Past seminars

Recordings are available for some seminars. Please view the seminar details for the link.

When	Time	Description	Add to your calendar
6 June 2023	13:00	POSTPONED School of Education Lecture Series: Dr Rob Higham (University College London) Full details	Add event
9 May 2023	16:30	POSTPONED School of Education Lecture Series: Associate Professor Dr Kristiina Kumpulainen (Simon Fraser University) Full details	Add event
14 March 2023	13:00	School of Education Lecture Series: Professor Katherine Runswick-Cole (University of Sheffield) Full details	Add event
7 February 2023	9:00	School of Education Lecture Series: Professor Neil Selwyn (Monash University) Full details	Add event
22 November 2022	13:00	School of Education Lecture Series - Professor Fiona Maine (University of Exeter) Full details	Add event
18 October 2022	16:30	School of Education Lecture Series: Professor Stephen Ball, University College London Full details	Add event
6 July 2022	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Liz Pellicano (University College London) - Reimagining Autistic education: Lessons learnt from remote learning during lockdown Full details	Add event
7 June 2022	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Lee Elliot Major (University of Exeter) Full details	Add event
3 May 2022	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (University of British Columbia) Facing Human Wrongs: Navigating the complexities and paradoxes of social and global change. Full details	Add event
1 February 2022	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Andreas Hadjar (University of Luxembourg) Full details	Add event
23 November 2021	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Martin Ubani (University of Eastern Finland) Full details	Add event
18 October 2021	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - St Luke's Day Lecture - Professor Gemma Moss (Institute of Education, University College London) Full details	Add event
8 October 2021	10:00	Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network Seminar: Multilingualism, language education and social participation Full details	Add event
8 June 2021	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Arathi Sriprakash (University of Bristol) Full details	Add event
4 May 2021	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - Associate Professor Sam Friedman (London School of Economics and Political Science) Full details	Add event
9 March 2021	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Dr Heather Ellis (University of Sheffield) Full details	Add event
5 February 2021		International Seminar: Mediation at the Heart of Learning Grammar A seminar discussing a range of issues related to teaching and learning grammar. Full details	Add event
2 February 2021	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Franziska Felder, University of Vienna) Full details	Add event
24 November 2020	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Professor Joe Elliott (Principal of Collingwood College, Durham University) Full details	Add event
15 October 2020	16:30	GSE Lecture Series - St Luke's Day Lecture - Professor Becky Francis (Chief Executive Officer, Education Endowment Foundation) Full details	Add event
9 June 2020	13:00	CANCELLED Lecture by Dr Sam Friedman (The London School of Economics and Political Science) Full details	Add event
5 May 2020	16:30	CANCELLED Lecture by Dr Aratha Sriprakash (Cambridge University) Full details	Add event
20 March 2020	9:30	CANCELLED Lecture by Professor Joe Elliott (Durham University): "The dyslexia debate" Full details	Add event
10 March 2020	13:00	CANCELLED Lecture by Dr Franziska Felder (University of Zurich) - The ethics of inclusion, or: why we still need to talk about what inclusion means Full details	Add event
5 February 2020	10:30	Centre for Social Mobility Seminar series: Professor Steven Jones, University of Manchester The Centre for Social Mobility is delighted to welcome its first seminar speaker of 2020. We are delighted to host Professor Steven Jones, University of Manchester. Please come and join us for what promises to be a stimulating talk and some informal discussion afterwards!. Full details	Add event
4 February 2020	16:30	Lecture by Dr Antonio Olmedo (University of Bristol) New landscapes and logics of competition in education: geography, demography and equity in English education policy This talk explores the new landscapes of competition in the English educational system. Such new landscape is part of broader processes of N/neoliberalisation, which involve not only changes at a structural level but also a reconfiguration of the subjectivities of political actors (from politicians to teachers and parents). Full details	Add event
9 December 2019	11:30	Considering a PhD in Education? Dedicated information session for students on studying a PhD with the Graduate School of Education Have you thought about what to do after your Masters? Are you considering a PhD?. Full details	Add event
30 October 2019	13:00	Creativity and Emergent Educational-futures Network (CEEN) Research Seminar Full details	Add event
24 October 2019	11:30	Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra @ St Luke's BSO musicians and Learning staff lead a seminar introducing their music work in classrooms. You can also hear the musicians play in pop up concerts in Cross Keys today at 10.45am and 12.30pm.. Full details	Add event
18 October 2019	15:00	St Luke's Day Lecture by Professor Daniel Muijs (Head of Research at Ofsted) Full details	Add event
11 June 2019	13:00	Lecture by Professor Neil Humphrey (University of Manchester) Are the kids alright? Examining the intersection between education and mental health Full details	Add event
16 May 2019	12:00	Creative research methods interactive semimar Join us for an interactive seminar where three members of CEEN will be sharing how they are / have been using creative methods in their research. Full details	Add event
7 May 2019	16:30	A lecture by Professor Elizabeth de Freitas (Manchester Metropolitan University: Affect, sympathy and the felt experience of form Full details	Add event
20 March 2019	13:30	Professor Debby Cotton: Widening Participation, Retention and Student Success Professor Debby Cotton, Head of Teaching and Learning, University of Plymouth, jointly hosted by The Education Incubator Team. There will be an opportunity to continue the discussion over tea afterwards. Full details	Add event
12 March 2019	13:00	A lecture by Professor Cathy Burnett (Sheffield Hallam University), The messiness of literacy: unsettling simple accounts of literacy through a baroque perspective on virtual play Full details	Add event
5 February 2019	16:30	Lecture by Professor Wasyl Cajkler (University of Leicester), Lesson Study and Growth of Pedagogic Literacy in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Full details	Add event
27 November 2018	13:00	GSE Lecture Series - Introduction to Research in the Centre for Social Mobility A series of seven lightening talks showcasing the research in the Centre for Social Mobility. Full details	Add event
15 November 2018	14:00	Exploring Pluri-Logicality - ‘The Literature Review’ Seminar This seminar will build on the ‘Exploring Plurilogicality’ interactive symposium that CEEN (Creativity and Emergent Educational-futures Network) held in July 2018.. Full details	Add event
18 October 2018	16:30	Lecture by Professor Michael W. Apple (University of Wisconsin), Can Education Change Society? Many people take it for granted that there can be no serious change in education unless "society" changes. While these arguments need to be taken seriously, there are substantive conceptual, historical, and political problems with them. Furthermore they can lead to cynicism. I critically examine a number of these claims and argue for a position in which education can indeed participate in social transformation. Full details	Add event
17 October 2018	13:30	Speaker series: Associate Professor Neil Harrison, UWE Full details	Add event
26 September 2018	10:00	CRISTEME seminar A seminar with Dr Nigel Calder, University of Waikato, new Zealand. Full details	Add event
26 June 2018	13:00	Seminar by Emeritus Professor Ian Menter (University of Oxford) Teacher education and government: a tale of two countries The relationships between politics and teacher education have become increasingly close over recent decades in many contexts around the world, often causing significant challenges as well as some opportunities. Full details	Add event
5 June 2018	17:00	Seminar by Dr Laura Black (University of Manchester) Deepening Engagement in Mathematical Learning: A question of ‘identity’? This seminar will focus on the concept of identity and its value for exploring both engagement in learning and alienation from formal schooling. I will draw on work from across our research projects which have looked at students’ relationships with mathematics in a variety of contexts, including post 16 A-level mathematics, mathematically demanding programmes at university and more recently in early primary school (aged 5-6 years old). I will argue that identity provides a useful way to understand how our experiences ‘in practice’ become crystallised (through reflection) into statements about who we are as a person – for example, ‘I did this well’ may become ‘maths makes sense to me’ and eventually ‘I am gifted at maths’. Our work in this area has considered how students’ mathematical identities are mediated by practices which are classed, gendered etc. Therefore, in this seminar, I will argue that researching ‘identity’ is not merely a matter of addressing the STEM agenda by increasing engagement (and participation) in mathematically related subjects, but rather it can provide a lens through which to study the function mathematics plays in re-producing broader social inequalities in education.. Full details	Add event
22 May 2018	13:00	Seminar by Professor Dongbo Zhang (University of Exeter) Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Reading Development In this talk, I will discuss development of reading abilities from cross-linguistic perspectives. Print represents spoken language, which is a universal principle that holds across languages; yet how specifically different linguistic units are encoded in print vary from language to language. The similarities and variations in language-to-print mapping relationships suggest universal as well as language/script-specific processes in early reading development. Full details	Add event
8 May 2018	17:00	Seminar by Dr Joanne Pearce (University College London) From Anthroposophy to non-confessional preparation for spirituality? It has been suggested common schools might be able to learn from spiritual education in Steiner schools. This assumes practice in Steiner schools is compatible with the aims of spiritual education in common schools. I question this by considering whether the former is confessional, as the latter should not be. I explain how my concern about the potentially confessional nature of Steiner spiritual education arose. I then argue for a nuanced understanding of confessional education, distinguishing between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ confessional education, as well as between confessional education as intentional and as defined by outcome. I argue that spiritual education in common schools should prepare pupils for spirituality, without being confessional. I consider whether Steiner schools are confessional by drawing upon findings from research conducted at six Steiner schools. Full details	Add event
