pathway: Education Alumni

Children from armed forces families have unique needs and face uncommon challenges. Yet their experiences are under-researched and too frequently overlooked in UK educational policy and practice. My research aim is to sharpen our understanding of service children’s needs and inform policy and practice in schools. Using an ethnographic and participant, task-centred approach I seek to explore children’s experiences, identities and agency, and how these intersect with policy and practice in schools and the military.  My personal history informs this research, as a former service child and a teacher in a school that serves an RAF community.

Much of school mealtime policy and research has been shaped and continues to be shaped by the promotion of nutrition and health.  However, this does not capture the social significance of school mealtimes or the role it plays in children’s socialisation processes.  My research takes an ethnographic approach to explore school mealtimes as important cultural sites that socialise children into mealtime comportment, commensality, communicative expectations, sociality, morality and understandings of diverse and complex relationships.  Its considers how school mealtimes are replete with social messages of appropriate ways to think, act and feel in the world, recognising the multiplicity of the avenues through which children get to know the social world and their place within it.

The thesis ‘Intensive IELTS Writing Preparation in China and Japan’ was given a British Council Research Assessment Award in 2014. In 2015/16 he was a recipient of the Newton Fund Scholarship – a competitive grant to promote researcher mobility and encourage British-Chinese academic relations – as well as funding to support different sections of upcoming overseas research trips from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) and the ESRC. In 2016 Tony will spend two months at the British Council in Tokyo, and a subsequent six months working at Zhejiang University under the guidance of Professor Lianzhen He, Dean of International Studies.