Shelley McLetchie- Holder, a current student on the EdD programme has had her IFS published in Nurse Education Today. Shelley’s IFS focused on the experiences of Black undergraduate students as personal tutees; her main question was: What factors impact on the academic performance of Black BSc pre-registration students as personal tutees at university? As a personal tutor herself, Shelley was keen to gauge the experiences of these students studying in a predominantly White institution.

Key highlights included the need to support first year students from diverse cultural backgrounds to help their transition to HE and the requirement for institutions to resource culturally competent tutoring and support services for ethnically diverse students to thrive. The findings draw attention to the need for further scrutiny of the personal tutoring system with application of an intersectional approach.

The article can be accessed here.

Prior to this, Shelley also had her MOE 2 published in Times Higher Education. As one of few Black women academics in her Faculty, Shelley undertook a small-scale study exploring the experiences of other Black women academics and outlined lessons she drew from other Black women academics and explained how institutions can best support these women.

This article can be accessed here.

I wanted to update the previous blog that was written for me in 2024. I am a Year 4 EdD (Doctorate in Education) student and have passed my IFS (Institution Focused Study) and preparing for my main thesis adventure. It has been a challenging journey so far in many ways, including balancing a busy family life and working fulltime as a teacher. I am still learning my trade as an educational researcher, under the expert guidance of my patient supervisors Prof Christine Callender and Dr Robin Whitburn.

I am an activist, campaigner, collaborator, advocate and volunteer regarding Afro hair discrimination in our schools. I am passionate about the research I am undertaking and have a responsibility to ensure it is high quality and useful for pupils, families and schools in order to assist change. The work also needs to warrant the trust that children and families have shown in sharing their difficult experiences with me.

In addition to educational research, it is important to keep raising awareness more generally and ensure that information is easily accessible for children, families and educators. My daughter, Ruby and I have had this Runnymede Trust blog published today (09.01.2025) which we hope will be supportive to stakeholders.

We were interviewed by our own Alison Wiggins in October 2024 for Black History Month as part of CPA’s (Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment department) ‘Let’s Talk About Anti-Black Racism’ Series. This will be used in various ways at the Institute of Education, including Initial Teacher Training for Secondary PGCE. I am immensely proud of Ruby for continuing to revisit these painful memories, in order to protect other children from similar racial trauma. Ruby also wrote for the Guardian to mark World Afro Day in 2023 and contributed to their campaign in 2024 too.

Enhancing Transversal Skills in Engineering Education: Insights from SEFI 2024

I would like to share a recent opportunity I had to present my research at the 52nd Annual SEFI Conference, hosted by EPFL in Switzerland. SEFI, Europe’s leading forum for engineering education, offers a platform to exchange research and innovative pedagogical practices with colleagues from around the world.

My Institution Focused Study (IFS), presented at SEFI, explores academics’ perceptions of transversal skills (TS) within the new engineering programme at the Norwegian Defence University College. TS, often known as “soft skills,” such as critical thinking, communication, and teamwork, are vital for engineers facing the complexities of today’s global challenges.

Using Colaizzi’s descriptive phenomenology, I gathered insights from academic staff on how TS are integrated into the curriculum and perceived within the educational framework. My findings revealed both implicit recognition of TS’s importance and the challenges associated with aligning them effectively within engineering education.

Presenting this research at SEFI allowed me to engage with global perspectives on how TS can be better integrated into engineering education. The feedback from fellow educators and researchers underscored the need for continued focus on balancing technical content with the cultivation of these essential skills. As the workplace continues to evolve, particularly with advancements in AI and other technologies, TS will play a crucial role in ensuring that engineers can adapt and succeed.

If you’re interested in learning more about my research or have thoughts on how we can better integrate transversal skills in engineering curricula, I’d love to hear from you. You can download my full study from this link.