6 February 2018	17:00	Seminar by Dr Marcello Giovanelli (Aston University) Text World Theory and teacher-oriented grammatics: Facilitating creativity, reading and writing in the classroom Stylistics has both over time and more recently underpinned much work that has gone on in EFL teaching, work in English departments in higher education, and creative and professional writing programmes. However, its potential influence as a valuable pedagogical tool for secondary age students (11-18) has yet to be fully explored. This paper therefore argues for a stylistics-informed pedagogy in the secondary phase drawing on Halliday’s notion of ‘grammatics’ as a way of using knowledge about language ‘to think with’. Specifically, I argue that Text World Theory offers an example of what I term ‘teacher-oriented grammatics’ and provides a cognitively-informed updating of existing readers-response theories which have traditionally been seen as highly attractive by teachers.. Full details	Add event
16 January 2018	17:00	Seminar by Professor Andrew Martin (University of New South Wales) Growth Approaches to Academic Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement Too many assessment systems represent a zero-sum game in which some students’ success comes at the expense of other students’ success. Under a growth framework, however, all students have access to a sense of achievement and efficacy; although they may not outperform peers, they can outperform their own previous efforts.. Full details	Add event
5 December 2017	13:00	Seminar by Dr Steven Jones (University of Manchester) Value-For-Money Discourses in English Higher Education In England, the notion of ‘value for money’ (VFM) is ubiquitous in discourses of Higher Education. Young people are assumed to make participation decisions based on rational cost-benefit analyses of long-term loan repayments against deferred graduate premium, and VFM is widely invoked as a driver of government policy.. Full details	Add event
21 November 2017	17:00	Seminar by Professor Carol Taylor (Sheffield Hallam University) Posthumanist/ new material feminist imaginaries for higher education research and pedagogy Posthumanism is a mobile term, a constellation of theories, concepts, approaches and practices which share an interest in destabilizing binaries, decentering the human, and forging new ways of doing and thinking ethics in relation. Posthumanism has been seen as both a ‘reaction’ to Humanism (Wolfe, 2010) and a recognition that the current era of the Anthropocene is having a destructive impact on the planet and its inhabitants. It is for these reasons that Rosi Braidotti (2013: 2) suggests that the post-human condition has introduced a ‘qualitative shift’ in our thinking about what ‘the basic unit of common reference is for our species, our polity and our relationships’, that Karen Barad (2007: 142) urges attention to ethico-onto-epistemological understandings of how matter comes to matter in more-than-human entanglements, and Donna Haraway (2016) argues for a speculative feminist practice of ‘making kin’ through relational acts of string-figuring.. Full details	Add event
7 November 2017	13:00	Seminar by Professor David Hall (University of Exeter) Education professionals and the permanent revolution of public service reform This seminar examines the implications of what is characterised as a permanent revolution of rapid and thoroughgoing educational reform upon teachers’ professional identities. Full details	Add event
24 October 2017	17:00	Seminar by Dr Colin Foster (University of Nottingham) Developing mathematical fluency: exercises or rich tasks? Achieving fluency in important mathematical procedures is fundamental to students’ mathematical development. The usual way to address procedural fluency in the classroom is by repetitive practice of routine exercises, but is this the only effective way?. Full details	Add event
13 June 2017	17:00	Seminar by Professor Judy Sebba (University of Oxford) 'The educational progress of looked after children: linking care and educational data' A systematic review by Aoife O’Higgins1 suggested that it is likely that care is a protective factor in educational outcomes. A major study was then undertaken into what factors seem to contribute to these poorer outcomes by linking two national datasets in England, that which records educational factors for all children with the data about their care careers. The analysis focused on the progress at secondary school of young people who had been in care for over a year at the time of taking their ‘school-leaving’ examinations in 2013. Detailed statistical analysis was complemented by interviews with 26 young people and with their foster carers, teachers, social workers and ‘Virtual School headteachers’ who are responsible for supporting their education. The findings are influencing policy and practice in England, for example on avoiding school moves of young people in care. Evaluations of the GLA’s London Fostering Achievement3 and the Attachment-Aware Schools Programme will also be drawn on. 1 O’Higgins, A., Sebba, J. & Luke, N. (2015) What is the relationship between being in care and the educational outcomes of children? An international systematic review. Oxford: Rees Centre 2 Sebba, J., Berridge, D., Luke, N., Fletcher, J., Bell, K., Strand, S., Thomas, S., Sinclair, I., O’Higgins, A., (2015) The Educational Progress of Looked After Children in England, The Rees Centre 3 Sebba, J., Luke, N., Plumridge, G. et al., (2016) Evaluation of the London Fostering Achievement Programme. London: GLA. Full details	Add event
23 May 2017	17:00	CANCELLED Seminar by Professor Keri Facer (University of Bristol) Due to unforeseen circumstances this seminar has had to be cancelled.. Full details	Add event
9 May 2017	17:00	CANCELLED Seminar by Dr Laura Black (University of Manchester) Unfortunately this seminar has been cancelled, we hope to reschedule in the Autumn term. Full details	Add event
21 March 2017	13:00	Seminar by Professor Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University) 'Religion in Schools: cultural change in Britain and the need for reform' On the one hand, 25 years of research on changing beliefs and values in modern Britain, and on the other a more recent proposal for change in the way religion is handled in state-sector schools in England and Wales (‘A New Settlement’, with Charles Clarke). After analysing some of the most profound cultural changes in Britain, I suggest how these have a bearing on the future of RE, school assemblies and faith schools. This seminar will be recorded. Full details	Add event
10 - 11 March 2017		Decolonizing Teacher Education An Expert Seminar hosted by the Centre for Creativity, Sustainability and Educational Futures Graduate School of Education. Full details	Add event
7 March 2017	17:00	Seminar by Professor Graeme Douglas (University of Birmingham) 'Including pupils with special educational needs and disability in national assessment: Comparison of international practice through an Inclusive Assessment Framework' The assessment of educational progress and outcomes of pupils is important to all concerned with education. This includes testing which is undertaken for accountability and award bearing purposes. This article examines how students with special educational needs and disability (SEND) are included in assessment. An “inclusive assessment” framework is outlined based around three core features: (1) all students are included and benefit from assessment; (2) assessments are accessible and appropriate for the diverse range of children in the education system; and (3) the full breadth of the curriculum is assessed (including curriculum areas of particular relevance to students with SEND). I will reflect upon policies and practice in different countries (especially England, Ireland and the US) to demonstrate how the framework. It is argued that the US and England have highly developed system-based approaches to assessment which seek to “include all” (feature 1) and be “accessible and appropriate” (feature 2). However, the analysis highlights that a consequence of such assessment approaches is the narrowing of the curriculum around topics that are assessed (most notably literacy and mathematics). Such approaches therefore may be at the expense of wider curriculum areas that have value for all students, but often of particular value for those with SEND (feature 3). It is argued that within such systems there may be a danger of neglecting the third feature of the inclusive assessment framework, i.e. ensuring that the full breadth of the curriculum is assessed. A consequence of such an omission could be a failure to assess and celebrate progress in relation to educational outcomes that are relevant to a diverse range of students. The presentation will draw upon a recent paper: Douglas, G., McLinden, M., Robertson, C., Travers, J., and Smith, E. (2016) Including pupils with special educational needs and disability in national assessment: Comparison of three country case studies through an inclusive assessment framework. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 63(1), 98-121. This seminar will be recorded. Full details	Add event
21 February 2017	13:00	Seminar by Professor Debra Myhill (University of Exeter) 'Do you know your adverbs from your articles? What place for grammar in the Curriculum?' In the context of national grammar tests for all 11 year olds, this presentation will explore briefly the contested place of grammar in the curriculum, and will offer a theorised rationale for the benefit of including grammar within the teaching of mother tongue language. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on Halliday’s social semiotic view of how language makes meaning, and on cognitive perspectives which consider the place of metalinguistic thinking in the process of writing. Using findings from a series of studies conducted in the Centre for Research in Writing, the presentation will illustrate how the teaching of writing can make meaningful connections for developing writers between language choices and meaning-making, and support them become more autonomous, independent writers. This seminar will be recorded. Full details	Add event
7 February 2017	17:00	Seminar by Professor Tim Oates (Cambridge Assessment) 'Why should we care about what children think? Using assessment gain insights into the mental life of children' In Wroxham School, primary school pupils present to their parents what they have learned as the core of parental consultation meetings. In schools only a few miles away, National Curriculum Levels continue to be the focus of parental consultations. In Michaela Community School, the pupils complete at home a range of daily subject-based tests. Such dense and frequent assessment would be considered anathema by other schools. This lecture will consider issues of granularity, analysis and precision in assessment - looking particularly at the purpose of assessment. It will draw on international comparative analysis of approaches to assessment as well as experimental work on radical new models in England. This seminar will be recorded. Full details	Add event
