Queena Lee

Background

Queena Lee is a lecturer in early childhood education at the Department of Education in Swinburne University of Technology. She is an early-career researcher and completed her PhD in 2024. Her PhD project studied how children’s agency develops and the relevant teaching pedagogy to support the developmental process, using a cultural-historical lens. One of the major findings is the agency-growth model to help practitioners understand children’s agency developmental trajectory so as to decide the support to assist the process. Queena’s passion for child development and teacher pedagogy comes from her identity as an early childhood teacher before joining the higher education sector. Her areas of interest and expertise are child development, agency and voices and cultural-historical psychology.

International collaboration

• Member of Cultural-Historical Psychology and Education Research Virtual Lab, Monash University, Melbourne (Australia) 
• Member of the International Society for cultural-historical and activity research (ISCAR)
• Convenor of the Cultural-historical and activity theory SIG group in the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)

Publications

Lee, Q., Devi, A., & Cutri, J. (2025). Harnessing the Power of Virtual Reality Experiences as Social Situation of Development to Enrich the Professional Experiences of Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers. Education Sciences, 15(5), 635.

Devi, A., Cutri, J., & Lee., Q. (2025). Innovating early childhood education through virtual reality: A case study of Mursion simulations in postgraduate pre-service teacher education. In W. Goff. (Ed.), Immersive learning in teacher education: Simulated environments, tools, and practices. IGI Global publisher. In press.

Lee, Q., Utami, A.D., & Minh, T.D. (2024). Comparative studies of play practices for children’s learning and development in Early Childhood Education in Australia, Indonesia and Vietnam. In Engaging with Australasia: Comparative Research on ELT and English Teacher Education (pp. 207-228). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Lee, Q. Y. (2024). Teaching practices in early childhood educational settings in Victoria and the development of children’s agency: A cultural-historical analysis [Doctoral thesis, Monash University]

Lee, Q. (2022). Lee, Q. (2023). PhD candidature during the pandemic: Hansel and Gretel’s trip through the woods. In Research and Teaching in a Pandemic World: The Challenges of Establishing Academic Identities During Times of Crisis (pp. 275-285). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Li, Y. (2020). The discourse of agency in early childhood: a corpus-driven discourse analysis of a state-level curriculum in Australia. 2020 International Graduate Research Symposium & 10 East Asia Chinese Teaching Forum (pp. 611-626). Hanoi: Vietnam National University Press.