Russell Bishop, Ph.D., is Foundation Professor for Maori Education in the School of Education at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is also a qualified and experienced secondary school teacher, having taught at Mana and Aotea Colleges in the 1970s and 80s. Prior to his present appointment he was Interim Director for Otago University's Teacher Education program. His research experience is in the area of collaborative storying. He has published nationally and internationally on this topic and has written a book Collaborative Research Stories: Whakawhanaungatanga. His other research interests include Collaborative Storying as Pedagogy and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies. The latter area is the subject of a book, Culture Counts: Changing Power Relationships in Classrooms, which demonstrates how the experiences developed from within kaupapa Maori settings, schooling, research and policy development, can be applied to mainstream educational settings.

A further book, Pathologizing Practices: the impact of deficit thinking on education, investigates how deficit thinking pathologizes the lived experiences of children and prevents minoritized children from achieving their full potential in schools. A more recent book, Culture Speaks, examines the schooling experiences of Maori students, their families, their principals and their teachers. The message of this book is simple: classroom relationships are paramount; all other actions flow from this wellspring. His latest books are entitled, Scaling Up Education Reform: Addressing the Politics of Disparity and Freeing Ourselves.
 
He is currently the Project Director for Te Kotahitanga and He Kakano. The former is a large New Zealand Ministry of Education (MOE) funded research /professional development project that seeks to improve the educational achievement of Maori students in mainstream classrooms through the implementation of a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations. The latter, again funded by the MOE, supports school leaders to improve the learning of Maori students.