17 January 2017	13:00	Seminar by Paul Warwick (University of Cambridge) 'Digitalised Dialogues Across the Curriculum (DiDiAC): Enhancing classroom dialogue by using Talkwall to 'Think Together'' The DiDiAC research considers how a microblogging tool might affect interactions in ‘dialogic classrooms’. Developed by the University of Oslo, Talkwall is a free micro-blogging tool for engaging students in collective classroom interaction. Using Talkwall, an individual (e.g. a teacher) formulates a question or a challenge before participants (e.g. students), individually or in groups, post messages to a shared ‘wall’ (e.g. large screen/projector). Underpinned by a Vygotskian sociocultural framework, which views learning as a social process mediated by tools, this seminar will report on research in Norwegian (n=5) and British (n=2) secondary schools investigating: i. the potential of Talkwall to enhance existing/promote new forms of classroom dialogue and provide a visualisation of ‘interthinking’ amongst students; ii. how microblog-supported classroom dialogue may contribute to the development of students’ collaboration and critical thinking skills; iii. the skills that need to be attained for students to master digitalised communicative contexts, and how teachers can support this mastery through their pedagogy. Using a design-based approach with teachers working as co-researchers, approximately 400 students are involved. Data collection includes quantitative (e.g. metadata, measuring collaboration/critical thinking, social network/semantic analysis) and qualitative (e.g. observations, video, interviews) approaches. Details of the theoretical underpinning for the research, the strategy for data collection and analysis, and latest project developments (e.g. the outcomes of several teacher-researcher workshops), will also be discussed. During the seminar, participants will have the opportunity to experience using Talkwall using their own mobile/computing devices.. Full details	Add event
6 December 2016	13:00	Seminar by Professor Jane Oakhill (University of Sussex) 'Children’s difficulties with text comprehension: From research to practice' A substantial minority of children have problems with text comprehension, even though their word recognition is within the normal range. Research has shown that skilled and less-skilled comprehenders differ in a number of ways, and in the first part of this presentation I will discuss the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities to the prediction of reading comprehension (as opposed to single word reading) during the early years of schooling (age 7 to 11). In the second part of the talk, I will consider some open questions and possible future directions for this research, with a particular focus on the relations between vocabulary skills and inference making. I will also consider the implications of the findings so far for helping children to develop and improve their comprehension skills.. Full details	Add event
22 November 2016	17:00	Seminar by Dr James Hall (University of Exeter) 'National evidence of how Sure Start Children's Centres combat disadvantage in the early years' Evidence is drawn from the DfE-funded Evaluation of Children's Centres in England (ECCE) Project - a £3M 5-year longitudinal evaluation of 128 Sure Start Children’s Centres and 3,000 families and children (aged 1-3 years). The talk discusses the common ways that Children's Centres operate, how families tend to use them, and the benefits that can come from this engagement. Disadvantaged families benefit most, which means that austerity cuts to Children’s Centres pose a particular threat to these families. Full details	Add event
8 November 2016	13:00	Seminar by Dr Pallavi Banerjee (University of Exeter) "Do STEM schemes work?" During the last decade several schemes were run to support STEM education across schools. How successful have they been? Research findings from a project addressing these questions will be shared. Journal articles from this project have now been published and can be accessed here http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/education/staff/index.php?web_id=Pallavi_Amitava_Banerjee&tab=pubs&view=type. Full details	Add event
18 October 2016	17:00	Seminar by Professor Adam Dinham & Martha Shaw (Goldsmith University) "RE for Real: Towards a religiously literate curriculum" RE for Real explored views on the purpose, content and structures of learning about religion and belief in secondary schools. The findings will be considered through the lens of religious literacy, followed by discussion of the implications of the recommendations for future policy and practice in RE and in education more widely. Full details	Add event
11 October 2016	13:00	Dr Phil Durrant (University of Exeter) "Growth in Grammar: A multi-dimensional analysis of student writing between five and sixteen" Our research team is establishing a corpus of writing from English, History and Science classes produced by children from ages 5 to 16 at schools across England. We will use this corpus to try to understand how children’s language changes as they get older, what linguistic features distinguish higher- from lower-quality writing and how children at different ages shape their language use according to the disciplines and genres they are writing in. In this talk, Dr Durrant will describe the background to the study, what we already know about this area, our methods, and prospects for future work.. Full details	Add event
31 May 2016	17:00	Seminar by Professor Angela Creese (University of Birmingham) 'Using linguistic ethnography to investigate the multilingual classroom' Linguistic ethnography (LE) studies how people make use of linguistic and other semiotic signs to constitute social processes. In this seminar paper Professor Creese illustrates how LE provides careful, rigorous and systematic methods to document the resourcefulness of translanguaging as pedagogy in the multilingual classroom. Translanguaging is a means of describing the strategic use to which people put their multilingual resources in contexts of linguistic, social, and cultural diversity. Professor Creese looks at how people draw on their biographically organised repertoires in communication in language classrooms and bilingual homes. She explores the possibility of linguistic ethnography to reveal which social practices are meaningful to participants and specifically describe how encounters between teachers and students about multilingualism in the classroom are recontextualized and revisited in the home. Overall she argues that LE offers a powerful methodological and theoretical approach to understanding how people reconcile conflicting ideologies about multilingualism.. Full details	Add event
17 May 2016	13:00	Seminar by Professor Karen Mattick (University of Exeter) 'Educational interventions to improve junior doctor prescribing' Prescribing medications is one of the most daunting responsibilities that a newly qualified doctor will take on. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of some of our research in this area, using prescribing as an example of a ‘high stakes’ decision that is made in the context of complex and fast-moving workplace environment. Research into prescribing is much needed. Prescribing errors are common, affecting 7% medication orders, 2% patient days and 50% hospital admissions. Most prescribing errors are associated with antibiotics, where there are additional layers of uncertainty, and long term as well as short term consequences of poor prescribing practice. It is clear that strategies that aim to improve knowledge and technical skills are insufficient. We need to educate doctors to work in an environment where their knowledge and skills may be negated by the numerous complex and overwhelming pressures at play can influence their prescribing behaviour, and where interventions that work in one context may not be successful in another. Full details	Add event
3 May 2016	17:00	Seminar by Dr Kristine Black-Hawkins (University of Cambridge) 'Achievement and inclusion in Schools' This research sets out to examine the nature of the relationship between achievement and inclusion in schools, and specifically how schools can support high levels of achievement for diverse groups of students. Four case studies of schools were undertaken, one each from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, so as to learn from the changing policy contexts of the four countries of the UK. The presentation addresses concerns about how schools can respond to differences between learners in ways that support the learning and participation of everyone. The following key questions are considered: • What strategies do schools use to raise the achievement of all students whilst safeguarding the inclusion of others who are more vulnerable? • How can schools ensure high levels of inclusion as well as high levels of achievement for everyone? • How might research into these matters be carried out?. Full details	Add event
22 March 2016	17:00	Seminar by Professor Tara Fenwick (University of Stirling) 'Professional responsibility and professionalism: a sociomaterial examination' Issues of professional responsibility and professionalism are invoked frequently by concerned policy makers and a nervous public alike. In education, critical circles have grappled with the familiar disturbing representations and prescriptions that continue to circulate in the name of improving quality and responsibility. Full details	Add event
23 February 2016	17:00	CANCELLED Seminar by Professor Victoria Carrington (University of East Anglia) 'How we live now: “I don’t think there’s such a thing as being offline' Unfortunately this seminar has now been cancelled. We hope that we might be able to reschedule for the next season. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. Full details	Add event
9 February 2016	13:00	Seminar by David Aldridge (Oxford Brookes University) 'Instructional triangles, belonging, and the knowledge-led curriculum' In this paper I would like to consider the relationship between the well-known ‘instructional’ or ‘pedagogical’ triangle of teacher, student and subject matter and the hermeneutic situation.. Full details	Add event
26 January 2016	17:00	Seminar by Professor Michael Young (Institute of Education) 'Researching the Curriculum: from 'Knowledge of the powerful' to 'powerful knowledge’ This talk will will trace how Professor Young was led to change his approach to the curriculum from his first book Knowledge and Control to the work he has done since his book 'Bringing Knowledge Back' In was published in 2007.. Full details	Add event
8 December 2015	13:00	CANCELLED:Seminar by Dr Tamara Bibby (Institute of Education) ‘The Creative Self? School? Classroom?’ Tamara Bibby's current work – and this seminar – engages with the work of D W Winnicott and others to develop different ways of thinking about key issues at the heart of pedagogy and the desires and defences of professionals located in educational institutions; specifically omnipotence (the desire to know what is best, to know how to ‘reach’ all learners), creativity (the desire to respond to our own ideas and sense of self), compliance (the normalised expectations of behaviours and outcomes) and the use of an object (how we interact with the sometimes challenging engagements with students and curriculum).. Full details	Add event
