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.

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.