Postgraduate Research Scholarship in Transforming Inequality in Schools

This scholarship has been established to enable an outstanding Indigenous PhD scholar to conduct research as part of the ARC-funded Linkage Project 'Sparking Imagination Education: Transforming inequality in schools' under the supervision of Associate Professor Cathie Burgess and Professor Valerie Harwood. The project is a collaboration between industry partners AIME and Social Ventures Australia and four Australian universities (University of Sydney, University of Queensland, University of Technology Sydney, and University of Wollongong), with a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics. The project responds to the challenge of how schools can provide innovations in imagination education to address the educational inequality experienced by some young Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, those from low socio-economic status, young former refugees, and those living in regional and remote communities. The scholarship provides both a stipend allowance and supplementary funding to support full-time PhD research over 3.5 years. Research areas include investigating how imagination informed by Indigenous imagination practices is used as an educational strategy, developing an Imagination Education Pedagogical Framework for equity in Australian schools, examining teacher engagement with this framework, building knowledge of Indigenous cultural uses of imagination in education, and identifying enablers and constraints for scaling up Imagination Education in Australian schooling contexts.