1 December 2015	17:00	CANCELLED: Seminar by Professor Ian Abrahams (University of Lincoln) 'Conceptions about international misconceptions' Unfortunately this seminar has had to be cancelled. However, we hope to reschedule it for 2016. Full details	Add event
17 November 2015	13:00	Seminar by Dr Julia Ipgrave (University of Warwick) 'Young People's Attitudes to Religious Diversity: perspectives from across the UK' Full details	Add event
3 November 2015	17:00	Seminar by Dr Nigel Harwood (University of Sheffield) 'Experiencing master’s dissertation supervision: two supervisors’ perspectives' Full details	Add event
20 October 2015	13:00	Seminar by Dr Shelia Trahar (University of Bristol) ‘The Path is made by Walking On It’: Ethical Complexities in Supervising International Doctoral Researchers Using Narrative Approaches? ‘The Path is made by Walking On It’: Ethical Complexities in Supervising International Doctoral Researchers Using Narrative Approaches?. Full details	Add event
16 June 2015	17:00	Seminar by Dr Julia Davies (University of Sheffield) '(Im)Material girls living in (im)material worlds: identity curation through time and space' This paper describes the role of Facebook in the lives of a group of fashion conscious trainee hairdressers living in a city in the north of England. The research looks at vernacular digital literacy practices in the lives of these Facebook friends. Following Leander and McKim (2003). Julia used a connected approach, tracing narratives as they flowed across the spaces of my friends’ lives. These women were not interested in academic reading or writing but invested time reading and writing using their smartphones. Their literacy practices were integral to their social and working lives; Facebook mediated and constituted social acts, evolving as a material reality, something to be curated (Potter, 2012) as well as a means through which they composed (Latta Kirby, 2013) their lives. The friends crafted textual identity performances which reflected and impacted how they saw themselves, their world and their place within it. The boundedness of different spaces were porous as images of bedrooms, nightclubs and bars, the salon and the college were displayed in online albums. Julia argues that this dynamic gave rise to complex interactions and relationships bringing about new ways of performing and understanding the self.. Full details	Add event
19 May 2015	13:00	Seminar by Professor Jim Ryder (University of Leeds) 'Being professional: Accountability and authority in teachers’ responses to curriculum reform' Full details	Add event
28 April 2015	17:00	Seminar /Key note speech Dr Julia Gillen (Lancaster University) Full details	Add event
28 April 2015	17:00	CANCELLEDSeminar by Professor Gill Valentine (University of Sheffield) Unfortunately Professor Gill Valentine is unable to deliver a seminar at this time, however Dr Julia Gillen will deliver a Key Note speech/seminar for the GSE Annual Research Conference 2015 in her place. Full details	Add event
24 March 2015	13:00	'The Creative Self? School? Classroom?' - Seminar by Dr Tamara Bibby (University of London) This seminar has been cancelled - apologies to all planning to attend. Full details	Add event
3 March 2015	17:00	'Problematising 'Diversity' and 'Integration' discourses and practices: what are the alternatives?' - Seminar by Professor Floya Anthias (University of East London) This paper proposes the need to move beyond current integration and diversity discourses (and their practices). It argues that whilst purportedly aiming to attack social divisions, on the one hand, these are underpinned by binary and essentialised constructions of these very divisions, on the other. They thereby reinforce notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. These problems are also embodied in their failures politically which make the importance of rethinking the approaches to the incorporation of minorities urgent. In order to retain their more progressive concerns with heterogeneity and inclusion, the paper brings into focus an intersectional approach that considers the complex and irreducible nature of belonging and social hierarchy. The paper explores alternative ways of approaching the social issues involved. Readings: Moving beyond integration and diversity discourses and practices: towards an intersectional framing, Sociological Review, Vol 61: 2, May 2013 Intersections and Translocations:New paradgms for thinking about Cultural Diversity and Social Identities, European Educational Research Journal, v10 n2 p204-217 2011. Full details	Add event
10 February 2015	13:00	'Re-conceptualising Validity in High Stakes Testing' - Seminar by Professor Barry O'Sullivan (British Council) Over the past six decades we have moved from thinking about validity in terms of the test, to thinking about it in terms of the impact the test has on the individual and on society (test consequence). Recently, a swing back to a more test-focused approach has emerged. One reason for this return to a more traditional approach is the failure of assessment theoreticians to adequately deal with the concept of test consequence. This is not hugely unexpected since the its proponent (Messick) himself pulled back from his original position over the course of his writing on the subject, so that his later works take an essentially traditional view. While it has been generally accepted that test consequence is important, the degree to which this is the case and the way in which it might impact on test development and validation has been debated and, more recently, challenged. Like others, my position on the topic has changed over the past number of years, from one of rejection (i.e. seeing the concept of ‘consequential validity’ is itself as an error), to one of slightly more acceptance (consequence is somehow important to all aspects of test development and validation). In this presentation, I will argue that the key understanding how test consequence can be operationalised in development and validation models is to focus on test stakeholders. By considering stakeholder groups from the conceptualisation stage of development we can essentially building consequence into test design. We can also postulate a clear a priori and a posteriori role for consequence within the development and validation model, allowing us to view consequence as a source of validation evidence. Acknowledging the importance of stakeholder groups to test development brings with it the equally important concept of how to more appropriately communicate validation results to these audiences.. Full details	Add event
27 January 2015	17:00	'Creative action: some reflctions on classroom behaviour, teachers and centralism, imposed research programmes, ...and REF games' Speaker: Professor Andrew Pollard (University of Bristol) This seminar will explore the influence of Etzioni's compliance theory (1975) on Professor Pollard's perspectives, analyses and agency over the past four decades. Touching on the 'Social World' ethnographies, the PACE project, TLRP and the REF, he will argue that Etzioni's theory can be seen as a tool for enabling creative optimism in a variety of challenging circumstances. Anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with Etzioni's theory can find a summary attached below. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS SEMINAR WILL NOT BE RECORDED. Full details	Add event
20 January 2015	17:00	Exploring the context Putting us all in-the-picture Speaker: Jonathan Rix (Open University) Its key components are the use of first person narrative and photographs to record a childs experience and to support reflective discussions with all those involved. This emerging observational approach is very simple to adopt but seems to offer a means of changing practitioners ways of seeing the child and their capabilities. The data and processes demonstrate the importance of understanding the child as a participant within context. This is underlined by an analysis of documentation associated with one child which took place as part of this research. It would appear that people talk about context but record the person. Full details	Add event
9 December 2014	13:00	‘Back to the Future’? Curriculum Development through Pedagogical Inquiry - Speaker: Professor Vivienne Baumfield (University of Glasgow) Professor Baumfield will focus on the assumptions made concerning the relationship between theory and practice and the contribution made by researchers, policy makers and teachers to the production of knowledge for and about teaching and learning in classrooms. The appraisal of the contemporary situation will take a historical perspective and reflect on its antecedents in the dispute between Dewey and Thorndyke in the US in the early years of the 20th century as to the scientific basis for education research and the contribution of Stones and Stenhouse in the UK in the 70’s and 80’s. The issues and their relevance for teachers and teacher educators today will be contextualized in the case of Religious Education, which by virtue of its contested position in the school curriculum stimulates a level of critical engagement productive of insight into fundamental issues of epistemic authority and democracy. Full details	Add event
25 November 2014	17:00	Professor Ann-Marie Bathmaker (University of Birmingham) - 'Who wants to be an engineer? UTCs, vocational diversification and the experience of girls and boys from different social class backgrounds in England' University Technical Colleges (UTCs) contribute to an increasingly complex landscape of education and training, promoted as a creative means of meeting the diverse educational needs of young people (Fuller and Unwin, 2011). UTCs respond in particular to national and international policy agendas that seek to promote participation in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). They have been championed by the Edge Foundation as providing a ‘highly regarded’ course of study ‘with clear progression routes into higher education or further learning in work’, especially careers in technician and degree level engineering. However, as yet, we know very little about whether young people and their parents understand the different options available, how decisions to attend a UTC are made, nor whether the education offered in these new institutions enhances or conversely limits the opportunities of students who attend them. This paper draws on data from a British Academy funded project (co-investigator: Dr Nicola Ingram, University of Bath) that carried out detailed case studies in two UTCs in England. The project addressed the following core question: What impact does vocational diversification in the form of UTCs have on the decision-making and experience of boys and girls from different class backgrounds? The research used a holistic approach focusing on the whole institution in relation to the introduction and development of new educational policies. This encompassed analysis of ‘the situated, material, professional and external dimensions’ (Braun et al 2011: 585) of the schools, recognising the schools’ origins (and that of their communities), their ethos and culture, their physical environment and resources, their staff, and students as well as external influences. The paper offers an analysis of the enactment of policy (Ball et al, 2011) in the two case study institutions, and considers how these enactments may reinforce or challenge historical patterns of gender and class divisions in vocational education in England.. Full details	Add event
