An interview with…
SCREEN QUEEN TOM BENNETT INTERVIEWS AUSTRALIAN PHONICS CHAMPION DR JENNIFER BUCKINGHAM
Dr Jennifer Buckingham is the Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit, a literacy programme provider and research unit in Australia. A prominent figure on the Australian literacy stage, she previously spent two decades at the Centre for Independent Studies, most recently as Senior Research Fellow and founder of the FIVE from FIVE initiative. She has published numerous reports and articles on reading instruction and has provided advice to state and federal governments on literacy programmes and the introduction of a Year 1 Phonics Check. Jennifer is a board member of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. Jennifer’s PhD was in the area of literacy and social disadvantage, supervised by Professor Kevin Wheldall and Dr Robyn Wheldall. I caught up with Jennifer at the Literacy, Language and Learning conference in Perth, Australia, in April 2019, where we talked about her career, phonics, and the political landscape of Australian education.
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June 2019
TB: Thanks for speaking to researchED magazine. How did you get started? JB: I started working at CIS at the end of the 1990s as a research assistant. And I was enormously fortunate in that I got to work with and under the mentorship of a fantastic social scientist and a fantastic social economist – Barry Maley and Helen Hughes. They really showed me the ropes in policy analysis. And they whipped my writing into shape. They and CIS founder Greg Lindsay were hugely influential on me. I had a science degree and majored in psych so I already had stats training and the science background that was a good grounding. But it wasn’t until I started at CIS that I got exposed to ideas that were just really exciting but also a bit of a shock – I had not been exposed to any of that kind of thinking before. Behavioural economics was a new idea for me, for example. I started working on a publication that was a statistical companion of 100 years of social and economic trends in Australia. I was using statistics that weren’t online at that stage – this was before we had internet in the office. TB: However did we cope? JB: It was brilliant. I am so grateful that I started without the internet because I had to go sit in the dusty old Australian Bureau of Statistics library and one by one pull a book off the shelf and find the data I needed to create the trend, but while I was doing that it exposed me to a whole lot of other stuff that I hadn’t been looking for and there are things in libraries that are just not online. Things
