Coming full circle

Almost a quarter of a century ago, a Westbourne alum got her first teaching job. Now, Dr. Christine Lambrianidis has returned to her alma mater as Director of Teaching and Learning.

You might not guess it from her bulging CV, but Dr. Christine Lambrianidis once worried she wouldn’t amount to much. “I arrived at Westbourne the daughter of working-class Greek migrants from the Western Suburbs,” she explains. “We spoke Greek at home. To improve my English, I was in a remedial class, the Learning Enhancement Program. Also, I hadn’t gone to the junior school, so I didn’t know anybody at my new school. The school my parents had scrimped and saved for so they could give me the best possible education.”

Things changed when a teacher filled Christine with a sense of self belief that has never since left her. “I’ll always remember my Year 8 English teacher telling my parents I could analyse literary characters at the level of a Year 12 student,” she remembers. “I suddenly realised I was good at something I really enjoyed.”

That pivotal moment has been the foundation for everything that followed. “Once I realised I was good at English, I went on to get involved with the school plays and debating club,” she says. “I got a PhD in Theatre and Performance from Monash University. I’ve had a variety of interesting jobs, including working as an educational presenter at the Malthouse Theatre and National Gallery of Victoria.”

Christine’s career has included more conventional teaching roles, most recently as a Director of Pedagogy at Suzanne Cory High School, a selective entry government school. Christine, who earned a Certificate in School Management and Leadership last year from Harvard, believes her wide-ranging experience will prove useful in a world being disrupted by technology.

Noting that education has long been based around standardised testing that gauges a student’s ability to “regurgitate information”, Christine argues humans will need to develop other skills to remain relevant in a world where AI dispenses information freely.

“The ability to do more than just repeat what you’ve been told has always been useful,” she says. “The students who get the very top marks have always been the ones who have a unique voice, the ones that take an unconventional approach to answering the exam question.”

As far as Christine can determine, that kind of self-assured adaptability will only become more crucial. “You used to get a one-word answer when you asked students what they wanted to do,” she observes. “Now they say, ‘I want to study business and be an entrepreneur and also be a content creator.’” Christine believes the labour market disruption that emerging technologies are unleashing will only make future career paths even more “hybrid”.  Accordingly, she believes her core mission is ensuring every Westbourne student discovers “a pathway that allows them to achieve growth and success”.

Warming to her theme, Christine predicts the VCE will soon be regarded as outmoded and eventually replaced. This is part of the reason she’s so focused on broadening and diversifying senior school pathways. “We have a duty to prepare students for whatever future they want,” she says.

Christine expects relations between students and teachers to continue becoming less hierarchical, something she sees as a positive development. “I got into teaching through a weekend job at the local Greek school while I was at university,” she explains. “Regardless of the school in question, teachers were expected to be distant authority figures back then,” she recalls. “It certainly wasn’t the done thing to ask for students’ input two decades ago.”

Westbourne’s pedagogic playbook, launched earlier this year by Christine, sets out a more contemporary vision of teaching and learning. It assumes students will be eager participants in their educational journeys. “Part of my role will be making sure the playbook’s vision of students setting high expectations for themselves, engaging in effective questioning, demonstrating agency, offering and receiving feedback, and so on, is realised,” she says.

Reflecting on how she viewed the world when she arrived at Westbourne compared to how she saw it five years later, Christine argues Westbourne’s greatest gift to students is giving them a degree of “audacity”.

“I didn’t show up at Westbourne confident I could achieve big things or believing I belonged in the spaces where important decisions get made,” she recalls. “It was Westbourne staff, especially my English teacher, who convinced me of that. After coming back, I’ve been delighted to discover that encouraging students to go after what they want, to grab the future with both hands, is still a core part of the culture here.”