Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles leads with a rare mix of courage, creativity and collaboration - placing children and young people not just at the centre of the conversation, but right out in front.
She is in her sixth year as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University and has helped transform the Faculty into a nationally recognised leader in innovative, research-led education.
But more than that, she's led a revolution in how we think about teaching.
"At the end of the day, why did we become teachers?" she asks. "It's because we care about children's lives. It's about creating opportunity, honouring childhood, and really understanding what it means to be human."
A prolific researcher and one of the few Executive Deans in the country to lead an Australian Research Council grant, Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles's work spans student voice, sustainability, climate change, and education. But at its core is a powerful belief in collaboration - and disruption.
"I'm constantly in a dance between disruption and transformation," she says. "We don't accept the status quo. We ask: 'What is education really for?' And then we go build it, with our students and our communities, not for them."
Central to this philosophy is SAGE — the Student Advisory Group in Education — a collective of pre-service teachers who contribute directly to faculty planning and decision-making.
Alongside SAGE is the Voice Platform, where staff and students can share ideas, feedback, and provocations in real-time. These are not token initiatives - they are structural commitments to dialogue, power-sharing and co-design.
"You have to share power," Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles says. "And a lot of people don't like to do that. But it's how I operate. If I couldn't lead that way, I wouldn't want to be a Dean."
This commitment to be bold was manifested in the co-design of the Faculty of Education 2030 Strategy — a long-term strategy developed through the Delphi method, which gathered broad community input until 75% consensus was reached on every single word.
"If I had written it alone, it would have looked very different," Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles admits. "But it wouldn't be as powerful.
"It was built together, and because of that, we own it together."
That collaborative approach has reshaped everything from the structure of degree programs to the very nature of educational research.
Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles's work - alongside nationally regarded colleagues like Professor Lexi Lasczik and Professor Sue Walker - focuses on recalibrating teacher education, in ways which are cross-disciplinary, sustainability-focused, and deeply inclusive of Indigenous and First Nations knowledge systems.
The approach challenges deficit models of education, flipping assumptions about what children and teachers can do.
"We work with children and young people as researchers. Their stories, their data, their experiences - they are all part of the evidence base. We're not doing research on them; we're doing it with them.
"A Future Teachers' Club has recently been launched, led by Chair of Discipline (Secondary) Dr Lana McCarthy - another space for youth to actively shape the direction of the Faculty's work and support young people's transition into teaching.
"They have a right to ask, 'What is education for?' And they deserve an answer."
Under Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles's leadership, the Faculty has grown from 2000 students to over 8000 in just a few years. The momentum is not just about scale. It's about impact - real, measurable, and deeply human.
"We constantly measure our programs - not just in quantitative ways, but in dialogue," she says.
"I meet with SAGE students every month. It's a courageous space. We face challenges together. And we grow stronger from that."
That sense of shared purpose, of "meeting of minds", is what makes Southern Cross University's Faculty of Education highly distinctive. It's not just a place for preparing teachers — it's a place for reimagining what education can be.
"At its heart, education must be evidence-based, yes. But more than that — it must be just, inclusive, and led by those it's meant to serve. That's where the real transformation happens."
University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Tyrone Carlin, praised the boldness of Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles's vision, saying the Faculty's output was having substantial impact on Southern Cross's standing for research excellence.
"In academe, excellence is often framed as the achievement of the individual. While Amy is without question an exceptional researcher and leader in her own right, what makes her truly extraordinary is her unwavering commitment to the power of the collective," Professor Carlin said.
"Her leadership shows us that transformation doesn't come from the top down — it comes from listening, from courage, and from creating space for many voices to shape the future."
