Invited Speakers

Executive Director - Victorian Deaf Education Institute

Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Gene has been involved in the disability sector, for more than 25 years, in a variety of roles including - as a professional social worker, as a policy analyst and program manager, and has played a leadership role in significant disability reform initiatives. Gene started her professional life with selection into the Australian Public Sector’s graduate leadership development program. Through this program Gene developed a depth of understanding of public policy and systemic reform processes - this influenced her future career direction. After completing a postgraduate degree in Social Administration, Gene’s work focused on the management of disability reform programs. Appointed as a senior manager to work on reform agendas in a variety of organizations over time, Gene’s work has included working with individuals, with consumer groups and communities, and partnering with organizations to enable people with disabilities to have opportunities for improved access to education, work and community participation.

Tertiary Qualifications: Bachelor of Arts, Adelaide University; Post Graduate Degree - Social Administration, Flinders University.
Professional Membership: Gene is a qualified Social Worker and a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers.

Dr Trevor Johnston is Associate Professor of Sign Language (SL) Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has  researched and published on Auslan (Australian Sign Language) since the early 1980s concentrating on lexicography, grammatical description, bilingual deaf education, and corpus linguistics both for research into sociolinguistic variation and for empirical language description. He has authored several dictionaries of Auslan (in book, CD-ROM and internet formats). He has conducted research in the area Auslan assessment, especially as a first language, in the evaluation of sign bilingual education programs. In 2008 he completed the initial compilation of the Auslan corpus (funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, University of London). The annotation and analysis of this corpus is a long-term on-going project. He is Chief Investigator on two current projects: the first on Auslan/English interpreter-mediated communication in health and medical settings, focussing on developing, sharing and harmonizing the use of medical terminology in Auslan through Auslan Signbank (an internet-based dictionary of Auslan); and the second on comparing variation in Auslan and British Sign Language (a closely related sign language) for evidence of the hypothesis that grammar is emergent from language use and is driven by frequency and usage which is reflected in the processes of grammaticalization and language change.

Dr. John Luckner is Professor and the coordinator of the Deaf Education teacher preparation program in the School of Special Education at the University of Northern Colorado. He also serves as the Director of Research and Evaluation for the Bresnahan/Halstead Centre at the University of Northern Colorado. Dr. Luckner was a classroom teacher of students who are deaf or hard of hearing for nine years; five years in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and four years in the United States Virgin Islands. He also worked for eighteen summers as an Outward Bound instructor. He is the co-author of five books and one test, fifteen book chapters and more than 80 juried journal articles. He serves on the editorial review board for the American Annals of the Deaf, The Volta Review, and the Communication Disorders Quarterly. His current research interests include literacy, teacher preparation, social-emotional development and the provision of appropriate services for students who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families. He lives in Greeley, Colorado with his wife and daughter. He enjoys travelling, outdoor activities and reading novels.

Dr.Connie Mayer is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada where she works in the graduate programs in Education, and Linguistics & Applied Linguistics, and in the teacher preparation program in the education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) students. Prior to joining York, Dr. Mayer worked for more than twenty years in the field as a consultant, administrator and teacher at both schools for the deaf and in school boards. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and the American Annals of the Deaf, and is currently an Associate Editor for the Volta Review. Her current research focuses on literacy development in D/HH learners with cochlear implants, early literacy and early intervention, sign bilingualism, and models of teacher education. She has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters, and presented at more than 100 national and international conferences. In 2007, her article "Can the Linguistic Interdependence Theory support a Bilingual-Bicultural Model of Literacy Education for Deaf Students?" published in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education was selected by Oxford University Press as one of the seminal papers published in the past century.

Greg Leigh is Director of RIDBC Renwick Centre for Research and Professional Education. The Centre, located in Sydney, is a joint facility of the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children and The University of Newcastle, Australia. He is Conjoint Professor of Special Education and Director of the Centre for Special Education and Disability Studies at the University of Newcastle. He holds degrees in Special Education from Griffith University; a Master of Science (Speech and Hearing) degree from Washington University (Central Institute for the Deaf) in the USA; and a PhD in Special Education from Monash University. He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators.

Professor Leigh has had a distinguished career in education of the deaf and has published widely in this field. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Deafness and Education International and Phonetics and Speech Sciences. He serves on numerous Australian government consultative committees on issues related to deafness and is currently chairman of the Australian National Newborn Hearing Screening Committee. He is a former National President of the Education Commission for the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf and is Chair of the International Steering Committees of both the Asia-Pacific Congress on Deafness (APCD) and the International Congress on Education of the Deaf (ICED). In 2003 he was International Visiting Scholar at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (Rochester Institute of Technology) in Rochester, New York.