Rate My Professor Sue Elliott

Dr. Sue Elliott holds qualifications including Dip KTC, BSc (Hons), MSc, and EdD. She has over 25 years of experience in early childhood settings as an educator, director, and consultant, including roles at long day care, mobile and sessional preschools, TAFE, and university training courses. She coordinated early childhood consultancy projects for organizations such as the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Museum Victoria, and Melbourne Zoo, focusing on early years programs. Additional positions included training coordinator with Community Child Care Victoria, Early Childhood Education Officer for Sun Smart at the Cancer Council Victoria, and sessional educator at the Melbourne Aquarium and Royal Botanic Gardens. Elliott transitioned to academia as a lecturer in early childhood education at RMIT University from 2006 to 2011, followed by the Australian Catholic University from 2012 to 2013. She served as Senior Lecturer and Course Coordinator in the School of Education at the University of New England, supervising Higher Degree Research students on play, outdoor pedagogies, and nature play programs, and providing consultative roles for the UNE on-campus early childhood centre and the Boilerhouse Science Discovery Space.

Currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of New England, her research specializations include design, play, and pedagogy in outdoor learning environments, nature-based playspaces, Australian adaptations of forest preschool approaches, education for sustainability in early childhood from systems and critical theory perspectives, action research methodologies, and mosaic methodology for engaging children in research. Key publications encompass books such as Early Years Learning in Australian Natural Environments (2021, co-authored), Researching Early Childhood Education for Sustainability: Challenging Assumptions and Orthodoxies (2020, editor), Outdoor Learning Environments (2017, editor), and Sustainability and the Early Years Learning Framework (2014). She has received the Early Childhood Australia Doctoral Thesis Award (2014), life memberships from the Victorian Association for Environmental Education (1993) and Play Australia (2017), and the Australian Association for Environmental Education Fellowship (2023). Elliott contributes through keynote lectures, workshops, consultancies, committee roles including Co-Convenor of Transnational Dialogues in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability Research, and editorial positions such as Field Report Editor for Children, Youth and Environments.