Peter Rushbrook

Adjunct Staff

Dr Peter Rushbrook

BA(Hons) [LaTrobe], GradDipEd [LaTrobe], MEdStuds [Monash], PhD [Monash]

Adjunct Associate Professor
Wagga Wagga

Peter has expertise in workplace learning, Australian and Asian vocational and adult education, the history of education, qualitative research methods, education policy formation and analysis, and Vocational Education and Training (VET) curriculum and assessment. Over his career he has worked within these areas in a range of teaching and research positions, including universities, VET institutes, secondary schools, US community colleges, Singaporean adult education centres, and community education houses. Peter has published widely in the VET and adult education fields and has presented papers in Australia, the Asia-Pacific, Great Britain, Europe and North America. Recent appointments include Singapore’s Institute for Adult Learning as a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of its Centre for Work and Learning, and RMIT Melbourne’s School of Education as Deputy Dean (Learning and Teaching). While at RMIT he helped establish its UNESCO-UNEVOC centre (International Centre for Technical Education and Training). Peter began his full-time academic career at CSU where he was Senior Lecturer in the VET program in the School of Education on the Wagga Wagga Campus and Associate Head of School (Assessment). He holds a PhD in VET education from Monash University.

Peter’s recent research interests focus on workplace learning and VET policy-making and practice in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. His three-year appointment to Singapore’s Centre for Work and Learning, an embedded ‘think tank’ within the Civil Service’s Ministry of Manpower, was research-based and led to the production of many practice-based reports and publications on workplace learning within the local context of public and private sector vocational and adult education change. The research outcomes closely informed Singapore’s development of its revolutionary SkillsFuture policy initiative that has placed the country in the forefront of global VET innovation. Peter’s current research interests include a 2022-2023 project to review the NSW Department of Education’s infrastructure traineeship, a post-Y12 Certificate IV program to encourage, among others, young women and First Nation’s students to embark on careers within the construction industry.

Peter began his teaching career in a Victorian Junior Technical School before moving to a TAFE institute for two decades, after which he sought appointment within the university sector. He was course coordinator of CSU’s VET program for a few years and taught a wide range of subjects in its undergraduate degree and postgraduate diploma courses. In Singapore and RMIT he taught in and managed a number of postgraduate VET programs. He has also supervised twenty or so postgraduate students in Masters and Doctoral programs. He is sought after as a PhD examiner within the VET field.

  • Rushbrook, Peter, (2021), ‘Robert Colin Badger (1906-1993)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 19: 1991-1995, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (2019), ‘Embedded research and learning at, for and through work in Singapore: case studies examining the research-workplace interface’, in Agnes Dietzen and Anke Bahl (eds), Work-based learning and Competency Based Training, (Berichte zur beruflichen Bildung series) in the publishing house of W. Bertelsmann Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Bound, Helen, Boud, David, Rushbrook, Peter, Karmel, Annie, Chia, Arthur (2017), Assessing learning for the changing nature of work, Ministry of Education, Singapore.
  • Bound, Helen and Rushbrook, Peter (eds) (2015), Towards a new understanding of workplace learning: a Singaporean perspective, WDA Publishing, Singapore.
  • Bound, Helen, Rushbrook, Peter, Choy, Michael (2016), ‘Towards learner-centred design: the development of a model for considering curriculum design’, Advances in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-19.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (2015), ‘Preparing Singapore’s adult educators for workplace learning: rethinking the novice to expert metaphor’, in Helen Bound, and Peter Rushbrook (eds) (2015), Towards a new understanding of workplace learning: a Singaporean perspective, WDA Publishing, Singapore, pp. 154-170.
  • Rushbrook, Peter, Bound, Helen, Karmel, Annie (2014), ‘Staying in a certain state of mind: becoming and being a freelance adult educator in Singapore’, Australian Journal of Adult Learning, vo. 54, no.4, pp. 213-433.
  • Bound, Helen, Rushbrook, Peter, Waite, Edmund, Evans, Karen, Nur, Sahara, Sivalingam, Mahaletchumi, Lin, Magdalene, Seng, Abigail (2013), The entrepreneurial self: becoming a freelancer in Singapore’s film and television industry, Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (2010), ‘Bringing Cinderella to the ball: constructing a federal system of technical and further education in Australia, 1971-1975’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 33-54.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (2008), ‘Lest we forget: The Kapooka Tragedy 1945’, History of Education Review, vol. 37, no.1.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (2001), 'Australia's first national report on technical education: the Commonwealth-State Apprenticeship Inquiry (the Wright Report) 1954', History of Education Review, vol. 30, no. 1.
  • Rushbrook, Peter (1997), 'Tradition, pathways and the renegotiation of TAFE identity in Victoria', Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, vol. 18, no. 1.