Show Me
Phone: 02 97014262
Email: Debra.phillips@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU North Sydney Campus
Dr Debra J Phillips is an Education lecturer at Australian Catholic University. Her doctorate awarded in 2020, an autoethnographic analysis of suicidality, provided background for her ongoing work into teachers’ mental health. Dr Phillips’ current research and writing explores how teachers manage and negotiate workload stressors to continue teaching. Dr Phillips comes from a background of school-based teaching practice and a background of post-graduate study in education, gender studies, narrative and theology which has provides an informed position for her lectures in educational psychology, teachers’ mental health and disability education. Dr Phillips is a practicing artist.
My identity as an academic. I identify as both an academic and an artist. As an academic, my work involves both teaching and research. As a teacher I deliver face-to-face, online through Zoom and now online through ACU’s digital platform. I want to get it right so I can offer the best world-class level of instruction, feedback and student-teacher relationship that is possible.
Research is the second prong of my work as an academic. My research interests are in teachers’ mental health and burnout, gender, depression and suicidality, suicidality and spirituality, and imagined futures. The research method that sparks me is autoethnography within a narrative inquiry frame.
The philosophy that underpins my work as an academic, teaching, research and writing – is derived from Grosz’s ontology of becoming; articulated as a belief that onto-epistemology is kinetic and always on the move. Using narrative inquiry, I highlight and then to counter-challenge how sociocultural narratives and contexts influence and frame broad understandings of mental ill health. My school experiences provided a specific reference point from which I could analyse the issues surrounding teachers’ mental health and the comprehensive factors of teacher burnout. My interest in the ethical parameters that guide research have emerged from examining narratives of lived experience that tell of sensitive and taboo issues now frames my approach to collaborative practice in teaching, research and writing.
Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
2022 (Aug) North Sydney Council Writing workshop at Stanton Library
2021 (May) solo art exhibition Mental health trauma
2021 ( June)North Sydney Council workshops on the value of writing for mental health Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)