• Writing on writing: five suggestions for challenging your writing practices

    Writing on writing: five suggestions for challenging your writing practices

    In this post I reflect on strategies that help me write. Of course, I still get stuck, distracted or temporarily disheartened, feeling that whatever I write is inadequate. But writing captures, however clumsily, an expression of an idea, an argument, a position, at a moment in time. And it can always be revised. As I […]

  • Writing the doctorate

    Writing the doctorate

    Writing the doctorate is hard. I am reminded of this of late, as four of my doctoral students are in the mythical writing up stage. I say ‘mythical’ because we all know that students don’t just ‘write up’ once the data analysis is done and dusted. My students have been writing continuously over the course […]

  • Widening Participation in 2023: shifting policy drivers, shifting institutional responses

    Widening Participation in 2023: shifting policy drivers, shifting institutional responses

    Widening participation is essentially about two things: 1) making it easier for underrepresented groups to access higher education than it would be otherwise – a project closely tied to notions of social justice and attempts to eradicate access inequality; 2) it is about ensuring that there is a sufficiently highly educated labour force for the […]

  • Teachers of the world, we salute you!

    Teachers of the world, we salute you!

    To celebrate World Teachers’ Day 2023, colleagues at the Sheffield Institute of Education recall the teachers that meant the world to us.  Mr Eskdale, Gosforth East Middle School, Newcastle Upon-Tyne, 1976-1979Mr Eskdale understood, as I look back at it now, that if you take an interest in a child, they will be motivated to do […]

  • To decolonise or to diversify? Untangling the terminology of emancipatory curriculum design

    To decolonise or to diversify? Untangling the terminology of emancipatory curriculum design

    “You cannot take authority over things that are not named.” Thus spoke Professor Udy Archibong, Pro-VC for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Bradford, at a conference on the ethnicity degree awarding gap that I attended earlier this year. She was responding to the idea that some universities might prefer to talk about […]

  • Celebrating ten years of research and innovation in Sheffield Institute of Education

    Celebrating ten years of research and innovation in Sheffield Institute of Education

    As the new academic year begins, we celebrate ten years of research and innovation in Sheffield Institute of Education, taking the opportunity to thank Sam Twiselton for her leadership and support throughout this time. In 2013, the education staff of Sheffield Hallam University were brought together in the Sheffield Institute of Education, with Sam Twiselton […]

  • A year in a blog

    A year in a blog

    I took over editorship of the SIoE blog at the start of this academic year with an idea of what I wanted it to be: a forum to debate current or controversial issues in education; a forum to share teaching innovations and our creative classroom practice; and a forum for us to learn more about […]

  • Unlocking potential: navigating personal data sharing across multiple universities for enhanced collaboration

    Unlocking potential: navigating personal data sharing across multiple universities for enhanced collaboration

    Are you or students you supervise involved in research collecting personal data across a number of different partners or institutions? Are you involved in collecting data at the post-graduate level? Before you encounter the myriad pitfalls and considerations, please read this blog… the insights will equip you with the confidence and expertise to navigate the […]

  • The poetry of reflection

    The poetry of reflection

    We love poetry and we love teaching. But is it possible to combine the two? We came across an article in the Times Higher Education (Illingworth, 2022) that did just that, and decided to try it. This post describes our experiences of using poetry to widen the horizons of our trainees, showing them how they […]

  • Autism understanding

    Autism understanding

    For an accessible visual and audio version with captions please watch Luke’s YouTube video.  *************************************************************************************************************************************** I can’t stand it any longer. The stress, the stress. Constant stress unless I’m drunk. I’m drunk far too often, but how else do I cope? My dream came true, and I wish it hadn’t. They told me that university […]

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