11 November 2014	13:00	Disabled Children's Childhood Studies: informing research and practice? Speaker: Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole (Manchester Metropolitan University) Disabled children's childhood studies present a paradigm shift away from the long-standing deficit discourses of disabled childhoods that have dominated Western culture and its reaches. Contemporary childhood studies have frequently contested normative, Eurocentric mantras that construct the standard child and disability studies have challenged the medical discourses of childhood and the scope of its authority. However, while drawing on these two approaches, the aim, here, is to demonstrate that disabled children's childhood studies offers more than a combined critique. Crucially, in disabled children's childhood studies, disabled children are not viewed as necessarily having problems or being problems but as having childhoods. The paper concludes by asking how the principles of disabled children's childhood studies might be reflected in contemporary contexts for research and practice with children, particularly in the light of the changes for children in England following the Children & Families Bill (2014). Full details	Add event
28 October 2014	17:00	'Developmental writing difficulties: assessing writing products and writing processes' Speaker: Professor Julie Dockrell (University of London) Children with Language Learning Difficulties (LLD) are predominantly educated in mainstream classrooms. They raise challenges for teaching and learning and typically progress more slowly in literacy than their peers. Children with LLD also experience problems when producing written texts and produce texts of lower quality with fewer words and reduced lexical diversity (Connelly et al, 2012; Dockrell et al, 2007, 2009; 2013). The majority of studies of children’s writing focus on the writing product and from this make inferences about the writing process. Using a cohort of pupils with LLD I will report on a study which uses both measures of the writing product and the writing process to explore difficulties with written language. Implications for the development of models of writing and writing interventions will be explored.. Full details	Add event
14 October 2014	13:00	Seminar by Dr Esmaeel Abodallahzadeh (University of Exeter) Prior research on the role of textual markers in reading comprehension suggests a complex picture of the relationship between textual signals and comprehension. These studies have come up with positive, neutral, and differential effects of these markers on processing and comprehension. This talk reports on how undergraduate EFL readers of English approach narrative, expository, and argumentative text types in which propositional relations have been explicitly or implicitly marked. Participants with different proficiency levels read passages of each text type in both their explicit and implicit versions. The results demonstrate significant differences between learner level, text version, and text type. Less advanced groups were found to enjoy most from the presence of such textual markers. The effect of the type of text and text structure on the comprehension of the learners on both the explicit and the implicit versions was also discovered. Further results demonstrated a consistent pattern of a text-specific hierarchy for the comprehension of conjunctive relations across learners with different proficiency levels. Finally, the results confirm the contributory effect of these markers in text comprehension. They boost our understanding of the rhetorical and cognitive nature of different text types and the positive role of logical connectors in their comprehension. Therefore, language teachers, testers, and materials developers need to further consider the relationship between textual signals and text types in devising appropriate materials and techniques to improve foreign language learners’ reading comprehension.. Full details	Add event
17 June 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Mike Sharples (The Open University) Title: Designing Massive Open Social Learning The FutureLearn platform has enabled over 150,000 people to learn online through courses offered by leading universities. Design of the FutureLearn platform has been guided by theories of social learning, alongside evidence of effective methods of teaching, learning and assessment. Each new feature is developed in relation to the design aims of telling powerful stories, enabling productive conversation, and celebrating progress. Consequences of this pedagogy-led design include: building courses around explicit learning steps; making learning visible through profile pages and discussions linked to each learning step; enabling users to follow other learners; designing peer review as a formative and discursive activity; and developing peer assessment based on Adaptive Comparative Judgment. All these elements must be deployed for massive-scale courses of over 10,000 participants and for learners with a wide variety of abilities, interests and types of engagement. I shall describe the pedagogy-informed design process for FutureLearn, the structure and elements of the platform and learning experience, and evidence of patterns of learning and user attitudes. Full details	Add event
3 June 2014	13:00	Speaker: Professor Matt Baillie Smith (Northumbria University) Title: International development and development education: instrumental, everyday and co-produced solidarities This paper uses critical scholarship on solidarity to re-think recent trends in development education and global citizenship education policy and practice. I use a hopeful lens to argue that a focus on development educations capacity to mobilise new development knowledges reveals a role for it in shaping a new language and practice of international development and citizenship that moves beyond established spatial imaginaries of rich and poor. (More on the abstract is available in the attached document). Full details	Add event
27 May 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Keith Topping (Dundee University) Title: Peer Tutoring in Reading and Mathematics in Primary School: Randomised Controlled Trials and Scaling Up Schools were allocated a condition: cross-age vs. same-age tutoring; light vs intensive tutoring; reading vs. maths vs. reading and maths. The project lasted two years with the same children in Year 2 but generally with different teachers, so the pupils were key to carrying tutoring forward. Subsequently the University of Durham established a Maths tutoring project which intended to scale up the project (to which Keith is a consultant). Four local authorities are implementing tutoring (Medway, Worcestershire, Leeds and Durham), again over two years. Local co-ordinators are responsible for training and monitoring teachers, while the university has trained the co-ordinators. Results will be available soon! Meanwhile there is a peer tutoring page on TES Pro which has registered over 13,000 hits from teachers.. Full details	Add event
13 May 2014	13:00	Speaker: Professor Agnes Kukulska Hulme (The Open University) Title: Learning activity designs for a mobile age We consider transformational designs for learning with mobile devices, with a special focus on language learning. As partners in the EU-funded MASELTOV project (2012-14), The Open University has led the development of an incidental learning framework to guide the design of a set of mobile tools and services for informal learning in cities across the European Union. These information, learning and community building services which are being provided on smartphones will benefit newly arrived immigrants, with the aim of improving social inclusion. The process of developing the incidental learning framework has prompted reflection on many aspects of informal learning, its significance and relationship to formal education, as well as its role in shifting the focus and content of language learning. The opportunities, challenges and pitfalls of mobile-assisted incidental learning in the city will be shared in this seminar, against a backdrop of evolving mobile learning activity designs that increasingly incorporate situated learning.. Full details	Add event
29 April 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Ron Barnett (University of London) - Title: Understanding the University This is an important matter since, unless we have a sound and full sense as to what it is to understand the university, the university will fall short of realising its potential. Prompted particularly by the Critical Realism of Roy Bhaskar and the Hegelian-inspired thinking of Slovoj Zizek, I shall try to sketch an argument along the following lines. I want to break with any sense that the university is an institution that, as it were, lies before us, open to straightforward empirical inquiry. I even want to break with simply seeing the university as institution and the university as idea polarised (against each other). More positively, I shall argue that we should understand the university as situated on four planes, both going down into its deep structures but also rising onto planes both of its imaginary possibilities and (thence) to a growing penumbra of universals. Being a university and understanding the university, is not thereby a relativist or postmodern free-for-all.. Full details	Add event
25 March 2014	13:00	Speaker: Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (University College London) Title: The social brain in adolescence Recently, neuroscience research has revolutionised our understanding of the adolescent brain. Brain imaging research has revealed that the brain develops during adolescence in terms of both its structure and how it functions. Social brain regions undergo particularly protracted development in adolescence. This research might contribute to an explanation of behaviours that are typically associated with adolescence, including risk-taking and peer influence. Full details	Add event
11 March 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Michael Fielding (University of London) Title: Beyond Student Voice: Patterns of Partnership and the Demands of Deep Democracy If we really believe in democracy, we need to develop schools that take seriously Francis Williams' insistence that Democracy is not only something to fight for; it is something to fight with. The student voice movement offers a promising starting point to reflect on and develop new possibilities and approaches to learning, both in its more restricted formal modes and in its broader more openly democratic senses.. Full details	Add event
