Karen Sinclair

Biography

Lecturer in Education/Primary/Early Childhood Prior to joining the School of Education in 1995, Karen worked in urban, NT primary schools with shorter stints in Victoria and South Australia. Her longstanding research interest involves the meaning, dynamics, and outcomes of student success as understood by individual and groups of stakeholders, within the larger ecology of Australian education. Published work to date includes stories of graduate teacher expertise, and a grounded theory analysis of expert teachers’ accounts of their own career progression within the NT professional context. Karen's Masters research project combined ex post facto data collection and two-way analysis of variance to identify patterns of English literacy pedagogies which bore statistically significant relation to 168 primary school students’ reported achievement of English reading, writing, listening and speaking

Research Interest

Research Interests: Karen is currently completing her PhD which is entitled, The Lessons Learned Project: students’ constructions of learning, achievement and school life. This project aims to analyse the relation between inclusive education practices and student success, as understood by primary age children and their significant others from within one urban school community. The study utilises a site based, multi case design, featuring eleven participant primary age children who each volunteered to take part in the research over the course of one school term on the basis of their existing identities at school, as successful school students. Each volunteer participant child undertook a self-selected project, making visible as case study data the substantive topics, proximal pedagogic processes, interpersonal relations and learning resources that each child attributed as essential to their individual status as a successful student within the school community.