Education research group
Cardiff University
2022-23
programme
WELCOME
Welcome to the 2022-23 Bath-Cardiff Education Research Group programme! We hope that you enjoy the sessions. If you have any questions or suggestions with regards to individual sessions, want to present or tell us something about the running of the group, please get in touch with us at:
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Cardiff: Manuel Souto-Otero
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Faisal Al-Balushi
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For joint sessions with Bath you can also contact:
Bath: Samantha Curle
At a glance
26/10/22
Gender, space and power in the pandemic
Dr. K. Carruther Thomas, Birmingham City University
18/01/23
The challenge of achieving a fairer education system
Prof. D. Reay,
University of Cambridge
17/05/2023
‘Four Great Gates’ Revisited
Dr. Sara Delamont,
Cardiff University
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16/11/22
The place of elite higher education in mass higher education
Prof. M. Tight,
Lancaster University
22/02/23 & 15/03/23
Sessions cancelled (strike)
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21/06/2023
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The Welsh digital competence framework in practice
Patricia Jimenez
Cardiff University
19/04/23
​What does REF tell us that we didn’t know already? Reasons to be cheerful and reasons to be worried.
Prof. David James,
Cardiff University
05/07/2023
Education Researcher (and Machine) in the Post-Human Era: Methodological Reflections
Dr. Kyungmee-Lee
Cardiff University
Session 1
Gender, space, and power in the pandemic: Exploring the equality implications of changes to working practices in COVID-19 lockdowns and beyond
Dr. K. Carruther Thomas, Birmingham City University
Shortly after the UK went into its first lockdown against the coronavirus pandemic, evidence began to emerge of a differential impact on men and women. Ascher (2020), Connolly (2020) and Ferguson (2020) inter alia argued the pressures of working from home, home schooling, caring and restrictive measures such as shielding and self-isolation, particularly disadvantaged working women. There were concerns that the pandemic was having ‘a devastating effect on gender equality and could set women back decades’ (Donegan 2020). A rapidly emerging literature (Boncori 2020; Fazackerly 2020; Kitchener 2020 inter alia) also documented disadvantages female academics faced in sustaining academic research and writing for publication, among other core practices.
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In 2021, the research project Dear Diary: Equality implications for female academics of changes to working practices in lockdown and beyond investigated UK female academics’ experiences of working practices, career progression and academic identity during and post-COVID lockdown. Diary and interview data were collected from 25 participants and have now been curated in an open access Illustrated Digital Archive (www.deardiaryresearch.co.uk ).
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Drawing on the accounts of postgraduate students, academic lecturers, and researchers, some of whom were parents of children and young people, this session will consider the research findings with a specific focus on the way space, gender and power interacted in public, private and professional spaces during the earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will also reflect on universities’ strategies and corporate messaging; the challenges of returning to campus and hybrid working and longer-term implications for working practices and wellbeing. Archive content (textual and visual) will be used to prompt reflection on these themes and questions.
SEMINAR 1
Session 2
The place of elite higher education in mass higher education
Prof. M. Tight, Lancaster University
While most developed, and some less developed, countries have now moved from elite to mass higher education, elite sub-systems continue to exist within the higher education system in many countries. This contribution identifies the issues and critiques that this situation gives rise to and discusses possible ways forward. It concludes that the underlying problem is the relation between intellectual and social elites, who have disproportionate advantages in terms of networks and access.
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Speaker:
Malcolm Tight is Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University, having previously worked at the University of Warwick, the Open University and Birkbeck College. He is editor of the journal Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, and of the book series International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, and co-editor of another book series, Theory and Method in Higher Education Research. His research interests are in the development of higher education and higher education research internationally.
Professor Malcolm Tight, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. m.tight@lancaster.ac.uk
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Discussant: Andrea Abbas is Professor of the Sociology of Higher Education in the Department of Education at the University of Bath and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Education in Asia https://www.bath.ac.uk/research-centres/centre-for-research-in-education-in-asia-crea/. She has a long term interest in exploring the possibilities of critical social theory for understanding and tackling inequalities and injustices in higher education contexts. One of her most recent projects focuses on developing a feminist perspective on the diverse and intersectional genderings of academics over a period of ten years using Margaret Archers notion of different types of reflexives as a starting point for understanding how complex gendered agencies intersect with the materially diverse structuring’s offered by morphogenetic universities and societies. Another project is developing the work of Bhaskar and Danermark on interdisciplinary research as a heuristic device in collaborative research between the UK and China.
Session 3
The challenge of achieving a fairer education system
Prof. D. Reay (University of Cambridge)
Abstract: The orthodoxy within the field of education, and amongst politicians and policy makers, is to express concern about educational inequalities whilst failing both to engage with many of the main drivers of inequality, and to grasp the complex and dynamic interplay of educational structures, processes and practices. This is a global problem not a problem for any country alone, but international evidence demonstrates, that some countries are much better at tackling inequalities than others. In this talk I explore the wider political context that has generated and exacerbated injustices in education and in particular, the repercussions of neoliberalism, before discussing educational inequalities in my own country, England. I look at a number of key policies that have intensified educational inequalities often while claiming their rationale is to reduce it. I then examine the research consensus on policies that would enable a fairer educational system. Finally, I discuss a few countries that have bucked the trend and the policies they have implemented that have successfully countered educational inequalities.