25 February 2014	13:00	Speaker: Professor Adrian Holliday (Canterbury Christ Church University) Title: Developing an action theory for intercultural communication: evidence, applications and politics The narratives demonstrate a level and type of evidence which is hard to collect in traditional forms of research. They show the everyday details of how people construct culture, subscribe to different discourses of culture, and represent underlying universal cultural processes which can be applied to any local or foreign setting. Some of the discourses are however prejudicial and destructive, and show how we can all fall into culture traps of the type which underpin world conflict.. Full details	Add event
11 February 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Mark Olssen (University of Surrey) Title: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and the Global Public Good: The Consequences of Climate Change A number of factors conspire at this juncture to derail the neoliberal settlement however. One is market failure as witnessed by the Credit Crunch and the current recession being experienced throughout Europe. Other factors such as population explosion, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and environmental catastrophe could exert even greater pressure for a reversal of the neoliberal project. Moderate or severe climate change could intensify such trends even further. Taken together, these factors could forseeably have a major impact on transforming the political and economic settlement as it has operated under neo-liberalism since the 1970s, resulting in the emergence of global political and educational structures constitutive of a new global welfare polis together with a global common good. My paper outlines the shifts in theoretical rationale and practice that might accompany such a transition. Full details	Add event
28 January 2014	13:00	Speaker: Dr Paul Thompson (University of Birmingham) Title: Investigating the discourse of interdisciplinary research In this talk I will report on the first stages of an ESRC funded project carried out at the Centre for Corpus Research, in collaboration with the publisher Elsevier, in which we investigate the discourse of a successful journal in an interdisciplinary field: Global Environmental Change. Our aims are to study the extent to which this field operates as a unified whole, the extent to which journal authors in the field broaden their messages to a multidisciplinary audience, and the extent to which each discipline in the field maintains a discrete identity. Full details	Add event
14 January 2014	17:00	Speaker: Professor Jane Seale (University of Exeter) - Title: A betrayal of potential? Fighting for a place for adults with learning disabilities in 'The Digital Future For thirty years technologies have been positioned as innovations having the potential to transform learning for people with learning disabilities. Belief in this revolutionary potential began in the 1980s when microcomputers were hailed for their ability to present stimulating visual and auditory learning materials, provide immediate feedback and adapt instruction depending on performance and record and monitor progress. As technologies have become more sophisticated; belief in their inherent potential has remained largely unaltered. But have the lives of people with learning disabilities been altered for the better and are we as a society particularly concerned about whether technology has enabled them to reach their full potential or not? By analysing what we do and do not know about both the 'digital past' and the 'digital present' of adults with learning disabilities I will consider whether adults with learning disabilities are conceived as having a legitimate place in 'The Digital Future' that we as a society imagine for ourselves. Full details	Add event
10 December 2013	13:00	Speaker: Professor Hilary Nesi (Coventry University) - Title: An evaluation of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus This paper will evaluate the corpus in terms of what it can and cannot tell us about 21st century student writing, with reference to both the existing body of research and prospects for future corpus investigation. It will also consider what researchers working on any future projects of this kind might learn from our experience of designing and creating the BAWE corpus.. Full details	Add event
26 November 2013	17:00	Speaker: Dr Liam Gearon (University of Oxford) - Title: On Holy Ground Dr Gearon will outline the theoretical framework behind his latest book. In the seminar paper Liam will review the thesis outlined, tracing the diverse epistemological grounds sought by modern religious education, including: philosophy, theology and religious education; the natural sciences and religious education; the social sciences and religious education; psychology, spirituality and religious education; phenomenology and religious education; the politics of religious education; the aesthetics of religious education. Full details	Add event
12 November 2013	13:00	Speaker: Professor Liz Todd (Newcastle University) - Title: Pupil Premium: Closing the gap for disadvantaged young people? Research carried out by BMRB-TNS (a social research agency), and Newcastle and Manchester Universities looked at how schools (primary, secondary and special) spent Pupil Premium funds (and future plans), how they decided to spend the Pupil Premium, differences in spending patterns between schools with different characteristics, and school perceptions of the impact of Pupil Premium funding so far. The seminar focuses on the findings from 30 case study schools (primary, secondary and special) across England. Case study co-authors are Liz Todd, Alan Dyson, Kirstin Kerr and Karen Laing. The BMRB-TNS survey of 1,240 schools will also be referred to. Our findings consider: the ways schools define and cater for disadvantage what they base decisions on to spend the Pupil Premium (in terms of evidence of effectiveness within their school the varied and sophisticated systems that they use to evaluate the spending. Overall we found (in contrast to some previous reports in this field) that schools responses to disadvantage are well-organised and well-conceptualised. These findings are discussed in the context of previous initiatives in the UK and in other parts of Europe. Full details	Add event
29 October 2013	17:00	Dr Denes Szucs (University of Cambridge) - Title: Testing theories of developmental dyscalculia Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a learning difficulty thought to be specific to mathematics. Currently dominant cognitive neuroscience theories of DD suggest that DD originates from the impairment of the magnitude representation (MR) of the human brain, residing in the interparietal sulcus (IPS), or from impaired connections between number symbols and the MR. However, behavioural research offers several alternative theories for DD and neuro-imaging also suggests that impairments in DD may be linked to disruptions of other functions of the IPS than the MR. That is, besides the MR, impairment of working memory, attention, inhibition and spatial processing were also proposed to underlie DD. Read more in the abstract. Full details	Add event
15 October 2013	13:00	Speaker: Dr Jean Conteh (University of Leeds) - Title: A niche interest? Making spaces for EAL in research, policy and practice There is a growing body of - mostly small-scale - research into issues related to the experiences of EAL learners. A Google search for EAL training yields page after page of offerings from freelance consultants, local authorities, companies and so on. EAL is frequently mentioned in national policy documentation. Yet, there is still very little clarity among education professionals about what EAL precisely is, who actually comes into the category of an EAL learner and what EAL practice is really about. Bilingual learners are still commonly regarded among practitioners as having problems (Safford and Drury, 2013) and NQTs consistently, year by year, rate EAL as one of the least effective elements of their initial training, and meeting the needs of EAL learners as one of their greatest anxieties. In the seminar, I will trace the history of EAL in research, policy and practice in England and raise some issues for the future.. Full details	Add event
25 June 2013	17:00	Professor Valerie Hey (University of Sussex) - The Paradoxical Academy: Between the Difficulties of the Devil and Democracy In what Zizek, rather portentously calls a state of permanent economic emergency (2010), higher education at least in the UK, and particularly in England, has been subject to rapid disinvestment in both financial and in terms of an ideology linked to social democratic terms. Ironically in the recession, the market is now the sole or major arbiter of choice. I want to reflect on what this decoupling has done or is doing to the condition of my own production and to those I teach. Is it that the intimidations of austerity are intensifying the trend to supplant the pleasures of vocation, creativity and curiosity in those who work in the university as academics and students? Does there seems to be a default to the mundane, the obvious and the instrumental dominating desires for success so, that academic vocabularies mimic rather than interrogate the problematics of funders blue skies for grey skies (?) and students entailed in investing in their future under the consumer pays mandate, seek the impossible guarantee that the challenges of knowledge and learning engaged with their teachers, may all pay off? I draw upon some emergent evidence about this trend and what it presages. Full details	Add event
11 June 2013	13:00	Professor Louise Archer (King's College London) - 'I like science, but I don't want to be a scientist': Understanding 10-14 year olds science and career aspirations Research shows that age 10-14 is a critical time during which children's aspirations and ideas about science are formed. The ASPIRES project tracks children in England at ages 10, 13 and 14, via a national survey and repeat interviews with children and parents. This paper reports data from the first two phases - in Year 6 (survey with over 9,000 children; interviews with 170 parents and children) and Year 8 (survey with 5,600 pupils and follow up interviews with 85 young people). The paper discusses the complexity of children's aspirations and attitudes to science demonstrating how liking science does not simply translate into future intentions to study science. The paper outlines what contemporary young people aspire to and how aspirations are formed, with particular reference to the role of family and interactions between family habitus and capital. It discusses some of the key factors affecting children's science aspirations and the reasons why so many children learn from an early age that science is interesting ... but not for me. Implications for policy and practice are outlined. Full details	Add event
