Rachael S. Burke
Rachael S. Burke is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology in Tauranga, New Zealand. She has a PhD, Masters and B.A (Hons.) in Social Anthropology from Massey University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Hiroshima University, Japan. Routledge published her doctoral thesis as a monograph, Bodies as Sites of Cultural Reflection in Early Childhood Education (2015), co-authored with Judith Duncan. Rachael spent many years living in Japan, where her three children were born. She continues to have a strong affinity with the land of the rising sun, returning often to Japan to engage with Japanese teachers and researchers.
Rachael’s research interests include cross-cultural education, social justice and implicit cultural practices, particularly in early childhood education settings. In her role as an anthropologist, she has conducted ethnographic research in New Zealand, Japan and the Pacific. Rachael enjoys interacting and learning alongside others and she is currently collaborating with external and internal colleagues on three different research projects. These include exploring children’s collaborative inquiry, how safe and inclusive polytechnic campuses are for rainbow students, and effective strategies for teaching te reo Māori to tertiary students. She is also working on an individual project which examines how the ‘image of a child’ held by beginner teachers from migrant backgrounds influences their practice.