Staff Profile

Chris Duke is Visiting Professor at RMIT University Melbourne, where he was Director, Community and Regional Partnership after being Professor of Lifelong Learning at the University of Auckland. He is an Honorary Professor of Lifelong Learning at the Universities of Glasgow, Leicester and Stirling in the UK.

He worked in the 1960s at the now University of Greenwich and then at the University of Leeds before becoming Foundation Director of Continuing Education at the Australian National University in 1969, then in 1985 Foundation Professor and Director of Continuing Education at the University of Warwick. At that time he became Secretary and then Vice-Chair of the UK universities lifelong learning body now called the Universities Assocation for Lifelong Learning. After serving as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Warwick he became President of the University of Western Sydney Nepean.

He has worked extensively from the 1970s with UNESCO, DVV Germany, the OECD and other international organisations mainly on education in relation to development, recurrent education and lifelong learning, and additionally equity and poverty reduction issues, and sustainable development. This international work included serving as Secretary-General of ASPBAE (1974-85) and Associate Secretary-General of ICAE until 1985.

He is a life member of UALL, ASPBAE and ICAE and a registered workaholic, but stress-free. This to be explained by rediscovering his vocation as peasant manqué in the Burgundy countryside where extensive gardening equates with average zero food-miles.

Selected Publications: 

Duke. C. (2012) ’Lifelong learning and the autumn of Europeanization in Asia’. International Journal of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning (in press)

Duke, C. (2012) ’Networking and Partnerships: Another Road to Lifelong Learning’. In R. Bagnall (Ed), International Handbook of Lifelong Learning (Second Edition). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Duke, C. (2011) The Impact Debate - Hazards of Discourse in the UK. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education

Duke, C. And Hinzen, H. (2011-12), Adult Education and Lifelong Learning within UNESCO –  CONFINTEA, Education for All and beyond, Development (Special Issues on Adult Education) 22-4, 23-1, pp. 18-23

Duke, C. and Hinzen, H. (2010) Youth and adult education within lifelong learning: claims and challenges for the development agenda Development, Education for Transformation 53.4

Duke, C. (2010)  ’Engaging with Difficulty – Universities in and with Regions’, in P. Inman and H. Schuetze (eds), The Community Engagement and Service Mission of Universities, Leicester: NIACE 

Duke, C. (2010) ’Learning Cities and Regions’, in Peterson, P., Baker, E. and McGaw, B. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Education volume 1 Oxford: Elsevier

Duke, C. (2009) ’Trapped in a local history: why did extramural fail to engage in the era of engagement?’  in P. Cunningham (Ed.) Beyond the Lecture Hall Universities and community engagement from the middle ages to the present day, pp 169-87. Cambridge: University of Cambridge