Education and Truth-Telling
My current major project is titled ‘Can schools reckon with historical injustice? An international, comparative study of education and truth commissions’ – and it examines how school communities in Australia and the Nordic states are negotiating expectations for truth-telling about their colonial pasts. The project is linked with an international comparative partners across the Arctic region exploring how schools and education stakeholders are navigating truth-telling expectations and processes.
Histories of the Future of Education
Together with Julie McLeod, Jason Beech and Shannon Peters, this 2026 Faculty of Education Seed Project examines how global education policy imagines historical change — and how relationships between past, present and future shape educational reform.
Through a comparative analysis of UNESCO Futures Reports (1972, 1996, 2021), it traces a shift from optimistic visions of the ‘knowledge society’ toward more uncertain, crisis-inflected futures. It pays particular attention to UNESCO’s recent ‘reparative turn’: efforts to address troubled pasts, rethink humanist ideas of progress, and re-position education in an era of planetary instability.
Drawing on historical, posthumanist and queer theory, the project explores changing ideas of subjectivity, community, environment and knowledge in global policy discourse.
The School Exclusion Project
The School Exclusion Project Research Report documents some of the ways in which that government schools across the Australian continent, from the nineteenth-century to the present, have excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This report has been written through an analyses of archival records, historiography, legislation, and policies. Together, the state and territory timelines in this report provide the first comprehensive historical overview of the exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from schools.
Pedagogies of Truth: Deep Listening
In 2024, I am the Humanities Research Centre Fellow in Australian Studies at the Australian National University.
My research project Deep listening: Regenerative history pedagogies for a future world will explore the pedagogical possibilities of Everywhen—the fusion of time and place across scale and space—for teaching and learning in History.
Drawing on Indigenous studies, history, and educational philosophy and theory, I will explore how philosophies, practices, and pedagogies of ‘deep listening’ offer vital insights into how to teach and learn history in times of unprecedented change and in the era of truth-telling.
Dr. Matthew R. Keynes 