Rate My Professor Kate Ferguson-Patrick

Dr Kate Ferguson-Patrick is a Senior Lecturer in Primary Education in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. With fifteen years of primary teaching experience in the UK and Australia, she joined the university initially as a school/university liaison teacher and advanced to her current role specializing in primary curriculum and pedagogy. Her academic qualifications include a PhD from the University of Newcastle on cooperative learning and democratic classrooms, for which she received the IASCE Elizabeth Cohen Award for Outstanding Thesis in 2019; a Bachelor of Education (Honours) from Nottingham Trent University, UK; and a Master of Arts in Children's Literature and Literacy from the University of Technology Sydney. Ferguson-Patrick’s research focuses on cooperative learning, democratic classrooms, intercultural understanding, global education, teacher professional learning, particularly for early career teachers, inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogies, and integrating Sustainable Development Goals into primary curricula.

Throughout her career, she has developed professional development programs for early career teachers on implementing cooperative strategies and democratic processes. She led initiatives in the Australian Government Quality Teaching Project as an academic mentor and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Umeå in Sweden and the University of Hull in the UK. Notable awards include the 2012 Faculty of Education and Arts Postgraduate Research Publication Prize, the 2014 Dean of Education Award for Excellence in Teaching (team), multiple College Excellence Awards in 2022, 2024, and 2025, and a 2024 Advance HE Global Impact Grant for innovative curriculum development linking quality education to sustainable development. Her key publications include the book 'Cooperative Learning for Intercultural Classrooms: Case Studies for Inclusive Pedagogy' (2018, with W. Jolliffe), and articles such as 'Integrating curriculum: A case study of teaching global education' (2018, 91 citations), 'Professional development of early career teachers: A pedagogical focus on cooperative learning' (2011, 76 citations), and recent works on collaborative problem-solving in mathematics (2025) and teacher expectations across countries (2025). As chief investigator and community outreach coordinator for the GERT team, and member of Pacific RISE, her work promotes 21st-century learning, collaboration, and global citizenship, influencing teacher education internationally through publications, presentations in Australia, Hong Kong, UK, Spain, and Sweden, and curriculum innovations impacting over 600 pre-service teachers.