Nurturing Kindness Through Engagement : Connecting Research into Pro-Social Behaviour with the Classroom

Aneeza Pervez works with primary school-aged children and explores how ‘pro-social behaviour’, or simply put, kindness, is understood and shaped through the social interactions that they have in school settings. She is in the final stages of her PhD research at the Institute of Education (Department of Psychology and Human Behaviour). She spoke with Siân Aggett who wrote this blog about the benefits that public engagement bought to her and her partners:  

Aneeza’s research was qualitative and already involved meeting with and interviewing teachers. But she felt that a deeper exchange with her contributors could have a real-world positive impact.   

“You know? We’re trained to do outputs such as, write papers, present in research, present at conferences, but nobody really talks about what you can actually do with the participant community.” 

She discovered the support of the UCL public engagement team who helped her to develop her ideas. 

‘I had never heard of engagement before or public, public engagement or anything before!’ 

Aneeza found some funding and was able to make her project idea a reality. The project saw her work co-creatively with teachers; sharing her research findings and having deeper discussions about what they meant for schools and how it could be translated to the classroom.  

‘We had really important discussions about what it means to be kind and helpful in school settings and we came up with various school-oriented definitions…’ 

An illustrator helped develop training materials and classroom tools, such as visual cue cards representing scenes of kindness captured in her research data. Aneeza also developed teaching guides in which she shares background information and makes the connection to the Personal, Social Health, and Economics (PSHE) curriculum. 

‘This falls within the social skills training that children must have. So, I tried to bind it together to make it more appealing to teachers!’ 

The appeal worked – her work was used in schools and was recognised with an award at an annual ‘Festival of Kindness’. On top of this Aneeza feels that by doing this project she has developed both as a project manager and as a grant writer (she has since secured further research funding). Aneeza is now working with teachers in her home city of Lahore in Pakistan who are keen to use the teaching tools. The positive impact that delivering this engagement work had on her research career was something she hadn’t expected: 

‘It’s not just engagement, you are creating academic impact! I have presented at a conference…and, I got some wonderful feedback. I’m also going to be writing up several papers out of it because it does strongly link to my PhD.’ 

Looking back, Aneeza appreciates how seeing the relevance of her work applied in the real world brought renewed momentum over the long PhD journey: 

‘I think because the four-year PhD journey (mine’s a bit longer than average), is very tiresome, and somewhere in the middle of completing the paperwork and doing things you can forget why you started it. And you kind of forget the things that interested you about that project. I think that’s what this public engagement activity brought me back to!’ 

This blog was written by Siân Aggett