Associate Professor Adam Casey
Higher Education Leader | Learning & Teaching | Academic Governance | Creative Industries
Associate Professor Adam Casey is a higher education leader with more than twenty years’ experience across higher education and vocational education, including more than a decade in senior academic leadership.
His work centres on learning and teaching strategy, curriculum and portfolio renewal, academic governance and quality, educational innovation, academic integrity, and the development of flexible approaches to teaching and assessment. Across his leadership roles, Adam has worked at the intersection of educational strategy and academic practice, translating institutional priorities and regulatory expectations into sustainable approaches to curriculum, teaching and student success.
Click here to visit Dr Casey’s Public Academic record via his Orcid page.
Academic Leadership
Adam’s leadership has developed across program, portfolio and institution-wide roles, encompassing academic strategy, curriculum development, quality assurance, governance, staff leadership and educational innovation.
As Associate Dean Learning and Teaching at Polytechnic Institute Australia, his portfolio extended across learning and teaching strategy, academic quality, curriculum and assessment, academic integrity, digital learning and student success. His work emphasised authentic assessment, student agency and flexible learning while ensuring that innovation remained grounded in academic standards, sound governance and regulatory expectations.
Across more than twenty years in higher education, Adam has led large academic teams and complex educational portfolios, supported significant curriculum and portfolio renewal, and contributed to major externally funded education initiatives. His approach combines strategic planning with a strong understanding of the practical conditions required for high-quality teaching: coherent curriculum, capable and supported academic staff, meaningful assessment, effective governance and close attention to the student experience.
Areas of Leadership
Learning & Teaching Strategy
Institution-wide educational strategy, contemporary pedagogy, flexible delivery, assessment renewal and approaches that support diverse learner cohorts.
Academic Governance & Quality
Academic policy, governance, quality assurance, academic standards, regulatory alignment and the development of sustainable institutional processes.
Curriculum & Portfolio
Curriculum design and renewal across higher education and VET, portfolio development, course viability and the alignment of educational offerings with student, industry and institutional needs.
Educational Innovation
Digital pedagogy, responsible use of emerging technologies, authentic assessment and approaches that connect educational innovation with academic integrity and quality.
Curriculum & Educational Practice
Adam’s academic leadership is grounded in extensive experience as an educator, curriculum designer and program leader.
Earlier in his career, he developed and led undergraduate and postgraduate programs in writing and the creative industries, with a particular focus on project-based learning, interdisciplinary curriculum, practice-based research and the relationship between academic study and professional creative practice.
This work established principles that continue to inform his broader educational leadership: curriculum should be intellectually rigorous while remaining purposeful; assessment should allow students to demonstrate meaningful capability rather than simply reproduce knowledge; and learning should connect disciplinary knowledge with professional, social and creative contexts.
His teaching and curriculum experience spans creative practice, writing, applied research, research methods, entrepreneurship and professional practice, alongside extensive experience in academic staff development and research supervision.
Creative Industries & Applied Research
Adam’s disciplinary background is in the Creative Industries, Creative Writing and practice-based research.
He has worked across writing, music, sound, creative practice and interdisciplinary arts education, bringing experience as both an academic and a practising creative professional to his teaching and curriculum work. This dual perspective has informed a longstanding interest in the relationship between scholarship, creative practice, industry and professional identity.
His research interests include creative practice, applied and practice-based research, creative industries education, contemporary pedagogy and representations of traumatic experience in literature and art.
Research & Academic Writing
Doctoral Research
Adam completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University in 2009.
The Silence of the Seventh Floor: Narratives of Traumatic Experience combined an original novel with a critical exegesis examining the representation and narration of traumatic experience, including analysis of works by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.
Honours Thesis
Adam received First Class Honours from Victoria University in 1999. His thesis, Travellers of the Borges Realm: An Examination of the Metaphorical Journey to the Secret Centre in the Literature of Jorge Luis Borges, examined metaphorical journeys toward knowledge and self-understanding in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.