Rate My Professor Sally Peters

Sally Peters is Professor and Head of Te Kura Toi Tangata School of Education at the University of Waikato. She completed her academic qualifications at the University of Waikato, including a Diploma of Education starting in 1987, a Bachelor of Education, a Master of Education, and a PhD in 2004 with the thesis titled "Crossing the border": An interpretive study of children making the transition to school, supervised by Jennifer Young-Loveridge and Monica Anne Payne. Her career includes a period at Victoria University of Wellington’s Institute of Early Childhood Studies before returning to the University of Waikato in 2000, where she progressed to full professor status in 2023.

Professor Peters' research centers on educational and life transitions, with a focus on transitions from early childhood education to school, pedagogies of educational transitions, children’s learning journeys, working theories, and dispositional learning in early years. Notable publications include co-editing The Bloomsbury Handbook of Early Childhood Transitions Research (2024) with Aline-Wendy Dunlop and Sharon Lynn Kagan; Literature review: Transition from early childhood education to school (2010) commissioned by the Ministry of Education; Crossing the border (2012) with Carol Hartley and others; and peer-reviewed articles such as “Fostering children’s working theories: pedagogic issues and dilemmas in New Zealand” (Early Years, 2011, with Keryn Davis), “Exploring children’s perspectives: Multiple ways of seeing and knowing the child” (Waikato Journal of Education, 2011, with Janette Kelly), and “I Didn’t Expect That I Would Get Tons of Friends More Each Day: Children’s experiences of friendship during the transition to school” (Early Years, 2003). She teaches courses including HMDEV500 Contemporary Issues in Lifespan Development, TEACH100 Literacy and Mathematics in the Early Years, and HMDEV503 Educational and Life Transitions. Professor Peters has successfully supervised multiple doctoral students to completion, such as Yu Yuan’s “Learning to be: Acculturation as a learning process” (2024), Emela Fenmachi’s “Parental Involvement in Early Childhood Learning” (2024), and Hazel Woodhouse’s “Our journey to school” (2024), among others. Her scholarship is evidenced by nearly 2,000 citations on Google Scholar.