Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG) activities
Upcoming events
ECRG Climate Change Primary Education Research Network with Dr Andy Flack
Date: Thursday 25 May 2023
Time: 16:00-17:00
Venue: Online
The Climate Change Primary Education Research Network brings together teachers, teaching assistants, student teachers, teacher trainers, academics and anyone else interested in sharing research informed practice relating to the climate and ecological emergency. For the final meeting of the Climate Change Primary Education Research network for the 2002/3 academic year, please come and join us. Dr Andy Flack will share new, research informed resources to support primary schools in exploring Wild Senses. There will be updates on policy and some tantalisingly good eco-education children’s books shared.
Please get in touch with Dr Verity Jones (verity6.jones@uwe.ac.uk) if you’d like the Teams invite sent to your calendar or want to know more.
Regional Climate Teacher Gathering
Date: Tuesday 30 May 2023
Time: 10:00-15:00
Venue: Rooms 4X112 and 4X113, Bristol Business School, UWE Bristol Frenchay Campus, BS16 1QY
Join us for a day of climate action co creating teaching materials to educate for sustainability in every subject for every young person. Hosted by the Ministry of Eco Education (Paul Turner) and UWE Bristol (Professor Verity Jones), this event brings together people to take part in climate change action; developing understanding about the climate and nature crisis; and co-creating teaching materials and sharing best practice examples.
Register to attend
ECRG Pedagogy Seminar “New ways to think about classrooms and teachers: using theory to inspire research into practice”
Date: Monday 5 June 2023
Time: 12:30-14:00
Venue: Room 2S704, UWE Bristol Frenchay Campus, BS16 1QY
In this seminar, Dr Lindsay Hetherington (L.Hetherington@exeter.ac.uk) and Dr Mark Hardman (m.hardman@ucl.ac.uk) will draw on examples from their research using a 'material-dialogic' theoretical framework to explore practice with teachers and classrooms. The seminar will model how theory might be used to inspire research and invite participants to relate this to their own interests and contexts. To register for this event, please RSVP to Ella Rees (ella.rees@uwe.ac.uk).
ECRG Seminar and Reading Group with Tom Fryer
Date: Friday 9 June 2023
Time: 13:00-15:00
Venue: Room 2S608, UWE Bristol Frenchay Campus, BS16 1QY
Past events
2023
ECRG Showcase and Social event, 19 May 2023
This showcase event, held at Design West, was designed for researchers and external partners to come together to network, explore research interests and identify possibilities for collaboration. We welcomed ECRG researchers working on research that will have a positive impact our on community and beyond. This event was a fantastic opportunity to speak with Research Strand Leaders and researchers across these Strands.
ECRG Climate Change Primary Education Research Network with Dr Ben Williams, 30 March 2023
Dr Ben Williams shared new, research informed resources to support primary schools in exploring microplastics in the home. Malcolm Richards, book shop owner and Senior Lecturer, provided an update on SPARKS - an exciting new sustainability hub that opened in Bristol in May.
ECRG Early Career Network event with Tim Clark: "Becoming a researcher: Insights from early career education and childhood researchers", 18 April 2023
This session focused on research development by featuring a series of talks from UWE Bristol Early Career Researchers who drew on their experiences of some of the key steps in their journeys to becoming active researchers.
Key themes for the ECRG Early Career Network event were:
- What’s the value in doing a Doctorate in Education?
- How can mentoring support your research progress as an Early Career Researcher?
- How do you build research collaborations?
- What’s involved in writing for publication?
- How do you find and apply for research funding?
2020
Online seminar: Graduate employment and postgraduate study outcomes for care-experienced students, 23 July 2020
Dr Neil Harrison, Deputy Director of the Rees Centre at the University of Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at UWE Bristol, gave an online seminar talk on Thursday 23 July 2020, where he discussed his new work, "Graduate employment and postgraduate study outcomes for care-experienced students".
Dr Harrison was Associate Professor in the Department of Education and Childhood at UWE Bristol until 2018.
Watch the recording of Dr Harrison's online seminar via Microsoft Stream. To find out more about his work follow Dr Harrison on Twitter.
Webinars - How to use DRY: The diary of a water superhero, 21 May 2020
Free online training using the award winning book DRY: The diary of a water superhero. Dr Verity Jones, Professor Lindsey McEwen and Sarah Whitehouse present sessions for educators and for parents/carers.
The book is based on the conversations and findings of research in five river catchments across the UK drawing on experiences and memories of drought and water scarcity. The findings were woven into a story about a girl in Year 6 who needs to do a school project that sees the ups and downs of engaging in community action.
View or read DRY: The diary of a water superhero.
