Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society Newsletter Issue 1 - Jul 2016

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Issue 01 July 2016

Professor Paul Thomas SEPD Director of Research

Welcome to HudCRES! HudCRES is the ‘Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society’ and it is the new over-arching research centre for the University of Huddersfield’s School of Education and Professional Development (SEPD).

SEPD already has strong research links with external partners such as colleges, schools, local authorities and other universities – as other articles in this newsletter show – but HudCRES will give us a stronger platform to both make partners more aware of the research we are already doing and provide more opportunities to discuss joint research bidding and activity.

To help with this, HudCRES has launched this newsletter, a Twitter feed (@HudCRES), the forthcoming ‘Ed Space research blog, an annual public lecture series and an annual Research Showcase event for partners.

The ‘Ed Space research blog The blog will share thoughts, insights and experiences around thinking about and doing educational research – whether it is writing and publishing academic or practitioner research, Masters/Doctoral work, or funded research projects.

It will also share personal reflections on how research can and should be used by education practitioners and wider society.

The blog will be operational from September 2016.

If you would like to contribute a short post for the blog, please email your initial ideas to: HudCRES@hud.ac.uk

To guide us in this we have appointed an External Advisory Board, whose membership includes a college principal, a school head teacher, a local authority senior manager, the chief executive of a youth organisation, a senior officer of a children’s organisation and a senior external academic colleague.

We think that HudCRES can be a vehicle for jointly developing research with partners that can effectively support policy and practice and we look forward to working with you!

hud.ac.uk/research/education

Portraits of School Life Janet Fink Professor of Childhood and Personal Relationships

This project was a collaborative piece of work between Janet Fink (Professor of Childhood and Personal Relationships), Savile Park Primary School, Halifax and Meltham Moor Primary School.

The Portraits of School Life Exhibition

In their classrooms and in visits to the University, Year 3 children portrayed different aspects of school life – from how they get to school to their favourite areas of the playground.

Emotion maps and drawings gave some unexpected insights into what school is like for seven to eight year olds and, after a visit to the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield these were contrasted with the children’s experiences of being a school child in a Victorian classroom.

At the end of the project, Heritage Quay (the University’s Archive: heritagequay.org) supported the children in installing a fascinating exhibition about school life in the past and the present, which was then opened to the public.

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Postgraduate research The School of Education and Professional Development provides a supportive and stimulating environment for postgraduate research students from a wide range of professional and cultural backgrounds, as shown by our strong results in the ‘PRES’, the regular international survey of postgraduate research student satisfaction with their research student experience.

Many of the graduates from our postgraduate research programmes now occupy senior positions in education in both the United Kingdom and overseas.

We offer the opportunity to study at PhD, EdD and Masters by Research levels. More information, including current fee-waiver scholarship opportunities, can be found on the HudCRES website.

Tina Froggett MRes Children, Wellbeing and Creative Learning Environments I feel very lucky to have been awarded the Sir Al Ansley Green scholarship to complete my Masters by Research and then continue studying towards a PhD.

My research focuses on children’s wellbeing and how mothers and early years professionals use their knowledge to provide learning environments for children.

Since starting last September I’ve never looked back – I just love being here and part of this amazing research community.

I’ve met Sir Al in person to talk about my research and meet monthly with my supervisor to ensure my research is on the right track. You’re matched to a supervisor who has knowledge of your research area, but all the staff are amazing and I feel that I could approach any one of them to get help around a particular topic.

I am also co-writing some chapters for a book that’s due to be published by the School of Education next year. I feel very inspired by all the different opportunities that my research will open up to me.

Hieu Kieu PhD HE Policy My PhD research focuses on Higher Education reform policy in Vietnam – it’s a topic that’s high on the agenda at the moment.

Being part of the School of Education has really helped inspire me to look further at different systems and how these might inform the agenda back home.

