-
Expertise, voice and ‘being useful’: participatory research with young children and environmental education
How can research with children inform policy in relation to community engagement with climate solutions? And what are the implications of the context we find ourselves working in; a context of increasingly urgent calls for ‘solutions’ to climate collapse, with an emphasis on time as ‘running out’, Voices of the Future, a three-year, multi-site project…
-
Putting a value on it: a theory of litter picking
In educational research, we often ‘do theory’ as a preamble to what we theorise about. For example, in theses and dissertations, a literature review is most often undertaken before data-gathering. This structuring is necessary to assist students through the process. In ‘real life’, though, we tend to engage in habitual social practices to which theory…
-
AI is the vehicle, but we are the drivers
Technological developments have always caused a stir in education. Some of us are old enough to remember the concerns of many teachers in the late 1970s and early 1980s that ownership and use of the pocket calculator would result in an innumerate population. But as slide rules and log tables went into hibernation, mathematics examinations…
-
Making the grass greener for teachers
Sometimes we are prone to thinking that the grass is greener elsewhere, but in terms of flexible working practices, the verdancy is more striking in the wider workforce compared to working in schools. Teachers have worked this out; more than six out of ten have said they are highly likely to leave teaching in order…
-
Why climate change must be in the new national curriculum
In July 2024, the new Labour government announced a review of the national curriculum. Two of its stated aims are to ‘ensure children and young people leave compulsory education ready for life and ready for work’, and to ‘reflect the issues … of our society.’ If the review is to succeed in these aims, it…
-
If walls could talk…
I’ve often wrestled with how we understand and treat neurodivergent children in schools. We tend to focus on diagnoses, behaviours, and interventions—essentially reducing children to two-dimensional shorthand. This flattening of experience misses something vital: the human, emotional, messy, lived realities of these children. That’s what led me to fiction, and why I believe it can…
-
Read it again, and again, and again….
As anyone with young children in their lives knows, those young children love to hear the same stories again and again and again. It may be tiresome for adults, but children love listening to the same story. Why is that? And could repeated reading benefit children’s learning and development? Repetition is a fundamental learning process,…
-
Sceptical of scepticism? The political epistemologies of experience
Those of us in the business of teaching and researching education think – and talk – a lot about ‘experience’. For example, capturing the ‘lived experiences’ of participants is a key aim of interpretivist forms of research. But what do we mean by ‘experience’? It depends on who you ask. There are in fact key…
-
Blank pages
November is academic writing month, and here I am writing. In the Peak District, where I live and do my writing work, it’s chilly and misty. At the end of the day, I’ll take my Labrador, Jussi, for a run around on the moor to wind down. The fog can make it spooky up there,…
-
Educating Kemi: resisting negative narratives around neurodiversity
The Tory leadership contender, Kemi Badenoch, has recently made some ‘stigmatising’ and confused remarks concerning autistic people. This is just the latest chapter in what has become an ongoing spectacle of socio-cultural posturing within what the media often calls the “culture wars.” Not content with vilifying asylum seekers and trans people, Badenoch is now targeting…
Got any book recommendations?