Trish Weekes

Background

About Trish Weekes

Dr Trish Weekes is CEO of Literacy Works, a publishing company for secondary school literacy resources. Her goal is to promote social justice and empower disadvantaged students through improved literacy, particularly writing skills. She is an active researcher and applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Sydney School Genre Pedagogy (SSGP) in educational contexts. Trish completed a PhD in secondary school literacy after 10 years of classroom teaching experience and she continues to contribute to academic research. Some recent publications are listed below. Trish founded her company ‘Literacy Works’ in and offers a growing range of SFL-based subject-specific resources for secondary school teachers. Since 2017 alone, her resources have been purchased by 90% of secondary schools in NSW and 60% of secondary schools in Queensland. In addition, Trish has designed and led professional development courses in 54 schools within NSW and Victoria. In 2020, Trish developed a new, unique, three-year professional development program: ‘Literacy in Subject Areas’, or LISA, which applies SFL-based knowledge and pedagogy to the individual subject areas of Music, Visual Arts, Drama, Technologies, Science, English, Health & Physical Education, Humanities & Social Sciences, Religious Education and Languages. The program ran in 9 secondary schools for 5 years with wonderful results showing improvements in NAPLAN results, improved teacher knowledge of disciplinary literacy and improved student writing in subject areas.