Alumni

Destina Winarti is an Australia Awards scholar who completed a PhD at the University of Canberra. Destina’s research focused on spatial skills and school mathematics. Destina’s groundbreaking PhD work was published in Educational Studies of Mathematics.

Destina holds a MSc degree, focusing on Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) from The State University of Surabaya, Indonesia. Part of her study for this degree took Destina to The Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Destina was previously a mathematics teacher in primary and middle school in Indonesia. She also has experience teaching pre-service teachers at the Institute of teacher training in Indonesia.

While working on her PhD, Destina was also a tutor for the Ngunnawal Centre at The University of Canberra, supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and employed on a SERC project funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to promote mathematics education in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. In this role she acted as a module reviewer and a facilitator for teachers Professional Development (PD).

After submitting her dissertation in 2020, Destina went back to Indonesia and worked at the Philanthropic organisation, Tanoto Foundation in Jakarta, as a Program Leader. Her team developed and managed a digital platform named e-PINTAR (Pengembangan Inovasi dan Kualitas Pembelajaran) and provided a Professional Development  (PD) program for middle school teachers all around Indonesia.

After receiving her doctorate in 2021, Destina shifted to academia, where she now works as a lecturer at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII) in Depok. To date she has been teaching three units, namely Learning Design & Technology, Educational Research Methodology and Statistical Analysis.

At the same time, Destina is involved in the SMERU Research Institute in Jakarta as a qualitative researcher, where she has recently published a working paper entitled Nurturing Learning Culture among Teachers: Demand-Driven Teacher Professional Development and the Development of Teacher Learning Culture in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Ajay is a mathematics educator at the Mauritius Institute of Education. His research interests are in children’s mathematics, teacher knowledge, spatial reasoning, and STEM education, particularly the intersection between mathematics and scientific disciplines. He is also actively involved in curriculum development at the primary and secondary school levels.

Ajay was a postdoctoral fellow when SERC was established in 2015. He was the lead author on the widely-used Spatial Reasoning Instrument. Ajay remains actively involved in the research within SERC, co-authoring many publications in recent years.