Structuring the Thesis (PDF)

David Kember is Professor in Education: Curriculum Methods and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education at the University of Tasmania. Prior to that he worked in Hong Kong for 25 years, first at the Polytechnic University, then the Chinese University and finally as a Professor in Higher Education at the University of Hong Kong. He spent six years running an inter-institutional initiative operating across the eight universities in Hong Kong, known as the Action Learning Project, which supported 90 action research projects in which teachers introduced a wide variety of initiatives aiming to improve the quality of student learning. His research in the following areas has been particularly highly cited: student approaches to learning and the influence of teaching and assessment on them; the Chinese and Asian learner; motivation; reflective thinking; teachers' beliefs about and approaches to teaching; action learning and research for teaching quality improvement; distance and online learning.
Michael Corbett is an educational sociologist whose work draws on social theory, as well as historical and geographic traditions. He has worked at the School of Education at Acadia University in Canada since 2002 with a three-year sojourn at the University of Tasmania (2015-17), where he held a research professorship in rural and regional education, and where he continues to hold an adjunct professorship. Corbett's work focuses principally on rural education and he is a global leader in this field. He has studied youth educational decision-making, mobilities and education, the politics of educational assessment, literacies in rural contexts, improvisation and the arts in education, the position of rural identities and experience in education, conceptions of space and place, the viability of small rural schools, and "wicked" policy problems and controversies in education.