Guest blog from Professor Christine Jarvis – Dean, School of Education and Profe

One of the most rewarding aspects of working in a School of Education is collaborating with experienced teachers at all stages in their careers who want to  take time to think more deeply,  and read more widely than the frantic pace of day to day work allows.  The courses have a really vibrant mix of participants from different experiences and backgrounds, including international backgrounds.  People come to us to share ideas with people they might not necessarily encounter at work, or even in other forms of CPD which often rely on working with people from similar backgrounds. 

The educators who come to study with us often want to develop some form of action research which combines important and valuable development activity in their place of work with engagement with new ideas and ways of looking at things encountered through reading and engagement with research. I guess a university is the place to go if you want to do more than just share good practice in your CPD – you want exposure to different ways of looking at education and are willing to have your ideas challenged and to challenge the thinking of others.  

Our Ed D doctorate is particularly popular and oversubscribed, and includes a taught first year in which participants learn how to become educational researchers and discuss different approaches to thinking about education and increasing our understanding of education, followed by a research topic where they work alongside one of our established researchers who supervises their work.

Our Masters programmes are very flexible and can be tailored to fit the individual interests of participants.  Participants’ dissertations cover a wide range of topics and are always interesting to read – here are a few examples from last year:

Safeguarding disabled children, Investigating the cultural assumptions, concerns and attitudes towards parenting and childhood in best-selling parenting advice books; Fear of maths in adult students; Gender segregation in career choice; using action research to investigate the impact of pupil premium funding; selective mutism in young children; pastoral provision and challenging educational underachievement in boys; the root cause of juvenile anti-social behaviour – and many many more!

If you do want to find out more about studying with us visit the School’s web–pages at https://www.hud.ac.uk/edu/ and if you are interested in doing a doctorate, have a look at the kind of topics where we have expertise in research supervision.

On a personal note, I’ve just finished my latest article, on the teen sensation Twilight and its implications for girls and schooling and am working with doctoral students on a range of topics, including working with Liz Delaney who is doing her research on children’s responses to science and scientists in fiction.  Always interested in talking to people about children’s and young adult fiction!