As a PhD student you have great freedom, however sometimes this can feel like quite an isolated journey. At Huddersfield I’ve felt part of a really strong and vibrant research community throughout. I’ve attended lots of interactive research seminars, skills enhancement workshops and researcher forums. I also get to work with other researchers from across the university in the Research Hub. This side of things is really invaluable for mixing and sharing experiences with others.

I’m already writing articles and attending conferences as a part of my research journey.

Once I’ve finished my research I hope to use my skills and experiences to supervise others undertaking similar research studies.

hud.ac.uk/research/education

Improving subject-specialist pedagogy in vocational teaching The University of Huddersfield is leading a three-year project to better understand and enhance subject-specific pedagogy in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes for teachers of vocational science, engineering and technology (SET) in further education colleges. We are setting out to identify what characterises good teaching on vocational SET courses before implementing an intervention during ITE that is designed to improve SET teachers’ pedagogical decisions.

Our project, ITE-VocSET, is funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which has for many years had a commitment to improving technical education and has previously collaborated with us on related projects. ITE-VocSET is currently in phase one which involves researching and designing the ITE intervention, which will comprise both on-line and face-to-face resources and sessions.

Phase two, from September 2016, involves the implementation of the intervention across four universities in England, including the University of Huddersfield, each of which have significant ITE provision for FE teachers.

We expect around sixty to eighty trainees to participate in total.

Phase three, from September 2017, will involve evaluation of impact through revisiting the participants and we will then disseminate our findings.

Professor Kevin Orr ITE-VocSET Project Director

ITE-VocSET has the ambitious aim of improving vocational teachers’ decisions in the classroom or workshop. To that end, we are focusing on how subject specialist knowledge might inform, for example, the effective sequencing of teaching or expectations of students’ understanding at appropriate thresholds.

Beyond our control, the teachers’ own experience and level of knowledge as well as the context in which they practise affect their decisions.

Although those influences and others are not determined by our project, we will report on what we can identify to enable a judgement of what allows strong vocational pedagogy.

How, though, will we judge if our ITE intervention has itself had any impact at all? That is, perhaps, the most difficult aspect of the whole project. We will gather data from participants before and well after their involvement in the intervention and we will collect data from similar trainees who were not involved. We will also examine the language that participants later use to explain their pedagogical decisions to identify influences, if any, from the intervention to help us make a judgement.

By the end of phase three we will have produced a set of resources for vocational teachers’ ITE including a rationale for its construction, an evaluation of the intervention’s effectiveness, and also a method to evaluate other pedagogical innovations that others might use in different circumstances. We have a lot to do!

Our blog will provide regular updates relating to the project, in addition to signposting articles connected with the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sectors, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and the broader skills and training conversation. blogs.hud.ac.uk/subject-areas/ subject-specialist-pedagogy

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Our publications Pre-order and Receive a 20% SocialToday Justice, Transformation and Knowledge: Discount

Policy, Workplace Learning and Skills JamesJustice, Avis (2016) Social

Routledge ISBN 978-1138813137 Transformation and Knowledge Social Justice, Transformation and Knowledge examines the policy contexts Policy, Workplace Learning and Skills in which lifelong learning, vocational education and training and skill development

is set. It provides a critique of neo-liberalism and its impact on vocational education and training and lifelong learning. It interrogates potentially progressive policy interventions that take for granted capitalist relations as these can become a form of ‘comfort radicalism’ that whilst calling for structural change remain lodged within capitalism. Such analyses are limited, particularly in austere conditions of worklessness.

James Avis, University of Huddersfield, UK

February 2016 | 234x156 | 176pp

Social Justice, Transformation and Knowledge examines the policy contexts in which lifelong learning, vocational education and training and skill development is set. It provides a critique of neo-liberalism and its impact on vocational education and training and lifelong learning.

It interrogates potentially progressive policy interventions that take for granted capitalist relations as these can become a form of ‘comfort radicalism’ that whilst calling for structural change remain lodged within capitalism. Such analyses are limited, particularly in austere conditions of worklessness.

