About

Professor Viv Ellis is currently Dean of the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and, since January 2022, a member of the inaugural board of the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership (‘the Academy’) a ground-breaking public body dedicated to the continuing professional development of teachers and school leaders in the state of Victoria. He is also an Honorary Research Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Research on Teachers and Teaching at the UCL Institute of Education and was Founding Co-Director of the Centre for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development (CITED).

Between 2009 and 2019, Viv was a Professor II at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) and, between 2017 and 2020, also a member of the Advisory Panel on Teacher Education Reform for the Norwegian government’s Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency (NOKUT). With the panel, Viv co-authored the report Transforming Norwegian Teacher Education. From 2018 to 2021, he was also Visiting Professor at Central China Normal University.

Prior to Monash, Viv held the Chair in Educational Leadership and Teacher Development at King’s College London and was Professor and Head of the Department of Education at Brunel University London where he successfully led the re-opening of the department and its highly successful submission to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework. Between 2002 and 2013, he was a Fellow of St Cross College and Co-Convenor of the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT) at Oxford University and also a tenured faculty member in the Department of Education. He has undertaken a number of advisory and research consultancies for government agencies and universities in the UK and internationally, including membership of the Education sub-panel for the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise in 2014.

Before working in universities, Viv taught English and Drama in community comprehensive schools and completed his PhD part-time at the University of London Institute of Education with the support of a Postgraduate Research Scholarship. Professionally, he has served as elected Vice Chair of the UK’s National Association for the Teaching of English, an elected member of the Senate of Brunel University London and also as a Director of the Heathrow Aviation University Technical College.

Viv’s research focuses on teacher education, with particular interests in innovation and global policy, informed by developments in cultural-historical activity theory. His work has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council; the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council; the British Academy; Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture/TAM Development Company; the London Schools Excellence Fund; the Higher Education Academy; the Society for Educational Studies; and the Terrence Higgins Trust, amongst other organisations. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and has written and co-edited books published by several international publishers including Bloomsbury, Policy Press, Routledge, Sage, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

‘This website is my personal-professional blog and the views expressed are entirely my own. Posts are usually categorised under the following headings: Publications (new books or articles, including those of friends and colleagues); Events (in which I am participating or have organised); Research (new projects or related information); Blog (*very* occasional rambles, diatribes, paeans, tributes, laments, wtfs, etc.). The Twitter account associated with this blog is used primarily as a WordPress tool and for research purposes.

Key interests represented in the posts on the site are: teacher education and development (institutional structures, history, programme design, policy, politics and professional learning; cultural-historical and activity theory (ways of thinking about human development derived from Soviet psychology – Vygotsky & Co; western cultural psychology – Scribner, Cole & friends; and anthropology –  cognitive and otherwise); Language and literacy (across educational settings – with particular interests in the subject English, writing, reading and talk); and comparative studies of education (and specifically education policies related to teacher development, with a particular interest in the United States and the Nordic countries).’