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Bio: Diane Reay is Professor of Education at Cambridge University. She is a sociologist working in the area of education but is also interested in broader issues of the relationship between the self and society, the affective and the material. Her priority has been to engage in research with a strong social justice agenda that addresses social inequalities of all kinds. Her research has a strong theoretical focus and she is particularly interested in developing theorisations of social class and the ways in which it is mediated by gender and ethnicity. This has resulted in researching areas as diverse as boys' underachievement, Black supplementary schooling, higher education access, female management in schools, and pupil peer group cultures.
Session 4
What does REF tell us that we didn’t know already? Reasons to be cheerful and reasons to be worried.
Prof. D. James, Cardiff University
Abstract: This seminar will include a brief overview of education submissions in REF 2021 and some key points about outcomes, whilst making some comparisons with REF 2014 and with other social science submissions. I will describe key aspects of the nature of the assessment and how the sub-panel worked, and suggest that REF has distinctive value and legitimacy amongst quality assessment processes associated with the spending of public money. I will go on to make the case that given the breadth and significance of educational activity and the volume of public expenditure it commands, the REF reveals a concerning level of investment in UK educational research. Finally, I will suggest that the REF process demonstrates that recent prevailing thinking about an ‘evidence ecosystem’ is too simplistic.
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Bio: David James is Professor of Sociology of Education at Cardiff University and Chair of the Executive Editors of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. He was founding director of the ESRC Wales Doctoral Training Centre & Partnership and chaired the Education sub-panel for REF 2021. Most of his research has centred on the relationships between education and social inequality, encompassing teaching, learning and assessment in FE and HE, lifelong learning and its relationship to work, school choice, professionalism in education, and governance/governing in FE.
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Session 5
‘Four Great Gates’ Revisited
Dr. Sara Delamont, Cardiff University
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Abstract: In 2003 I was invited to do one of the Plenaries at the joint NZ and Australian Educational Research Conference. The paper I gave, called ‘Four Great Gates’ was published in Research Papers in Education in 2005. It is a manifesto for re-setting the agenda for educational research I the way proposed in 1971 by M.F.D. Young to make its own research problems rather than ‘take’ educators’ problems, to do what Blanche Geer, Howard Becker and Harry Wolcott called for in 1964, 197x, and 1981, and work out strategies to make schools and higher education institutions anthropologically strange or unfamiliar. Twenty years after that plenary I have been reflecting on some of the strategies that can be used to fight familiarity, and, more introspectively, on how far I have lived up to my own proposal to take the Lebanon Gate.
Anyone thinking of attending this seminar could usefully skim the 2005 paper before the event.
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Bio: Sara Delamont is Reader emerita in SPCSI. She was the first woman to be president of BERA (in 1984) and was awarded the BERA Lifelong Service award in 2015. She has been on the editorial boards of BJSE and of RIPE since they were funded in the 1970s. She is primarily an ethnographer, and is famous for Tshirts with slogans on.
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Session 6
The Digital Competence Framework in practice: the local and practical accomplishment of “the digital” in an educational setting
Patricia Jimenez (Cardiff University)
Abstract: The Digital Competence Framework (DCF) is one of the cross-curricular elements of the new Curriculum for Wales 2022. The framework is designed to help learners become confident digital citizens, to interact and collaborate digitally with others, to produce work digitally, and to become confident in handling data and using computational thinking (problem solving strategies). The talk will discuss what implementing the DCF looks like in practice, exploring what is involved in the production of digital skills as educational outcomes. The discussion is based on a two-months fieldwork at a primary school in South Wales, where lessons and classroom activities were observed and video-recorded for detail analysis. The analysis explores the local and practical production of adequate instructions, pedagogical dialogues, and technological affordances as interactional accomplishments.
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Speakers: Patricia Jimenez is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University, with research interests in ethnography, interactionism, ethnomethodology, education, the digital society, and policy in practice.
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Session 7
Educational researcher (and machine) in the posthuman era: methodological reflections
Dr. Kyungmee Lee, Lancaster University
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Abstract: There has been increasing enthusiasm for and conversation on machine-assisted research innovation in the broad field of education and social sciences. This seminar will provide a brief overview of popular claims—both positive and negative—about fast-emerging posthuman conditions; and unpack some of the dominant discourses of innovative machine-assisted research approaches. The ‘back-to-person’ and ‘back-to-basic’ methodological approaches, exemplified by autoethnography and evocative academic writing, will be discussed as a critical alternative approach to rethinking machine-assisted research and researchers.
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Bio: Kyungmee Lee is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University. She is a co-editor of Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning. Her research targets the intersection of online education, adult education, and international education concerning issues of accessibility and inclusivity. Using a range of qualitative research methodologies and evocative academic writings, her current projects investigate the academic experiences of diverse non-traditional student groups in distance education settings. Kyungmee’s scholarship emphasises concepts of discourse, knowledge and power, understood through a broadly Foucauldian lens.
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