Dr. Johanna Funk
Dr. Johanna Funk has always had an interest in opening up education to everyone. When teaching in inner city London UK, Johanna began to research how best to support underserved learners within institutional systems. Moving to remote northern Australia has helped her to continue supporting learners’ skills in a range of contexts and fostered her 2020 PhD in Open Educational Practices with Indigenous Learners and Workforce development. Johanna’s GOGN Fellowship (with the Open University, UK) in 2021 also focused on how workforce competence in cultural studies is supported by Open Educational Practices. Johanna is applying what she learns to her work as a Lecturer, Cultural Knowledges, in capstone and teacher education, renovating curriculum and learning design in the Faculty of Arts and Society (formerly College of Indigenous Futures) at Charles Darwin University in Australia. Dr. Funk’s recent work is asking several broad questions: How is civic and social reciprocity/community practice evolving with artificial influences? How can we keep our humanist intelligence and integrity intact alongside the artificial? How can compassion and pedagogies of care keep shaping authentic learning cultures? How can our practices keep evolving human, educational and intercultural integrity? Given recent years’ emphasis on compassionate and human-centred learning, and now with a frenzied reactivity towards the latest techno-deterministic impacts, she aims to understand how we can build on practices that maintain: strength of learners’ authorship and responsibility civic impact on/in their/our communities cultures of authentic learning processes and applied skills rather than content and production / corporate compliance. Johanna will be visiting Windsor from September 17th to October 12th, 2023. She can be contacted at: Johanna.Funk@cdu.edu.au Learn more about Dr. Funk’s research and work on her research site: https://researchers.cdu.edu.au/en/persons/johanna-laverne-funk/publications/