Griffith alumna Dr Morag Morrison-Helme will be inaugurated as a Fellow of St John’s College (SJC) at Cambridge University in October, when the new Academic year begins.
Having completed both an undergraduate degree and PhD at Griffith, Dr Morrison-Helme will be the first Fellow in Education at the college.
“I am of course delighted to be invited to join the fellowship of St John’s, Cambridge – established in 1511, a college with a very long and distinguished history of supporting academic achievement,” she said.
“I have been an External Director of Studies at SJC for some years now, and in this role I had the very great privilege of being responsible for overseeing the academic studies of undergraduate students undertaking subject papers in Education.
“The college can boast that our Education students have gone on to very successful careers, both in Education related fields and in the Arts and Humanities.”
Dr Morrison-Helme is one of two Griffith alumni at St John’s College.
“We do currently have a wonderful Director of Studies for Law, Part IB, Dr Jodi Gardner, who is a College Associate Lecturer in Law at St John’s,” she advised.
“Jodi is a young and vibrant academic who did her Law degree at Griffith and we are both extremely proud to be alumni of Griffith University, though some decades separate us, I was in the third year and still have a 3 digit student number!”
She speaks very fondly of her time at Griffith, recalling that it was a huge part of her life.
“(There were) my undergrad years, teacher training on the Dip Ed, then back as a PhD student,” she said.
“Colleagues and friends that are still a huge and very special part of my life even though I am now so far away.
“As a student in the very earliest years of its existence I feel I have grown up with the university, and visits back to the Mt Gravatt Campus particularly always bring back incredibly happy memories. So much has changed, but the foundations still the same – just like it’s old alumni!”
As a Griffith PhD candidate, Dr Morrison-Helme was supervised by Bruce Burton and co-supervised by Julie Dunn.
She has been working in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge since 2002, supervising and lecturing on undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate courses in Drama, Creativity and
Arts Education.
Soon to be known as a ‘Cambridge Don’, she also co-ordinates the MPhil in Arts, Culture and Education and is Director of Studies for Education at St John’s College.
Dr Morrison-Helme has taught Drama and Applied Theatre across a range of settings in Australia, the United Kingdom and Sweden. She began her career as a secondary school Drama teacher and lecturer in Drama Teacher Training in Australia and was also involved in curriculum development with the Board of senior Secondary School studies in Queensland before taking up a lecturing post in post-graduate Teacher Education at the University of Cambridge.