Offering detailed discussions within UK, European and global contexts, this book proves an insightful and critical text which illustrates Professor Avis’ extensive experience and knowledge of the field.

Offering detailed discussions within UK, European and global contexts, this book proves an insightful and critical text which illustrates Professor Avis’ extensive experience and knowledge of the field.

Muslims, Schooling and the Question of Self-Segregation Shamim Miah (2015) 20% Discount Available - enter the code FLR40 at checkout*

Palgrave Macmillian ISBN 9781137347756

Pb: 978-1-138-81314-4 | Discounted Price £25.59 Hb: 978-1-138-81313-7 | Discounted Price £76.00

Drawing on empirical research amongst both Muslim schools’ students and parents, this timely book examines the question of ‘self-segregation’ and Muslims in light * Offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer or discount and only applies to ofpurchased keydirectly policy developments around ‘race’, faith and citizenship. books via our website.

For more details, or to request a copy for review, please contact: Rebecca Jackson, Marketing Assistant, rebecca.jackson@tandf.co.uk

“This book makes an incisive intellectual contribution to understanding contemporary For more information visit: educational politics, policy and practice, with a specific focus on the schooling www.routledge.com/9781138813144 of Muslim students. It brilliantly investigates several highly contested concepts segregation, integration, radicalisation, Britishness offering innovative insights into how we re-imagine educational equality and justice.”

Mairtin Mac an Ghail, Professor of Education at Newman University, Birmingham.

The University Repository The University of Huddersfield Repository is an electronic archive of all of the University’s research output – references to journal articles and other outputs produced by academic staff within the School of Education and Professional Development are contained within it. In many cases the full text is directly available to download. It can be accessed here: eprints.hud.ac.uk Some recently published articles: Reid, James (2016) Engaging with childhood: student placements and the employability agenda.

Childhood: A journal of global child research, 23 (2). pp. 286-300. ISSN 0907-5682. Accepted text available to download: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/25641 Tett, Lyn (2016) Learning, literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37 (3). pp. 427-444. ISSN 0142-5692. Accepted text available to download: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/21248 Simmons, Robin and Smyth, John (2016) Crisis of youth or youth in crisis? Education, employment and legitimation crisis. International Journal of Lifelong Education. ISSN 0260-1370. Available from Taylor and Francis: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02601370.2016.1164470

hud.ac.uk/research/education

Our events

HudCRES holds regular public lectures and seminars.

We are currently finalising our programme for 2016-17.

The confirmed events are shown in the table below.

During the 2015-16 academic year, these include International seminars on ‘Policy, pedagogy and practice in higher vocational education’ and ‘Engaging children and young people: creative methods and research ethics’, as well as lectures and seminars by Professor Diane Reay, University of Cambridge and Professor Louise Archer, Kings College London.

Events are advertised through the University Events page hud.ac.uk/events – search for HudCRES.

The corruption of Capitalism: why rentiers thrive and work does not pay

8 November, 2016

Guy Standing, Research Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Who cares about vocational education and training?

Pedagogy and pathways for the ‘overlooked middle’

1 December, 2016

Kevin Orr, Professorial Inaugural Lecture.

Social Justice, local and global policy and adult literacy

18 January, 2017

Professor Lyn Tett, HudCRES Policy research group.

SEPD/HudCRES Research Conference

March 2017 (tbc)

Dealing with difference: journeys through time and space

6 April, 2017

Pete Sanderson, Professorial Inaugural Lecture.

Phone Clones: The authenticity work of transnational call centre workers in India

8 June, 2017

Kiran Mirchandani, Associate Professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Send an email to HudCRES@hud.ac.uk if you would like to be added to our future events mailing list.

Contact us HudCRES@hud.ac.uk

Follow us on Twitter:

+44 (0)1484 478249

@HudCRES

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