28 May 2013	17:00	Professor David Pedder (University of Leicester) - Title: Values-practice dissonance in professional and organisational learning in schools Teachers tend to learn and work in contexts of values-practice dissonance. Individually and/or collectively they may simply choose to live with the dissonance between what they do and what they value. Alternatively, conflict between values and practices can prompt teachers to re-examine their professional learning practices and/or the values they place on those practices in order to bring practices and values into closer alignment. Awareness of dissonance can result in a change-provoking disequilibrium. However, if the dissonance is too large, teachers may dismiss new ideas as inappropriate to their situations. Since the resolution of dissonance involves the reconstruction of current values, beliefs, and knowledge in ways consistent with change messages, dissonance may lead to rejection rather than adoption of new learning. At the organisational level, collective awareness of dissonance between values and practices by leaders and teachers at school can become a very powerful catalyst for school self evaluation, organisational learning and change. Feeding back values-practice gap data to schools has often acted as a powerful resource for organisational learning and school self evaluation, supporting school leadership teams develop more penetrating, critical, and reflective understandings of current patterns of practices and values among teaching staff, feeding through in some cases to school improvement planning. I will examine the theme of values-practice dissonance with reference to three research studies I have been involved in: Schools and CPD: the state of the nation study; Learning how to learn in classrooms, schools and networks; and Consulting pupils about teaching and learning. Full details	Add event
14 May 2013	13:00	Professor Mike Baynham (University of Leeds) - Title: Risk, indexicality and scale in academic literacies I will go on to consider notions of indexicality and scale, arguing that a comprehensive account of indexicality needs to address what I call after Zygmunt Bauman the "bringing in" of scalar meaning as well as the more conventional notion of indexicality as a pointing out from meaning to context. I will then go on to critically review the notion of genre in academic literacies, considering genre as dynamic, and historically emergent. To exemplify this dynamic approach to text and text production I will focus on the emergence of experiential writing in the social sciences, and its development in student writing, showing how it is a relatively unstabilised genre whose norms are somewhat ill-established, not always made explicit pedagogically and drawing out the consequences of this for student writers. I will show how student experiential writing typically indexes scalar phenomena concerned with particular disciplinary epistemologies in the social sciences and discuss the problems that such experiential writing may pose for students. I will conclude by drawing out implications for teaching academic writing to Masters students, arguing that it is worth making students aware of the disciplinary epistemological issues, understood as what counts as knowledge and as a knowledge claim, as they are routinely indexed in experiential writing. Full details	Add event
30 April 2013	17:00	Associate Professor Carol Evans (University of Exeter) - Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education The funded project is Facilitating transitions to masters-level learning improving formative assessment and feedback processes. My review is based on the systematic analysis of 460 articles on assessment feedback between 2000 -2012 and empirical evidence from my own research on implementing assessment feedback interventions. I will outline the Feedback Landscape conceptual framework that I have developed to explore the identified feedback gap that is discussed within the literature. Notions of sustainable and authentic assessment feedback will be explored along with key features of effective feedback designs and future directions for research. The session is relevant to all lecturers and students interested in developing their assessment feedback practice including feedback-seeking skills and/or interested in undertaking a systematic review. It is of high relevance to any lecturers wishing to engage in collaborative research on enhancing assessment feedback. I will outline key projects that I am developing and would be interested to hear from anyone who would be interested in collaborative cross-disciplinary ventures. Full details	Add event
26 March 2013	13:00	Dr William Richardson (University of Exeter & HMC) - Independent schools in England. What are they for? What is an independent school? What are they for? What are they against? What kind of influence do they wield? And how much of that influence affects what state-funded schools do? Is the English situation significant internationally? Among the questions to be explored in the seminar will be the role of the state in the running of schools, the nature of lobbying and influence in English schools policy, curriculum trends in the independent sector and the demographics of independent school pupils and teachers. Finally, is it the case that England's fee-paying schools have vanquished the post-war comprehensive now that all English secondary schools are on the way to becoming independent?. Full details	Add event
13 March 2013	13:00	Dr Michael Buser - Beyond the Rebel Clowns: Cultural Activism and Place Making This paper introduces a recent AHRC-supported scoping study on creative practice, activism and place-identity. During the talk I will discuss a few broad themes including some ways in which cultural activist projects challenge dominant ways of seeing and constructing social worlds and how alternative imaginaries are put forward and experienced. I am particularly interested in drawing attention to opportunities and challenges related to community development and place and will present some art/activist and intervention examples from Stokes Croft, Bristol. The presentation highlights divergent expressions of temporality, the role of participation and disappearance in activist projects and how such activism might inform contestations around urban space.. Full details	Add event
12 March 2013	17:00	Professor Brahm Norwich and Dr Hazel Lawson (University of Exeter) - How teachers learn to teach pupils with SEN on PGCE programmes; findings from a recent funded research project The project specifically compared the school based learning and outcomes of postgraduate teacher trainees on primary and secondary programmes that used different approaches (practical teaching task, pupil focussed task and no planned task other than class teaching practice) to preparing teachers for the special needs aspects of their future teaching other than class teaching practice. We will also discuss the significance of the research and ideas about future research foci. Full details	Add event
26 February 2013	13:00	Dr Ann Childs (University of Oxford) - What is the role of university teacher educators in the new policy landscape for teacher education in England? Here I will use the research in subject departments to explore what is learned, how it is learned and what facilitates and constrains this learning. One of the key motivations for this research was that secondary PGCE students in England spend two thirds of their time in subject departments and, as teacher educators, we wanted to understand the day-to-day demands and processes of learning to develop our own ITE and CPD programmes. Since this research took place the coalition government has moved rapidly to more school-led and school-based ITE and CPD. This policy direction draws on a notion of teaching as a craft learned best from experienced professionals in the context of the school and the classroom.. Full details	Add event
12 February 2013	17:00	Professor Rosamond Mitchell (University of Southampton) - The social networks of Year Abroad students and their contribution to second language learning Students undertaking residence abroad are expected to develop their language skills very substantially, but research evidence shows that this development is highly variable. This talk will report on an on-going ESRC funded project which tracked 60 students while spending their year abroad in France, Spain and Mexico. The project has documented students language development over time, and relates this to patterns of language use and the evolving social networks in which students became engaged while abroad. The talk will focus on the conceptualisation of social networks for this mobile group, and will report preliminary results on students social positioning and its relationship with aspects of language development. Full details	Add event
29 January 2013	13:00	Dr Julian Sefton-Green (University of London) - The Class: disconnected learning and the social worlds of young people in the digital age This is a report on a current research project, The Class, part of the Connected Learning Research Network funded by The MacArthur Foundation as part of its Digital Media Learning program. Working with an 'ordinary' London school, I have been following the 'learning 'networks within and beyond a single class of 13-14 year olds at home, school and elsewhere over the course of an academic year observing social interactions in and between lessons; conducting interviews with children, parents, teachers and relevant others; and mapping out-of-school engagements with digital networking technologies to reveal both patterns of use and the quality and meaning of such engagements as they shape the learning opportunities of young people. In the talk I will reflect on emerging findings to research questions. Full details	Add event
15 January 2013	17:00	Seminar by Professor Ann Phoenix (University of London) - Title: Adults looking back on childhood wellbeing and language brokering The few pieces of research done on children who are language brokers do not support such a simple story (e.g. Orellana, 2009). This paper uses accounts from a study of adults looking back on their childhood experiences of language brokering to explore children's agency & creativity in language & cultural brokering; thee ways in which childhood language brokering constitutes a social resource to families and society (and the social contexts in which language brokering arise. The paper examines how adults looking back on their experiences of language brokering consider it impacted on their wellbeing in childhood and how they feel about it and themselves as adults. Full details	Add event
4 December 2012	13:00	Professor Lani Florian (University of Edinburgh) - Exploring Inclusive Pedagogy In our conceptualisation thus far, the concept posits that the actions of the class teacher should aim to extend what is generally available in the classroom to everyone, taking account that there will be differences between learners.. Full details	Add event
20 November 2012	17:00	POSTPONED - Professor David Pedder (University of Leicester) - Title: Values-practice dissonance in professional and organisational learning in schools The title will remain the same. Full details	Add event
6 November 2012	13:00	Professor Julie Allan (University of Stirling) - Dialogues with difference in the European arena The purpose of this work, which included a Council of Europe Project, Policies and practices for socio-cultural diversity, two ministerial conferences and several high level meetings, was to try to establish dialogues relating to diversity and to stimulate decision-making (Council of Europe, 2008, 2009, 2010a & b). Full details	Add event
