In this profile we speak to Professor Deborah Youdell, recently appointed Dean of the School of Education, about how her mum inspired her career in education, her current research into biosocial learning and inequities and how she’s settling into life in Sydney.
1. What is your background and what brought you to Macquarie?
I am a Sociologist of Education from the UK. I worked as a Lecturer at Macquarie University for a few years in the early 2000s before going back to a position at Cambridge. I have been at the University of Birmingham in the UK since 2012 and was Dean of the School of Education before making the move to the same role at Macquarie.
2. How did you originally become interested in your area of research, and what keeps you interested in it?
My mum was a teacher and taught in schools in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Nottingham (a big industrial and mining city in the Midlands of England). She was a ‘Super Head’ before there was such a thing, and would be sent into struggling schools to help them. She believed in every one of the children she taught and in their capacity to learn, and she always made a positive difference. I would often go into schools with my mum and I was very aware, even as a small child, of the difference that privilege makes. I grew up wanting to make the world fair and, as my insight grew, wanting to understand why that was so hard to do. The fact we haven’t achieved social justice in and through education keeps me interested – maybe I’ll retire once we’ve fixed inequality!
3. Tell us a bit about your current research and what makes it so important?
I’ve been collaborating with colleagues in biochemistry and neuroscience to develop a biosocial understanding of inequities in learning. As well as understanding the social, economic, policy and relational (etc) barriers to learning across scales, I have wanted to know how these impact the body, and how embodied processes across scales work to enable or block learning. Educators have a practical understanding that good food, good sleep and good relationships promote our capacity to learn, but we know much less about the biological processes that underpin that, and even less about the biological mechanisms through which we could intervene. I think this could be a game changer for policy and resource allocation not just in education, but in wider children’s and health services and the day-to-day practices in schools and classrooms. This isn’t to hand education over to the brain scientists, as some worry, but rather to work in a transdisciplinary way that is transformative across disciplines and in the real world.
4. What do you need to do your best work?
Conceptual work – an open-minded and curious group of people; physically – a laptop and a beautiful view. Practically – right now I need funding to support an interdisciplinary team to do empirical work in classrooms to begin to build this new knowledge base.
5. What is the most impressive/useful/advanced piece of equipment you use in your work?
I don’t have this but a (quite expensive) wish list item is a mobile mass spectrometer that can be taken into schools and classrooms to collect atmospheric and exhaled breath samples so that we can set volatile organic compound (VOC) analyses against individual student and classroom data and begin to understand how the dynamics of the classroom and learning (or not learning) are enfolded with the metabolic processes of the body.
6. What do people always ask you when they find out what you do for a living?
Either if they should make their child eat fish (if I’ve been talking about Omega 3 and the brain) or where they should send their child to school – although having been in the country for five weeks I'm currently the one asking that question!
7. What is something you’ve read recently that has had an impact on you?
The ‘TEEP Report’ – the report to Government of the Teacher Education Expert Panel. Recommendations were released earlier this month. It has had a big impact because it gives me a very clear job to do as a leader of education in Australia.
8. What is your definition of success?
Spending more time than not with a deep sense of general contentment.
9. A bit about where you live and what you like about it?
We have rented a house two minutes’ walk from Balmoral Beach in Mosman. The house is up several flights of stairs and has a deck and balconies that look into the tree canopy. The house is a little tired, but that adds to its charm.
10. A personal quality you value in others?
Honesty.
11. A moment you felt proud?
When I first found myself in the A Level sociology textbook.
12. What is on your agenda for 2023?
Settle in to life in Sydney, get to know lots of people at Macquarie, lay the ground for the School of Education to be the best teacher education provider and write a grant that will buy me that mass-spectrometer.