Editorial
We have had great pleasure this year in the Pymble Institute connecting with four dynamic people who exude passion for their work in research and academia. As 2025 comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on how important universities are for schools and share my observations on why school communities benefit richly from partnerships, of different kinds, with academics.
This editorial also serves as a public thank you and vocal shout out to our colleagues in tertiary education who are genuinely interested in and caring about Kindergarten to Year 12 education. We appreciate your support for current teachers, the next generation of teachers, children and young people in our schools, and the wider public domain where knowledge, in all its forms, is expressed and debated.
The Pymble Institute’s 2025 Research Fellow was Dr Bosco Rowland, a registered psychologist and Senior Research Fellow with Monash University in Melbourne. Bosco’s face to face visits and workshops with students, staff and parents have helped shape the philosophy behind the College’s new Service Framework. By understanding the research about what makes a difference to the mental health of children and young people, and locating acts of helping and serving as a key dimension, we have developed an approach based in current Australian and international best practice. Thank you Bosco for playing a pivotal role in helping us develop the Social Intelligence Strategic Pillar through your care, support and inspiration.
The 2026 Pymble Institute Research Fellow is Associate Professor Sophie Gee. Sophie is an academic in the English Department at Princeton University in the United States and the inaugural Vice-Chancellor Fellow at the University of Sydney. In this latter role, Sophie focuses on public intellectual discourse and collaboration which is ideal for schools. We loved Sophie’s special lecture for the Pymble Institute earlier this year on what happens when we read and why studies in the humanities can enrich the lifeworlds of all. Sophie has kindly accepted our invitation to further share her wisdom with Pymble Ladies’ College in 2026 as our third Research Fellow. We are excited about the projects she will support us for our Academic Intelligence Strategic Pillar, namely the Teaching and Learning Framework, the Conde Library, our English Department’s leadership of the College’s reading culture, and working with the History, Society and Ethics Department.
We welcomed Professor Simon Buckingham Shum from the University of Technology Sydney to lead one of the first, all-staff professional learning events of 2025 with a focus on our strategy in Digital Intelligence. Thank you, Simon, for bringing your scholarly mind and deep care to the topic of AI in education. Simon’s words and concepts are still resonating as they provoked a much better understanding of how our work at Pymble fits into the tertiary landscape into which our students are heading. Speaking to an audience of over 300 staff from Kindergarten to Year 12 teachers, as well as our professional services, coaching, boarding and health care staff is a significant opportunity, and Simon’s keynote presentation and follow up workshops exemplified both cutting-edge innovation and care and respect for everyone lucky enough to attend. We’re sure to work with Simon again soon as AI moves more and more into our lives.
To conclude the year, in Term 4, a special keynote to support the Teaching and Learning Framework was delivered by Penny van Bergen, Associate Professor in Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Macquarie University. As a taster for further work with Pymble teachers in 2026, Penny lead us through key research principles in the areas of memory, cognition, learning and knowledge and linked these to both the Academic Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence Strategic Pillars. Penny’s enormous warmth and energy, and rigorous interrogation of the field of learning sciences, was sincerely appreciated by all – especially the respect Penny gave teachers in terms of their professional expertise and knowledge of their students.
This is quite a list! 2025 has been a year of much learning; enriched immeasurably by the research and scholarship of Bosco, Sophie, Simon and Penny. We appreciate and acknowledge each of these education experts and thank them for being part of our collective commitment to our profession, and the children and young people we serve.
Thank you all for your support of our work at the Pymble Institute. We wish you all a happy and restful holiday time and a great start to 2026.
