AusTOP About Us - Australian Psychology Learning and Teaching

About Us

We are a passionate group of educators from across Australia, determined to raise the profile of teaching and learning psychology in schools. As psychology teachers, we are uniting across Australia in an effort to raise the profile of psychology in Australian schools. We are also aiming to address some of the hurdles within the profession.

Members of our network come from diverse education settings across Australia and beyond.

We welcome fellow psychology educators to join us. It’s free to join, as part of our endeavour to be an open-facing, research-inspired, and not-for-profit psychology teacher network.

Formation: At the 2021 AusPLAT Conference, designed for psychology educators across various (school and tertiary) settings, a larger representation of secondary school teachers participated than ever before.

As a result, a new group, the Australian Teachers of Psychology (AusTOP) Network, was formed, driven to make positive change for teachers and teaching of psychology in Australia. Since then, we have participated at the 2023 and 2025 AusPLAT conferences and hosted a number of events to help support Psychology teachers.

Current work: Our steering committee engages in monthly meetings where we discuss current initiatives, plan future events, and prepare for upcoming conferences to ultimately help champion teachers’ professional careers.

Why Australian teachers of psychology are determined to build a network

Monash researcher and lecturer (and founding network member), Dr Karen Marangio, joined forces with six psychology teachers to discuss the formation of AusTOP in 2022. In this article we discussed the following needs as a way to move forward as the AusTOP network. To this day, these remain the primary goals of AusTOP and guide what we do.

1. Raise the profile of psychology education
2. Overcome isolation and make connections between psychology educators
3. Embed psychology in the curriculum
4. Champion teachers’ professional careers
5. Forge co-beneficial and sustainable relationships with a range of professional teacher and subject associations