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The Real Honour
As a newly announced recipient of an OBE for ‘Services to Higher Education’ I am experiencing a strange mix of emotions and questions. The biggest emotion other than embarrassment is sadness that my mum died last year and won’t get to be there when I pick it up. The biggest question is to wonder why…
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“You say … I hear …” tensions in professional/parent partnerships
In this blog entry Nick Hodge and Katherine Runswick-Cole reflect on some of the factors that might lead to a lack of understanding between practitioners and parents/carers of children with Special Educational Needs. Inspired by #festABLE tweets, a blog about dealing with difficult parents of children with SEND and a very kind mention in Jarlath…
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The Perilous Praise Burger (Or ‘In search of the Artisan Praise Burger’)
In a world of over-reliance upon pre-packaged off the peg solutions, where convenience food is pervasive due to the time-poverty phenomenon of modern life, convenience is often seen as the number one priority in everything. In this world, are over-worked teachers (NEU, 2018) (also recently reported in The Guardian, 2017), reliant upon the fast-food model…
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Stephen Lawrence and Closing the Black and Minority Ethnic attainment gap
I was privileged to be invited to the service to commemorate Stephen Lawrence’s death and perhaps more importantly celebrate his life and legacy. St Martin-in-the-fields welcomed family, friends, royalty, politicians, senior police officers, celebrities, community leaders, those emboldened by Stephen’s life to act and those who have benefited from his legacy. In this famous church…
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Research-Engaged Practice in Education
This month the Research-Engaged Practice Network (REPN) are back after a brief period of rest, with research being presented from a range of practitioner-led perspectives, including the Primary Science for All project, the Research Schools Network and South Yorkshire Futures. For those that aren’t aware of the REPN, it provides a way in which all…
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The Only Fresh Air is Outside in the Yard
This film made is about the ways that children can sometimes slide through school without getting a great deal of benefit from being there. It looks particularly at the impact a teacher can have by noticing the thing that makes a child tick and thinking about how that child can be included in the school community.…
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“Dans ma trousse, j’ai…”SIoE conference offers inspiring models for learning in a foreign language
The inaugural Association for Language Learning /SIOE cross-curricular language learning conference took place this summer at the SIOE. For the first time academics and practitioners from Anglophone countries and similar contexts across all phases converged to explore how content and language integrated learning pedagogy could be applied to different contexts and subjects. The range of…
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Changing writing
I can just remember the last two occasions on which I signed my name. The first, a fortnight ago, was when I validated a friend’s passport photograph and the second, only the other day, involved signing for a parcel – and for that I used a fingernail to scrawl my name on a handheld device.…
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University Assessment and a High Court Judgement
A genre analysis of university assessments by lecturers may prevent a forensic analysis of them in the High Court. The High Court judgement in the case brought by a former student against Oxford University excited much coverage in the press last week. Mr Faiz Siddiqui had claimed that the teaching at Oxford had been so…
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THIS LGBT HISTORY MONTH LET’S REMEMBER THE DIVERSITY OF LGBT PEOPLE
How often have you heard someone talk about ‘the heterosexual community’? Rarely or never, I would guess, but the phrase ‘LGBT community’ is frequently used by policy-makers, service providers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people themselves, particularly during February, which is LGBT history month. So what understandings and experiences does that phrase conjure…
Got any book recommendations?