Maria Gindidis

Bilingual Education
Brain based- learning - The Bilingual Brain
Community Languages and Teacher Training for sustaining and maintaining languages in these contexts.
CLIL ( Content Language Integrated Learning) in various Australian school contexts.

Maria's research interests are extensive yet synergised under Brain - based learning and how this impacts on learning second, community and foreign languages.
Her PhD involved researching the lived experience of marginalised teachers in community schools struggling to teach community or heritage language programs, using phenomenology as a research methodology.
A further current research area involves a number of schools designing CLIL (Content Language Integrated learning) programs and the possible development of an Australian CLIL paradigm and model for teaching and learning languages.

Dr. Maria Gindidis is currently a School Reviewer, Coordinator of Languages and teaches in both Undergraduate and Post-graduate Teacher Education units on the Clayton Campus. She has held positions of State Coordinator of Bilingual Schools Project, Innovations and Excellence Educator for a Cluster of five Schools, Curriculum Director of a 3 campus school in Mooroolbark, Futures and Innovations Leader and Acting Assistant Principal of an eastern region secondary school. She has also held the Middle Schools Portfiolio for the Gippsland region. Previously a sessional lecturer in Teacher Training at Monash University for 16 years, Maria has taught in a number of secondary schools and coordinated bilingual programs in 15 schools across Victoria. At Monash she lectures and delivers workshops in Brain-based learning, Understanding Learning and Teaching, LOTE (Languages) Method (Primary and Secondary), Professional Issues, Leadership, Student Engagement and Bilingual Education. Her Phd reserach involved teachers' experiences in community languages schools.