Webinar: Locked in chat, 5 May 2020
Hosted by Dr Alpesh Maisuria, Associate Professor of Education Policy in Critical Education at UWE Bristol.
Contributors:
- Climate change denial - implications for education; Professor Tristan McCowan.
- Passive revolution, pititas, and Evo Morales; Dr Angus McNelly.
- Putting a lid on ideas: 'Key concepts' and ethnocentricity; Dr Leena Robertson.
'That's not on message': Narrative research, challenging dominant narratives and ethical responsibilities, 18 February 2020
Venue: Room 2S705, UWE Bristol Frenchay Campus
BRIDGE hosted a talk from Professor Pat Sikes (School of Education, University of Sheffield). In this seminar, Professor Sikes told some stories about two auto/biographical narrative research projects she has been involved in which posed unequivocal challenges to dominant narratives with potential consequences for those they were intended to protect.
Miseducation and its consequences: Education and the working classes, 8 January 2020
Venue: Room 2B020, UWE Bristol Frenchay Campus
BRIDGE hosted a talk by Diane Reay, Professor of Education, University of Cambridge on 8 January 2020. This was the first seminar of the BRIDGE Research Group for 2020 and was attended by 50 people. Professor Reay's talk explored the psychic consequences of class inequalities. Drawing on empirical case studies, it described the affective economies of identification and dis-identification that underpin class relationships to education.
The main focus was the psychic landscapes of class, the powerful feelings of anxiety, hope, fear, guilt, desire, disappointment, shame and rejection generated in and through our contemporary neoliberal educational project. In doing so, the case is made that class operates as a powerful psychic force that has negative emotional consequences for all individuals but, in particular, for those from black and white working class backgrounds.
Professor Reay, author of Miseducation, Inequality, Education and the Working Classes, grew up on a council estate, the eldest of eight, and became a Cambridge professor. Here, she talked about inequality in education. Professor Reay's research includes:
- children's relationships to space and place in the city
- parental involvement in education and research
- socially mobile working class young people
- the impact of assessment on primary school children
- ESRC-funded projects including children's transitions to secondary schooling, choice of higher education, students' identities and participation as learners, and white, middle class# identities through an exploration of educational choice.
Listen to the audio recording of Professor Reay's talk.
2019
Family Language Policy: Mobility, migration and multilingualism in the UK, 24 September 2019
BRIDGE hosted a presentation from Professor Xiao-Lan Curdt-Christiansen (Professor of Applied Linguistics) and Dr Jing Huang (Research Associate) from the Department of Education, University of Bath. In this talk, they presented an ongoing ESRC-funded project entitled Family Language Policy: A Multi-level Investigation of Multilingual Practices in Transnational Families. The project employs a multi-level, multi-community and multi-family-type design to explore what types of Family Language Policy (FLP) exist in the UK at the national level, how FLP is shaped, established, and implemented at the community level, and how the actual practices are managed at the family level.
The project has a particular focus on families from three ethnolinguistic communities - Chinese, Polish and Somali. Findings from the national-level survey and family-level ethnography will be presented with data examples.
English as an Additional Language Conference 2019, 10 July 2019
UWE Bristol, in partnership with Integra Schools, were pleased to present the English as an Additional Language Conference 2019.
One of the major challenges for students learning English as an additional language is developing a command of the more formal academic language essential for success across the curriculum. Speakers at this conference advocated that securing a whole school approach to teaching academic language is essential and demonstrated how to identify and explicitly teach academic language across all subjects. Our speakers were:
- Dr Gail Forey
Language for curriculum learning and disciplinary literacy in secondary school: What to teach and how to teach it? - Catharine Driver
Towards content language integrated learning: Developing language and literacy in STEM subjects. - Zara Ali
A school leader's experience of securing a whole school approach to teaching academic language.
BRIDGE Inaugural Doctoral Success Event, 26 June 2019
VThe Department of Education and Childhood celebrated the doctoral successes of Dr Jane Carter, Dr Juliet Edmond, Dr Ali Rouncefield-Swales and Dr Jacob Bacon. The speakers presented their respective doctoral journeys on the following research topics:
- Dr Jane Carter
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check: Listening to the voices of children and their teachers. - Dr Juliet Edmonds
The beliefs, practices and development of three teachers of Science in the primary school. - Dr Ali Roucefield-Swales
Apprentice to graduate: Narratives of navigating a pathway into and through higher education. - Dr Jacob Bacon
FE Sports Lecturer Professionalism: 'Freedom to play' or 'Do as I say?'
