Image from Palestinian Childhoods: Solidarity and Sumud exhibition poster. Credit: Photograph: Ahmed Al Daalsa. Balloons: Laura. Concept: Aya Battiri and Mahmoud Hussein.

16 September 2025

By Feryal Awan and Rachel Rosen

From 1–14 September 2025, UCL East’s Marshgate Building hosted Palestinian Childhoods: Solidarity & Ṣumūd, a landmark exhibition that wove together photographs, letters, sound and objects accompanied by a series of events. It created a space of solidarity for Palestine within the university – urgently needed at a time when silence too often dominates institutional life, as Feryal is finding in her current research about the experiences of primary school teachers and students in London as they speak out for Palestine. (more…)

Amina Meshnuni and Abdullahi Yussuf, speakers for this year’s TCRU-Coram annual lecture. Credit: James Tye for UCL.

3 June 2025

By Andrea Verdasco and Dushana Pinfield, Events and Communications Manager, TCRU

IOE’s Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) and Coram have called for a fundamental shift in how asylum-seeking children and young people in the UK are supported. The case was put forward by IOE’s Professor Elaine Chase and Coram Young Citizens, Amina Meshnuni and Abdullahi Yussuf, speakers for this year’s TCRU-Coram annual lecture. The lecture marked a significant step in collaboration between UCL and Coram, with the public signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between them, underpinning a commitment to deeper partnership on research-led policy change regarding children’s rights. (more…)

Credit: WavebreakMediaMicro via Adobe Stock.

31 March 2025

By Hans Svennevig

This post is the third of three in a series on disaster and climate education (DCE). In the first two posts, Pedagogies for disaster and climate risk reduction and Collaborative and co-learning for disaster and climate justice, Kaori Kitagawa introduced what DCE is about and techniques for collaborative co-learning to prepare for these scenarios and reduce their impact.

In this post I hone back in on schooling to share resources that could enable teachers to embed DCE within their lessons. I use the case of England’s Citizenship school curriculum, but the principle of embedding DCE into learning and the resources themselves have wider application. I draw on my and Kaori’s recent publication ‘Preparing for disasters through Citizenship Pedagogies’. The new Co-learning for disaster and climate justice master’s module at UCL uses these themes to enable students to develop pioneering approaches and resources of their own that further progress practice in DCE. (more…)

Credit: Pixel-Shot via Adobe Stock.

27 February 2025

By Kaori Kitagawa

This post is the second of three in a series on disaster and climate education. Read part one: Pedagogies for disaster and climate risk reduction.

Compared to didactic, ‘knowledge transmission’ models, more collaborative approaches stand out as an appropriate pedagogy for disaster and climate education (DCE). Preparing for disasters in communities or households will benefit from building solidarity and sharing responsibilities. By enabling a social learning environment, collaborative learning pedagogies cultivate a sense of belonging. This inclusive space values and respects every member, which plays a crucial role in promoting social justice. But we can go further. (more…)

Credit: 24Novembers via Adobe Stock.

20 February 2025

By Kaori Kitagawa

As climate change accelerates, regions worldwide are grappling with increased flooding, droughts and wildfires. Areas prone to seismic activity frequently face large-scale earthquakes. Such catastrophic events disrupt lives and have fatal consequences. We need ‘education’ – formal, informal and lifelong learning – to help citizens navigate them. In this series of blog posts, I and my colleague Hans Svennevig discuss pedagogical approaches to education for reducing disaster and climate risk. This post explores the range of pedagogies used, and in the second I look in particular at ‘co-learning’ approaches in this field. In the third post Hans shares practical examples. (more…)

Photo: UNFCC via Creative Commons

23 November 2022

By Kate Greer and Nicola Walshe, Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education (CCCSE)

So, how was COP?

Good…? Exhausting…? Productive…? Challenging…?

