Academic Status
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Andrew Bills is a teacher and researcher in educational leadership foregrounding policy, politics and practice. In 2022, he won the ACEL SA Distinguished Contribution to Research in Education Leadership Award. He is a translational researcher. His work is in service to schools and school systems to address inequality and lift equity. His primary audience for teaching, research, and public presentations are system leaders, school principals and teachers.
Prior to university employment, he developed three alternative schools for disadvantaged young people and worked in the SA Education Department as a diagnostic school reviewer, educational leadership consultant, school counsellor, special education teacher and action researcher. He works [and has worked] in partnership with international, national and state educational organisations and educational stakeholders including:
In these partnerships Andrew has led and continues to lead professional development for new and experienced school leaders and has managed, designed and developed three schools using action research and appreciative inquiry as the driving school establishment and formation methodologies.
Andrew currently leads three externally funded research projects in partnership with university academics, school principals, education system bureaucrats and teacher-leaders that seek to collectively build and develop socially just schooling forms in South Australia.
He works within the research traditions of phenomenology and critical sociology, bringing appreciative inquiry, post-structural policy analysis and critical action research methodologies to his work.
Bachelor of Arts (Journalism) (1989) Charles Darwin University
Graduate Diploma Teaching (1992) Flinders University
Graduate Diploma in Educational Counselling (1996) University of South Australia
Masters in Educational Counselling (1999) University of South Australia
Workplace Assessor Training and Cerification (2003)
Graduate Certificate in Education- Inclusive Practice (2005) University of Tasmania
Doctor of Education (2011) University of Adelaide
Educational Leadership Academic- Policy, Politics and Practice
Coordinator Topics
Lecture Topics
Research
Stakeholder Membership and Community Activity
Doctoral Completions
The topics I teach draw from the lived experiences and professional challenges confronted by my students. These are then placed in dialectical tension with the leading literature in the field of study. Through a dialogic and dialectic interchange between theory and professional experience, my students can learn new ways of seeing the world and leading through educational challenges.
Doctoral Supervision in Educational Leadership- Policy, Politics and Practice I work to foster in all students the critical and creative dispositions to become more radical an pragmatic educational leaders in a neoliberal world that is shutting down these particular dispositions and producung instrumental leader compliance.This requires professional work against the grain and calls upon leaders to feel free to be themselves in a world that is calling them to be anything but themselves. Here, I work to promote in all of my students the courage to teach and the courage to lead- a renewed sense of authenticity in being and becoming an educational leader.