23 October 2012	17:00	Dr Deborah Osberg (University of Exeter) - Authoritative Knowledge & the Question of the Public Role of the University: How complexity challenges our assumptions & opens alternate possibilities In this inaugural lecture for the new Centre for HE Research, Deborah will explore the question of whether the university may still be considered to have a unique public role in society, as distinct from a purely economic role.. Full details	Add event
9 October 2012	13:00	Professor Steve Higgins (University of Durham) - Exploring the potential of a multi-touch classroom to develop adaptive expertise in primary mathematics SynergyNet, one of the final round of TLRP-TEL projects, is investigating the potential of large multi-touch surfaces in a lab classroom environment.. Full details	Add event
26 June 2012	17:00	Educational Outcomes for Youth with Disabilities: Increased Expectations but Unrealised Gains This project was to examine the role and impact of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poor communities in Ghana, Kenya, India and Pakistan. This presentation will draw on qualitative data gathered from interviews conducted with young people (aged 15-30), with varying levels of schooling, and their significant others (parents and elder siblings) living in India. Rich narratives collected from the field highlight the immense faith being placed in schooling to deliver the promise of a better life. However, evidence suggests that while being at school resulted in some personal benefits these were coupled with many unfulfilled expectations and even reinforced existing forms of differentiation. Full details	Add event
18 June 2012	13:00	Musical Creativities in Practice (Originally to be held on 19th June) It argues the need for conceptual expansion of musical creativities in line with the real world practices. It explores how different types of musical creativities are recognised and communicated in the practices of professional musicians including composers, improvisers, sing-a-song writers, original bands, DJs, live coders and interactive sound designers working in the music industry. Drawing on Bourdieus thinking tools, this book provides the foundation for a sociological analysis of musical creativities which is designed to transform the ways that music in education is thought about in the future. Full details	Add event
29 May 2012	17:00	University - school based partnerships; networking to increase social capital In light of this policy the seminar will look at what is already known about how teachers learn and what the knowledge base might be needed to educate teachers to work in schools in the 21st century. Using social capital theory I will discuss the key role that university education departments have in the process of educating teachers and I will draw on data from the Cambridge HEI-School based partnership network.. Full details	Add event
15 May 2012	13:00	The challenges of researching digital interaction: multimodality, embodiment, time and space Concepts of embodiment will be explored through a focus on three themes: physical manipulation through tangible technologies; context-based interaction through mobile devices; and whole-body physical action through sensor-based technologies. The challenges of researching interaction in digital multimodal environments, notably online social media and mobile environments will also be discussed with a focus on exploring how digital technologies disrupt and reconfigure concepts of time, place and space and its effect on methods of data collection and analysis within social science. Full details	Add event
1 May 2012	17:00	Politics, politicians and English comprehensive schools This paper examines the plurality of political intentions and interventions relating to the English post-war comprehensive school and considers whether the project foundered because it was too political, or, alternatively, because it was not political enough.. Full details	Add event
20 March 2012	13:00	Adults looking back on childhood wellbeing and language brokering - CANCELLED AT LAST MINUTE This paper uses accounts from a study of adults looking back on their childhood experiences of language brokering to explore children's agency & creativity in language & cultural brokering; thee ways in which childhood language brokering constitutes a social resource to families and society (and the social contexts in which language brokering arise. The paper examines how adults looking back on their experiences of language brokering consider it impacted on their wellbeing in childhood and how they feel about it and themselves as adults. Full details	Add event
6 March 2012	17:00	Imagining Literacy: the Gremlin, the Matrix and other Triumphal Tales I will discuss the ways in which the semiotic resources of metaphor, visual images, number and testimonial narratives are combined to produce powerful imaginaries that circulate widely in the media, government and popular discourse. These are used to advocate for and justify policy interventions into citizens lives while obscuring the powerful co-ordinating role of literacy in the relations of ruling.. Full details	Add event
21 February 2012	13:00	Taking Stock of Argument: Examining Research Trends in Argumentation in Science Education with Implications for Professional Development Despite decades of educational reform, even graduates of science programmes are typically unable to provide reasons, evidence and justification to some of their claims about the natural world.Recordedtalkavailable on the intranet. Full details	Add event
7 February 2012	17:00	CANCELLED - The social networks of Year Abroad students and their contribution to second language learning This talk will report on an ongoing ESRC funded project which is tracking 60 students while spending their year abroad in France, Spain and Mexico. The project is documenting students language development over time, and will seek to relate this to patterns of language use and the evolving social networks in which students become engaged while abroad. The talk will focus on the conceptualisation of social networks for this mobile group, and will report preliminary results on students social positioning. Full details	Add event
24 January 2012	13:00	Super-diversity and social class: The view from interaction In the study of race, ethnicity and class, small-scale social interaction is seen as increasingly important. Full details	Add event
17 January 2012	17:00	The Art of Listening Our culture is one that speaks rather than listens. From reality TV to political rallies, there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate, and to receive attention. It reduces 'reality' to revelation and voyeurism. The paper argues that this way of life is having severe and damaging consequences in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected. It addresses the question: how can we listen more carefully? Social and cultural theory is combined with real stories from the experiences of the desperate stowaways who hide in the undercarriages of jet planes in order to seek asylum, to the young working-class people who use tattooing to commemorate a lost love. The Art of Listening shows how sociology is in a unique position to record 'life passed in living' and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care, providing a resource to understand the contemporary world while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future. Full details	Add event
6 December 2011	13:00	Developments in Critical Disability Studies: Implications for Inclusive Education I have been trying recently to articulate what could be meant by a critical disability studies approach. My recent book (Disability Studies: an interdisciplinary introduction, Sage 2011) and a forthcoming paper (with Helen Meekosha, Critical disability studies: A review essay, for Critical Sociology), account for this emerging trans-disciplinary space through reference to a number of emerging insights including theorizing through materialism; bodies that matter; inter/transectionality; Global disability studies and self and other.. Full details	Add event
22 November 2011	17:00	Poetry teaching in New Zealand and UK secondary schools This seminar presentation draws on research in progress that investigates to what extent poetry taught in secondary schools in New Zealand and the UK is: prescribed by national curriculum and assessment criteria; flexibly interpreted by examination boards. It primarily concentrates on data collected in New Zealand in 2011 to explore how teachers working in schools in one city are able to respond to contextual factors and what choices they (and their students) can make about poems they read, write, listen to and perform in their classrooms. In investigating these factors and contexts, the research endeavours to move beyond national boundaries to inform international debates about poetry pedagogy and poetrys location within curriculum frameworks and diverse cultural contexts. (This seminar was not recorded). Full details	Add event
8 November 2011	13:00	Lesson Study works and what it offers: lessons from the Lesson Study MLD project Moderate learning difficulties (MLD) has been a neglected area of research and development in Special Needs Education partly because of its contested nature and loose formulation. The project Raising Levels of Achievement through Lesson Development for pupils with Moderate Learning Difficulties aims to improve the learning experiences and opportunities of pupils with MLD to enhance their educational achievements and to develop pedagogic strategies, programmes and materials for wider use in secondary schools based on the Lesson Study. The Lesson Study methodology is a collaborative approach for teachers to assess, evaluate and plan a sequence of lessons that focuses on the learning of one to two focus pupils in this case those identified as having MLD. We report findings at around half way point of the project, which, in addition to outlining the main principles of Lesson Study, throw some light on the MLD category as well as the impact of the Lesson Study process on participating teachers in terms of their reported teaching efficacy, attitudes to inclusion and pedagogic strategies developed for teaching pupils with MLD at Key Stage 3.. Full details	Add event
25 October 2011	17:00	What has morality to do with Religious Education? The aim of this paper is to provide a positive case for increasing the role and importance of religious morality within the subject of religious education in British schools. Full details	Add event
11 October 2011	13:00	Exploring the use of styles in educational instruction and assessment In the session I will provide an overview of styles research (cognitive styles, learning styles and approaches to learning). I will highlight and examine key debates and issues in the development and application of styles research with reference to key concepts within the field such as a hierarchy of styles (Kozhevnikov, 2007); a styles profile (Evans & Waring 2009) and the matching hypothesis (Mayer, 2011). The importance of the detailed mapping of styles constructs to other individual learning differences, locating styles research within cognitive psychology will also be discussed (Moskvina and Kozhevnikov, 2011). Full details	Add event