Sam’s research for his Institutional Focused Study (IFS) has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.  His work investigated pupils’ perceptions of Romans and Roman Britain explored through a very particular lens – you can read the article in full (it is open access meaning you don’t need to log into the UCL library account to read it):

Vernede, S. (2024). How does taking a praxis-based decolonising approach to primary history education impact pupils’ perceptions of Romans and Roman Britain? Education 3-13, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2024.2369244

The abstract of this article explains Sam’s work. The study presented findings from an action research project  completed in my own year 3 classroom. Using the frameworks of praxis (Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books.) and sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, L. S. 1978. Mind in Society The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by M. Cole et al. Translated by M. Cole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.), I studied the relationship between praxis-based, decolonised history teaching and year 3 students’ perceptions of Romans and Roman Britain. Student-participants’ work and classroom observations were used as data collection methods. An inductive approach to thematic analysis produced 5 themes, namely: Knowledge of locations across the Roman Empire, People’s physical actions, Characteristics of people that lived in Roman Britain, Migration in the Roman Empire and Students’ disciplinary knowledge.

If you are an EdD student and have a publication, research or other ideas that you’d like to feature in a blog – please let the Programme Leader know.

What Do You Think You are Doing?’

Mental Health Professionals’ Perspectives on Reflective Practice with Education Professionals: A Place2Think Case Study.

Ola’s work from his IFS study provides a thought provoking analysis of a case in a Mental Health setting.  He created a poster for the Annual Conference for Doctoral Education at the IOE (2024) and also presented this work in a seminar.

Ola’s work asked the important question: What are MHPs perspectives on reflective practice (Place2Think) with education professionals?

Within his research, he used a conceptual framework based on Third Space Psychagogy (Bhabha, 1994; Foucault, 2010) Methodology: Exploratory Qualitative Inductive Case Study.  He then sampled seven MHPs based at his own workplace organisation and collected qualitative data using semi structured interviews (one each lasting 45 minutes). The data was analysed using Reflective Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022)

The findings revealed three themes:

1. Place2Think is viewed as a valuable resource – offering a safe space for connecting and communicating. It provides restorative and formative functions for supervision.
2. Such reflective supervision echoes Foucauldian psychagogy used for self governing.
3. MHPs said they stepped out of role (on some occasions) and felt a sense of self-empowerment as central to their role.

Implications for practice include the possibility of articulating Place2Think as a reflective supervision/consultation and/or psychagogy across the organisation, getting Place2Think more involved within the wider conversation around supervision in schools, and more trust in MHPs to offer a more restorative service through Place2Think to education professionals.

Since the study, there has been more joined-up thinking around Place2Think, which is now being more overtly articulated as consultation across Place2Be. Place2Think was also presented as a case study at the inaugural Supervision in Education symposium organised by UCL’s Centre for Inclusive Education and St Mary’s University, Twickenham on 12 June, 2024.

This is an example of how the IFS can facilitate the application of research to professional practice.

In this blog, EdD student Dr Alex Baird discusses research guiding the future LGBTQ+ leadership development programmes and their accompanying research.

Committing to a queerer future in the university

Current EdD student, Kelly Stokes has recently had a blog published with the British Educational Research Association (BERA)

https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/headteacher-agency-erosion-through-performativity

The research presented in this blog, is from Kelly’s Institutional Focused Study (IFS) – it’s great to see IOE students sharing their work and ideas.

Kate Williams is an educational researcher and campaigner against afro hair discrimination in schools – and currently studying for her EdD with us at the Institute of Education. This is in response to her own daughter’s experiences in school and aims to compliment Ruby’s own campaigning.  Kate’s campaigning work is genuinely groundbreaking and provides an example of how our EdD students develop ideas, evolve great writing and enact change. Kate’s reach and impact from this work has been wide and comprises a video (see below – with thanks to Sas Amoah at the Open University) and a wide range of press and media interaction.  These are great ways to publish work but to reach the relevant audiences, and as Kate has shown, make waves with her research skills!

In this interview, developed with The Open University’s Black and Minority Ethnic Network, Lenny and Kate Williams reflect on their daughter Ruby’s experiences of hair discrimination and share how they took the pain of what happened and turned it into the motivation to protect others.  You can read more at this link.

Runnymede Trust Blog: Afro Hair Matters

Schoolsweek: Hair policies

The Teacherist: Hair, Discrimination and its Impact