Rate My Professor Alex Gunn

Professor Alex Gunn serves as Professor and Postgraduate Coordinator at the University of Otago College of Education. She holds qualifications of DipTchg(ECE), BEd, MA, and EdD. Gunn began her career teaching in urban and rural not-for-profit and community-based early childhood settings with children aged from birth to school age. She subsequently took a position in early childhood teacher education in Christchurch before moving to the University of Otago College of Education in 2011, where she teaches and conducts research in early childhood education, inclusive education, teacher education, and assessment. Her research explores teachers' beliefs and practices, the ways educational activities reflect and reproduce norms, and how teachers engage with normative understandings that enable and constrain particular subjects, ideas, and practices. Key interests include gender in early childhood education, assessment, inclusion, teachers' practices, policy, inclusive education and social justice with a focus on queer concerns and heteronormativity, and educational assessment through sociocultural and narrative approaches.

Gunn teaches in areas such as teacher education, inclusive education emphasizing difference, diversity, and social justice in early childhood contexts, contemporary perspectives on children as learners, gender and education, curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood education, professional teaching practices, assessment education, and qualitative research design and implementation. Her recent publications include 'Economics trumps child rights: How the 2024 E&E Regulations Review frames teacher qualification issues and why we should be worried' in Early Childhood Folio (2025), the chapter 'Early childhood education and learning' in The professional practice of teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand, 7th edition (2025), and 'Refocusing care as central to teaching within ECE' in Early Childhood Folio (2024). She supervises postgraduate students researching topics including decolonising teaching, recruitment and retention of male teachers, democratic early childhood education, and inclusive early childhood education focusing on Pasifika, disability, and refugee or immigrant contexts. Gunn employs qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, genealogy, queer theory, practitioner research, Foucauldian discourse analysis, interviews, focus groups, cultural historical research, activity theory, and questionnaires.