About

For the first decade of my career, I worked in re-engagement programs that were often underfunded and too small to provide formal professional development around digital teaching. That meant my colleagues and I had to lean on each other—troubleshooting problems, sharing ideas, and experimenting with new tools through completely ad hoc, informal exchanges. We quickly discovered that these organic conversations often yielded more relevant, practical insights than any standardised training could have provided.

Later, I joined academia as a lecturer in blended learning, supporting educators across multiple schools and faculties transitioning to a new digital learning management system. My team delivered formal PD focused on technical and general pedagogical skills, but when it came to tailoring those practices for individual contexts, content areas, and student cohorts, we found a stark gap. Ultimately, teachers themselves had to adapt the basics into something truly workable for their specific classrooms—again relying heavily on peer-driven problem-solving.

Over the last seven or eight years, I’ve continued to see the same pattern in public secondary education: teachers face a considerable workload in developing context-sensitive digital practices, and there’s rarely enough targeted PD to meet that need. Recognising how little this vital “on-the-ground” work was documented in academic literature, I launched into my PhD research. Now, as a final-year candidate, I’m investigating these informal, teacher-led processes in depth—seeking to shed light on the complex realities of digital innovation in everyday classroom life.