: Older Disadvantaged Job Seekers. SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH ONLINE, 28(1), pp. 21-36. doi:10.1177/13607804211009534

Hogan, A., Gerrard, J. & Di Gregorio, E. (2023). Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school. The Australian Educational Researcher. 50, 763–780. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00524-5

Holloway, J. (2021). Metrics, Standards and Alignment in Teacher Policy Critiquing Fundamentalism and Imagining Pluralism. Springer Nature. 

Holloway, J. & Louise Larsen Hedegaard, M. (2023). Democracy and teachers: the im/possibilities for pluralisation in evidence-based practice, Journal of Education Policy, 38(3), 432-451, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2021.2014571

Marom, L. (2019). Under the cloak of professionalism: covert racism in teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(3), 319-337, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2018.1468748

Smith, W.C., Holloway, J. (2020). School testing culture and teacher satisfaction. Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability, 32, 461–479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-020-09342-8

Sripraakash, A., Rudolph, S. & Gerard, J. (2022). Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State. Pluto Press.