Sue Ollerhead
Sue Ollerhead is a researcher and senior lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of Secondary Teacher Education at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with eleven official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa and French at school and university. She began her teaching career at a Xhosa-medium primary school in an informal settlement, and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa's adult migrant literacy program. She has also spent a large part of her working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in South Africa, Namibia, Egypt and the United Kingdom. A distinguishing feature of her teaching life in multicultural and multilingual contexts has been her sustained commitment to learning and sharing pedagogies that respond to learners' diverse identities. Throughout her academic career in teacher education, Sue has used her international experiences to train numerous undergraduate and postgraduate students to become knowledgeable, reflective and responsive teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Her recent publications in the area of pedagogical language knowledge, plurilingualism and translanguaging, complemented by her continued teaching and research into linguistically responsive teaching approaches, position her as an important emerging scholar in the field of language teacher education.