Rate My Professor Jane Merewether

Dr. Jane Merewether is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood and Indigenous/Cultural Studies in the School of Education at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. With a PhD and over 18 years of experience as an early childhood teacher, she has engaged extensively with the Reggio Emilia educational project. Her career includes prior roles such as postdoctoral researcher at Edith Cowan University, lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Curtin University School of Education, and positions at Macquarie University, where she received the HDR Excellence Award. Merewether's research examines young children’s common world relations with materials, places, and nonhuman others, emphasizing liveable, sustainable, and ethical pedagogies amid climate and ecological change. Drawing on childhood studies, Indigenous perspectives, feminist new materialisms, environmental humanities, posthumanism, and environmental education, she employs participatory methodologies to foster response-abilities for collective thinking with the world.

Published in leading Australian and international journals and books, her scholarship has garnered over 600 citations on Google Scholar and 353 on ResearchGate. Key publications include 'Young Children’s Perspectives of Outdoor Learning Spaces: What Matters?' (Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 2015, cited 120 times), 'Listening with young children: enchanted animism of trees, rocks, clouds (and other things)' (Global Studies of Childhood, 2019, cited 59 times), 'Enchanted animism: A matter of care' (Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2023, cited 32 times), 'Common Worlds Justice in Post-Anthropocentric Education' (Equity & Excellence in Education, 2022), 'Unsettling “reduce-reuse-recycle”: the provocation of wastepaper and “discarding well”' (Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2023), and 'Animating Soil: Cultivating Young Children’s Soil Relations' (2025). A member of the Common Worlds Research Collective, she has delivered national and international presentations, including at the Reggio Emilia Australia 2024 Research Symposium, Early Childhood Conference 2024, and as Scholar in Residence at Edith Cowan University’s Centre for People, Place and Planet in 2025. Her contributions earned the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research (WAIER) Early Career Award in 2022 and an Early Career Researcher Award.