pathway: Education

My work focuses on early literacy development in rural Tanzania. International initiatives and interventions in this area largely focus on assumptions about children’s foundational literacy learning drawn from Anglo-American contexts and overlook evidence of how children interact with and use printed materials in their family and community. I use a socio-culturally situated and multimodal framing of literacy which draws on children’s play and their religious and community practices, and how their relationships with siblings, peers and family members support this early literacy learning and development.   

Learning is highly relational, yet prevailing discourses in education position students as individually responsible for learning, attainment, and behaviour. My research follows a group of students from Yeat 9 to Year 11 to explore how narratives around attainment and learning influence students’ co-construction of an ethics of responsibility. I explore feminist and queer theoretical re-framings of responsibility that offer potential to rethink individualising impulses that position students in opposition to others, to consider new modes of cooperative relationality in school cultures.

Since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, English literature teachers have been challenged to diversify their reading lists and to teach in ways that celebrate and support minoritised students. I will study how literature teachers in London and New Orleans manage to teach about racial and ethnic identity, and feel confident in doing so, while navigating anti-Critical Race Theory pressures ad discourses. The project will involve me conducting case studies – on both sides of the Atlantic — to identify the practical skills that confident English teachers use compared to those who are less confident in teaching about identity through literature. My aim is to co-design training materials to support British and American teachers to build confidence in teaching about identity and belonging through literature curriculums.

 

Publications

 

Elliott, V., Nelson-Addy, L., Chantiluke, R. & Courtney, M. (2021) Lit in Colour Diversity in Literature in English Schools. London: Penguin & Runnymede Trust

 

Chantiluke.R, Kwoba.B, Nkopo.A, Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire (London: Zed Books), 2018

Advances in AI and Machine translation are making headlines.  But we still need human linguists, translators and interpreters (TI).  Adapting language and TI education to this technological shift is crucial to avoid deepening the current ‘language crisis’. Part of that adaptation will depend on undergraduate language teachers who teach at the boundary between humanities and TI.  Adopting a cross-national mixed methods approach, my inquiry asks: How can teacher voices and cross-disciplinary knowledge contribute to the creation of innovative tools for language teacher development with and for TI in a post-AI era?

 

Publications:

(Based on MSc module assignment ‘Designing and communicating research’ (DCR))

 

Published in: The Linguist (summer edition), CIOL magazine.

“Is research working? Better use and understanding of translation are key to improving global research”

https://www.ciol.org.uk/sites/default/files/TheLinguistSummer24-website.pdf

 

Book translation:

one of a series of 4 books in English on ‘Shanghai Culture’.

Title: Shanghai Women,

Author: MA Shanglong,

Translator: Celine Garbutt.

Publisher: Shanghai University Press

ISBN 978 – 7 – 5671 – 4647 – 1

I work as a senior educator developer specialising in inclusive education teaching and learning practice. My participatory neurodivergent-led research project examines the phenomenology of neurodivergent learner shame. It aims to unpick the messages that neurodivergent young people starting university have internalised about their ability to succeed in education, reflect on how stigmatised academic identities are managed, and think about what educators can do to nurture a healthier academic identity. I am working with Tourette’s Action charity and University of Exeter’s Neurodivergent and Disabled Students’ Society on creative ways to engage a wider variety of neurodivergent people in participatory research.

In my research, I plan to develop a methodology for the co-creation of Climate Change Education (CCE) through collaboration between young climate activists (YCAs) and in-service teachers. For me CCE is not a topic which should eb left to Science or Geography – I am interested in every aspect of climate change, in particular issues of climate justice and how they intersect with other issues of epistemic justice. I am heavily influenced by critical theory and ideas from critical pedagogy, from thinkers such as Paolo Freire. In my project, teachers and young people will be positioned as co-creators of pedagogy, with the young people bringing the specialist knowledge of climate justice, as well as their own experience and understanding of pedagogy. The research will examine both the experiences of the participants in this collaborative, youth-led process of curriculum making in relation to CCE, as well as the outcomes of that process in the form of novel pedagogical approaches.

My research aims to draw on ideas from anthropology and education to explore the possibility of using drama as an art-based pedagogy in early childhood education among marginalized communities. I would be conducting an ethnographic research using visual and other methods on the early years classroom practice and children’s experiences in the selected state preschools of India. In the next stage, by working with an NGO, a drama based pedagogical intervention will be facilitated and developed in collaboration with the early year education teachers. In the final phase I intend to explore the impact of the intervention.

This research focuses on the urgent global call for education systems to be reimagined into a ‘new social contract’ that can repair injustices while transforming the future. Based in Rwanda where, despite challenges, there is strong political support for education transformation, this doctoral research seeks to explore the dynamics of environmental and epistemic justice and the potential for structural and transformative change through the integration of transgressive Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) methodologies into the newly introduced Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC). Collaborating with the Albertine Rift Conservation Society (ARCOS) and involving a research team of teachers, students, and parents, with NGO, ministry and district representatives, and academics in six Rwandan Eco-Schools, the research will use transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation approaches to explore and co-produce new learning approaches, pedagogical tools and curriculum guidance to support the integration of Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and 4 (Quality Education) in the CBC.

My research explores inclusion and exclusion issues within the Nigerian higher education system. I have selected an ethnography design to contribute to the decolonial discourse, its struggle and transformation of higher education, especially in the global south, and bring to the fore the issues around Inclusion and exclusion raised by the admission policy and selection into higher education. Finally, I hope my research will give the oppressed or marginalised students the avenue to share their everyday experiences of inequity and inequalities in the university.

Key researchers have identified challenges for deaf children with literacy, and found a gap between deaf learners’ cognitive abilities and their language learning levels. Deaf children struggle with depicting English sounds in writing because British Sign Language (BSL) does not have a written orthography.  My study would enable me to conduct an investigation to explore a deaf child’s bi-literacy potential by using BSL in its written form – SLwrite (Sign Language Write).

The overall aim is to examine whether deaf children, if taught a representational, written form of their native visual-gestural sign language (L1), may better develop improved cognitive abilities in order to regenerate literacy skills in their second language, English (L2).