OfS Changing Minds Research Seminar, 7 May 2019
Bristol Inter-disciplinary Group for Education Research (BRIDGE), is pleased to have Dr Jessica Gagnon speak about the HEFCE-funded research project Changing Minds on 7 May 2019.
This presentation explored initial findings from the two-year Office for Students (OfS) funded attainment gap project titled “Changing Mindsets: Reducing stereotype threat and implicit bias as barriers to student success”. The project is focused on addressing unequal student outcomes for two student groups: Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and socio-economically disadvantaged students. Findings from the project are intended to inform higher education policies and practices to address inequalities in students' experiences and outcomes.
Project Zulu Research Event, 2 April 2019
Project Zulu is a UWE Bristol educational development initiative which works with partner schools in township and rural areas of Kwazul-Natal, South Africa. Collaborations between school communities in South Africa and UWE Bristol staff and students seek ways of enhancing infrastructure, pedagogy and learning opportunities through knowledge exchange, action research and practical support.
The three research projects presented in this seminar have developed over the last three years and are based on such collaborations:
- Learning difficulties nursing and occupational therapy collaboration at a SEN school by Dr Alex Palombi and Vanessa Parmenter
- Reading partner intervention at two rural South African primary schools by Dr Jane Carter and Karan Vickers-Hulse
- ICT project at a rural South African primary school by Dr David Wyatt and Benjamin Knight.
Lunchtime Seminar, 4 March 2019
For this Lunchtime Seminar, the speakers were Jade Parnell, from the Centre for Appearance Research (Department of Social Sciences, UWE Bristol); and Dr Maryam Almohammad and Dr Jane Andrews (Department of Education and Childhood, UWE Bristol). Jade Parnell discussed her doctoral research on "Promoting acceptance of socially stigmatised appearances in young children in primary school".
Dr Maryam Almohammad and Dr Jane Andrews presented on their topic of "Artmaking, materialism, and multilingualism in welcoming environments for EAL learners".
Visit our blog for more information.
Paired Peers Twilight Session, 14 February 2019
Critical perspectives on transitions into, through and beyond university: Learning from the Paired Peers project
Our speaker was Dr Richard Waller (Associate Professor of the Sociology of Education, Department of Education and Childhood, UWE Bristol). The Paired Peers project was a two part longitudinal study (2010-2103 and 2014-2017) funded by the Leverhulme Trust which followed an initial cohort of 90 undergraduates studying at either of the two universities (University of Bristol; UWE Bristol) in one English city (Bristol). The project matched pairs of students by social class, gender and subject discipline both within and between the two institutions, and followed them from induction to graduation and for several years beyond into their post-university lives and careers.
The presentation was followed by a discussion of the implications of the project's findings for the practice of academics and university professional services staff alike. For more details about the talk, visit our blog.
BRIDGE Education Research Seminar - Technologies to support inclusion and learning: Working with young autistic people, 21 January 2019
Our speakers were Dr Nigel Newbutt (Senior Lecturer/Senior Researcher in Digital Education, Department of Education and Childhood, UWE Bristol) and Ms Dimitra Magkafa (Doctoral Researcher, Department of Arts and Cultural Industries, UWE Bristol). For more information about the speakers and their talk topics visit our blog.
2018
Lunchtime Seminar, 13 December 2018
Our speakers for this lunchtime seminar were Laura Manison Shore, PGCE Primary and Early Years Programme Leader and Partnership Manager (Department of Education and Childhood, UWE Bristol) and Dr Maryam Almohammad, Research Associate (Department of Education and Childhood, UWE Bristol). For more details visit our blog.
Gender, sexuality, bodies and identity research conference, 4 December 2018
This conference brought together leading researchers from the South West of England and guest speakers from the USA in the field of gender, sexuality, bodies and identity and showcased some of the work of the presenters and the groups, centres and universities they represent. For more information please view our blog.
Panel discussion: UWE Bristol Speaks Up against violence and abuse, 26 November 2018
A new campaign has been launched to help UWE Bristol students speak up and report unacceptable behaviour such as harassment, discrimination and violence. Speak Up has been introduced this term to raise awareness and prevent these types of incidents on campus. In recognition of the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (25 November 2018), UWE Bristol hosted a panel discussion to continue conversations around violence and abuse.
Inter-disciplinary twilight session: A cross-faculty meeting, 19 November 2018
This event brought together researchers across the University to share current research interests to establish inter-disciplinary research connections.
English as an Additional Language and Creativity Conference 2018, 12 July 2018
For more information about this conference, visit our blog.
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Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG)
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More about the research theme strands within the Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG) at UWE Bristol.

Postgraduate research in the Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG)
Postgraduate research activity in the Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG), UWE Bristol.