Dr Matt Lumb

My commitment to the field of access to education developed through experiences as a community development professional working on projects in Australia and in parts of Asia and Africa, and as a classroom teacher in Australian high schools.

A formative time in my professional life was working for UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) where I undertook a dual role in Australia as Education for Development Coordinator and as International Projects Officer (Monitoring and Evaluation). As Education for Development Coordinator, my role was to manage school and community-focused fundraising and advocacy initiatives; e.g. pioneering and managing relationships with NSW DET and NSW Teachers Federation around a new statewide initiative called UNICEF Day for Change.

As International Projects Officer (Monitoring and Evaluation) I worked in Australia and overseas to liaise between local stakeholders of development practice, representatives of UNICEF and other UN agencies in overseas development contexts, and the Australian Government - to monitor program processes, identify future funding needs, and produce nuanced reporting and evaluation products. This role involved numerous visits to development contexts including Zambia (HIV/AIDS orphans & prevention of transmission between mother and child), Laos (Child Protection against UXO or Unexploded Ordinance), Indonesia (Polio Vaccination), Vietnam (Iodine Deficiency) and Fiji (Health Technologies).

As a teacher in NSW public schools in the central west of the state, I gained renewed appreciation of the role education plays in relational processes underlying the possibility of community development. It was in this context I acquired a deeper understanding of the ways that pedagogy, curricular and assessment structures impact on subjectivity, identity and life trajectory.

Working for Australian Red Cross as firstly Refugee Support Coordinator and then as manager of a community service called Tenant Connect, I experienced the tensions and contradictions of community based and not-for-profit organisations in terms of the spectrum from service to development. I was privileged to work with a diversity of experienced practitioners across this spectrum and to learn about the ways processes of evaluation can themselves be programs of practice.

Since 2011, I have worked at the University of Newcastle as an outreach practitioner and am currently enrolled in a PhD with the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education, investigating the concealed impacts of outreach connections. I have an interest in the ways sophisticated participatory methodologies have the potential to make evaluative processes more productive, and to deliver nuanced and contextualised understandings of the underlying dynamics that produce program impact.