pathway: Education Alumni

I’m interested in the knowledges and literacies refugee-background children bring with them and how these are (not) used within our monolingual, monocultural curriculum, which often views non-English speakers as running at a “deficit”. Within this, I focus on how these assumptions affect refugee integration into society, their sense of belonging, and their developing identities within the label of refugee.

At a broader level, I explore discourses of migration, particularly how mediatised political narratives of the migrant and the “refugee crisis” affect the influence of research on policy, pedagogy, and the interplay between these.

My research is concerned with teacher resilience, principally focusing on the contribution of initial teacher training and early career experiences to resilience development. My research explores this important area from the perspective of secondary school teachers who are five to ten years post qualification: teachers viewed as “survivors”, having successfully navigated their early careers.  I hope that my project will support the development of policy and practice in initial training and early career support for teachers, as well as contributing to a better understanding of the complex topic of professional resilience.

My research is an exploration into the motivation for learning of pupils who have been excluded from school. I have selected a narrative design to investigate the complex nature of motivation for learning by investigating how a pupil’s motivational journey has resulted in their exclusion and lack of engagement with their education.

My research involves exploring language learning, identity and integration amongst adult migrant and refugee learners of English in the UK. I seek to better understand how language learning and integration inter-relate, and the barriers and facilitators to both these processes. I am particularly interested in migrant and refugee English language learners’ perspectives of what successful integration might look like for them; as well as political discourse and policy on English language and integration. I am also interested in how identity negotiation, identity positions and agency interact with the processes of language learning and integration.

My research includes exploring the use of participatory tools for researching with ‘non-proficient’ speakers of English, as well as combining qualitative and quantitative research methods.

My research explores how British students, with different imaginaries of their ‘place’ in the world (socially and spatially), navigate increasingly globally-integrated fields of higher education. It foregrounds the experiences of British young people across two starkly different research sites: an elite international school in Singapore, South East Asia; and a state school in Rotherham, a deindustrialised town in northern England. Using participatory cognitive mapping methods and semi-structured interviews, I argue that youth transitions to higher education are mediated by powerful socio-spatial geometries structuring higher education, and that young people are positioned inequitably in relation to changing power structures shaped by the globalisation and internationalisation of higher education.

Previous research suggests that much professional learning takes place within informal workplace contexts, and that inter-professional support may be an important aspect of this learning.

The first stage of my PhD project seeks to explore the support, advice and feedback that junior doctors receive during their first year, using qualitative analytical methods, and specifically:

(i)            which other staff members provide support;

(ii)           what factors influence whether support is sought, when and how it is provided, and

(iii)          if such assistance positively influences doctor’s learning and patient outcomes.

My PhD thesis explores the complex linguistic identities which are constructed by young people attending a complementary language school in London. In this study, over a period of 4-5 months, I am investigating the way in which young people attending a German Saturday school use language to construct and negotiate their identities. It is a linguistic ethnographic study based in one North-London Saturday school. The research focuses on four students’ language practices within the environment of the Saturday school. By sharing my findings with teachers in complementary schools, I aim to help to increase their awareness of their students’ organic linguistic repertoires and complex identities.