Awards Judges 2011

Sean Gordon

SchoolAid Founder and former school principal

With over 18 years' experience as school principal and after serving on many state and national peak association committees for principals (APPA, ACPPA, APAPDC and ACSP), Sean was awarded Life Membership of the Australian Primary Principals Association (2004) and the Australian Catholic Primary Principals Association (1991).

Sean's community involvement saw him recognised as an ambassador for the Year of the Outback, Gold Duke of Edinburgh recipient and Premier of NSW Award for his involvement at the Thredbo landslide rescue. Sean and his wife Jo-Anne live in Redcliffe in QLD where they share the parenting of 4 beautiful children: Josie, Caitlin, Michael and Cristin.

Professor Rosemary Ross Johnston

Director of UTS Centre for Child and Youth: Culture and Wellbeing

Professor Rosemary Ross Johnston is Head of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, and is Founding Director of the Australian Centre for Child and Youth: Culture and Wellbeing. She was Director of the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts at UTS for seven years and Director of Teacher Education at UTS for three years.

She has served and continues to serve on the executive of a number of national and international Boards, including as Vice President of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes, which is affiliated to UNESCO and has 40,000 members in association across the world; the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) (based in the United States); the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL); and the Montgomery Institute (Canada). She is also on the Boards of private school and tertiary institutes.

As well as setting up and developing the Literate Australia project, she is currently leading two large Research Projects, New Ways of Doing School: Mixing story and technology to generate innovative learning, social and cultural communities (funded by the Australian Research Council); and New Ways/ Old Ways: Converging Roads, with the Martu communities ofthe Pilbara.

She is widely published in the fields of literacy and children's literature, and her work has been translated into several languages. www.fass.uts.edu.au/research/centres/acy/