Anne Hickling-Hudson (1943 - )

Short Biography & Significant Contribution

Anne Hickling-Hudson taught sociological and cultural studies in Education at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT) from 1987 to 2012.  After retiring, she has continued since 2013 as an adjunct Professor of Education in QUT’s School of Cultural and Professional Learning.  Born and raised in Jamaica, Professor Hickling-Hudson gained BA and MA degrees in History Honours and in Education from the University of West Indies (Mona campus), a research Master’s in modern Chinese history from the University of Hong Kong and a graduate Diploma in Media from the Sydney-based Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her doctoral research, which comparatively analysed adult education in the Grenada Revolution and afterwards, won two awards for the thesis of the year in 1996 – the Gail Kelly Award from the US-based Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and the annual award from the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).

During her academic career, she made significant contributions to research and the supervision of doctoral students in fields such as on intercultural and postcolonial approaches in teaching, education policies and practices for decolonization, ethical development and social justice, and rethinking the education of teachers in postcolonial societies, particularly in the Caribbean and Australia. Her career as a teacher, teacher educator, researcher, education planner and community activist spans the Caribbean, the UK, the USA, Hong Kong and Australia.  Among her significant projects was working with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in the 1980s to prepare Caribbean teachers for educational change.

In Australia, she has been instrumental in supporting teaching and research on ethical international education and the promotion of Indigenous studies in teacher education. At QUT, she designed and implemented subjects within the field of comparative and international education such as The Global Teacher, Cultural Diversity and Education, Asian Cultures and Education (for B.Ed. students) and Globalization and Change in Education (for M.Ed. students). She also co-designed and team-taught sociology of education subjects such as Education in Context and Teaching in New Times. In 1999 she led a team of QUT colleagues to win a competitive national grant to prepare and pilot curriculum materials for a national education syllabus on ‘Teaching the Studies of Asia’. The team delivered to the Asia Education Foundation a template for a 40 hour Studies of Asia programme accredited at the M.Ed level. This programme was adopted by more than eleven Australian universities.

Professor Hickling-Hudson is a pioneer in using postcolonial theory as a technique of comparative education. She applies postcolonial analysis to educational policy and national development, teacher education and the intercultural curriculum, and internationalism/international mobility in higher education. She has published widely and has won prestigious fellowships and grants to conduct her research. Among research grants that she has won are a Rockefeller Fellowship for researching Cuban internationalism in education, two large Australian Research Council (ARC) grants for working with educators in Papua New Guinea to develop educational programs to counter HIV and AIDS, and an Australian grant from the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) for working interstate with three other universities to develop a ‘Public Pedagogy’ approach in university teaching. Her research led to the first comprehensive study of Cuba’s unique internationalist role in education, published in the 2012 book The Capacity to Share: A Study of Cuba’s International Cooperation in Education (editors and authors A. Hickling-Hudson, J. Corona Gonzalez and R. Preston, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 20 chapters).

As a prominent researcher within and outside Australia, Professor Hickling-Hudson is active in promoting and facilitating education research and exchange in the profession. She was the President of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) (2001-2004), of the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE, 2009 - 2010), of the Australia and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society (ANZCIES, 1998-1999) and of the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies (ACCS, 2009-2011). She was also the chair of the Postcolonial Education SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a Board member of the US-based Comparative and International Education Society (CIES).

In her role as an editor of scholarly research, she is or has been on the editorial boards of leading international education journals including Compare, Comparative Education Review, The International Journal of Educational Development, Policy Futures in Education, Critical Literacies: Theories and Practices, and two regional journals, the Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and the Caribbean Journal of Education. She co-edits the book series Postcolonial Studies in Education (Palgrave Macmillan) which has so far published fifteen scholarly books, and the online journal Postcolonial Directions in Education: see link: http://www.um.edu.mt/pde/index.php/pde1/issue/archive

Professor Hickling-Hudson is widely regarded as an expert in her field and has been invited to give numerous keynote conference addresses, conference papers and university guest lecturers in countries including Australia, UK, Canada, USA, South Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Cuba, China, Nepal, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.