EmPr Catherine Beavis

Catherine Beavis is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia and past Deputy Director of The Centre for Research for Educational Impact (REDI), Deakin University.

Since 1989, at Griffith and Deakin Universities, she developed, taught and convened courses at undergraduate, postgraduate and Masters levels, and undertaken Doctoral Supervision, in areas encompassing English and Literacy Education, Curriculum Studies, Language and Literature, Research Methodology, Digital Culture, New Media and New Literacies; Learning and Digital Games. Her research addresses English and Literature education, English curriculum history, young people and digital culture, ICT and new media, critical literacy, in and out of school literacies and computer games. She has published eight edited books, over forty chapters and more than thirty papers in highly regarded refereed journals.

She has a successful track record in national competitive grant funding and has been chief investigator with colleagues on five ARC Projects: two Discovery and two Linkage projects (Lead CI on both Linkages) and is currently CI on the ARC Australian Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Her research is centrally concerned with young people’s engagement with digital culture and digital games, digital social media and the online world; the role of this engagement in young people’s everyday lives, and the ways in which immersion and interaction in the online world shapes orientations and dispositions towards learning, identity and community. This research sits alongside and is intertwined with a focus on literacy, English and Literature Education, the changing nature of text, digital literacies and the implications of digital technologies for pedagogy and curriculum, with a particular focus on new literacies in digitally mediated communication, multimodal forms of meaning making and critical perspectives.