Cambourne's Conditions of Learning
An ecologically valid and educationally relevant theory of literacy learning
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Dr. Brian Cambourne, associate professor, is currently a Principal Fellow at the University of Wollongong in NSW. He started his teaching career in NSW in 1956 and spent the next nine years working in a variety of small, mostly one-teacher primary schools before entering academic life. He has since become one of Australian’s most eminent researchers of literacy and learning. He completed his PhD at James cook University before becoming a post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; a Fulbright Scholar; Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Reading at the University of Illinois and Research Fellow at the Learning Centre at Tucson.

Returning to Australia and the University of Wollongong, Brian devoted his research to literacy learning and teaching. His major interest is in professional development for literacy education and he is committed to the idea of co-learning and co-researching with teachers. His ‘Seven condition of learning’ revolutionised the teaching of literacy in classrooms and remains current today. His national and international scholarship has earned him many prestigious awards, including being inducted into the International Reading Association’s Reading Hall of Fame, and the Outstanding Educational Achievement Award by the Australian College of Educators. Both awards recognize his long-term outstanding contribution over many years to education.

Brian now lives in a small seaside village 100kms south of Wollongong not far from the Shoalhaven Campus of the University Of Wollongong.

Awards and Publications

Dr. Brian Cambourne, Associate Professor

Brian Cambourne BA. , Litt B., ( UNE) Ph.D ( JCU)



Overview and Summary of  Brian Cambourne’s Curriculum Vitae

Brian Cambourne is currently Principal Fellow in the Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong Australia. He began teaching in 1956  when he was 19 years of age, and spent ten years teaching  in a mix of one-room schools, and primary and elementary classrooms K-6 for the New South Wales Department of Education. In his tenth year of service for this department he entered the groves of academe as a teacher educator at Wagga Wagga Teachers' College. He completed his Ph.D at James Cook University in Nth Queensland, and was subsequently a Fullbright Scholar and a Post- Doctoral Fellow at Harvard. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at  the Universities of Illinois and Arizona.

Since 1980 Brian Cambourne has been researching how learning, especially literacy learning occurs. He has conducted this research in the naturalistic mode he prefers by sitting in classrooms for many hundreds of hours. Cambourne argues that teachers who are dissatisfied and/or frustrated with the methods they use to teach literacy are prisoners of a view of learning which is based on quite invalid assumptions and which seriously complicates the process of learning to read and write.  He argues for an alternate view of learning and an approach to teaching literacy which uncomplicates the process of learning and makes literacy more accessible to more students, especially non-mainstream students. Furthermore, his data show that this approach to learning leads to the development of highly literate, critically aware, confident readers and writers, who continue to read and write long after they have left school. He has a strong prejudice that literacy is a cultural resource which enables the less privileged members of any culture to challenge those potentially elitist groups who seek to keep economic and political power for themselves. He  also believes that we can only have better, fairer, and kinder societies if  highly productive, critical literacy is made accessible to as many members of a culture as possible.

Between 1990 and 2000 he was engaged in several large R & D projects in the area of staff development in literacy. His co-researchers in these projects were Andrea Butler, Jan Turbill  (Australia), and Gail Langton  (USA). This R & D produced the staff development program known as "Frameworks" which was adopted in Australia,n ,USA, PNG, and Canada.

From 1999-2006 he coordinated a prize winning, innovative approach to pre-service education at University of Wollongong known as the ‘ Knowledge Building Community’ ( KBC).

Between 2004 and 2014 he has been an academic partner for professional development projects in many Australian schools


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