It is difficult to sum up the experience of attending the annual UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP. COP can be heartwarming and heartbreaking. It can leave you feeling determined and despairing. Motivated and overwhelmed. Fearful and hopeful. All at the same time. Intertwined with the tangle of feelings that we bring home from our experience at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, one thing is (relatively) clear. This year, COP27 resulted in good news for education. Through an immense collaborative effort of Member Parties and Observers, progress was made towards implementing an internationally coordinated educational response to climate change. Here, we briefly reflect on this achievement and its implications for climate change education in England and further afield.

Of foremost importance for education is that at COP27 countries agreed to a new global Action Plan on Action for Climate Empowerment, or ACE. ACE is the term used to describe a broad area of work set out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Paris Agreement (2015) which includes education alongside five other elements: (more…)

Mainstream media barely reported the election of Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian woman from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, as Colombian vice-president.

4 August 2022

By Leda Kamenopoulou 

If we are serious about decolonising education, we must prioritise research from the South, and fund it properly.

‘Decolonising’ academia means challenging the dominance of knowledge produced by historically privileged contexts and groups, and it is a trend that has taken higher education by storm. In the last year alone, I noticed numerous conferences, workshops, seminars, projects and reading groups, all focused on decolonising education, psychology, curricula and reading lists, research methods and ethics, teaching and learning.

At IOE’s Department of Psychology and Human Development, we have just set up an ‘epistemic justice working group’ to help us address the power imbalances between North and South in knowledge production and sharing, by reflecting on our curricula, teaching practice, and research. It is important to clarify that ‘North’ and ‘South’ do not necessarily denote geographical location. Instead, the ‘South’ is a metaphor for spaces historically characterised by inequality, poverty, and economic, political and cultural disadvantage.

In this post, I argue that these decolonisation-themed activities will remain empty rhetoric until we are prepared to see the South as of equal value (more…)

Beryl Gilroy at Beckford primary school in north London in 1971. Photograph: Beryl Gilroy Estate

24 June 2022

By Elaine Unterhalter

This blog is the sixth in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.

Many historical strands weave through the 1950s, but the end of Empire and grappling with what colonial education and decolonisation entailed were key themes at IOE.

Understanding the 1950s at IOE requires trying to bring together two threads: inclusive education for modernising societies and the relationships of colonialism, built on economic and political dispossession associated with slavery, land seizure, economic exploitation, racial discrimination and cultural hierarchy.

The involvement of IOE with Britain’s colonial projects stretches back to the 1920s. A Colonial Department was formally established in 1927, aiming to train teachers and support education policy work for the Colonial Office. In 1952, as part of a series of lectures organised to mark the Golden Jubilee anniversary of IOE, Sir Christopher Cox, educational adviser to the Colonial Office, delivered a lecture celebrating the ‘increasing importance’ of (more…)

In Doncaster, much of the dispersal housing lies in outlying areas with few services

21 June 2022

By Mette Louise Berg

Photo by Rasha Kotaiche

This is Refugee Week – a celebration of ‘the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary’ around the world.

These are difficult times for those seeking sanctuary across the Global North. In the UK specifically, asylum is a contentious and politicised issue, and we only rarely hear and listen to the voices of people who seek asylum. In research for the report we are launching this week, we worked with a group of people with personal experience of the asylum system and organisations supporting them in Doncaster and Halifax in Yorkshire, two dispersal towns. We asked questions about housing, and the way they are being (more…)

7 February 2022

By Kendra Pyne, Yi Shi and Mukdarut Bangpan

School support to build children’s resilience and boost their analytical skills could help to mitigate the inequalities that have increased during the pandemic. This is one of the broad range of interventions highlighted by our analysis of 52 research projects from around the world published in the International Journal of Educational Research.

As schools shut their doors during the Covid-19 pandemic, educational systems around the world have been struggling to provide continuity of teaching and uphold the quality and inclusiveness of education. While school disruption has affected all communities in terms of livelihoods, learning and economic opportunities, and psychological health, people living in disadvantaged situations are more likely to suffer from the most detrimental consequences.

Such disparity has led to a series of unanswered questions in the context of public health emergencies: what action has been (more…)