Qualifications

I gained my PhD in Citizenship Education Policy in 2012 from the Institute of Education in London. I also have an MA in History of Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies, from Birkbeck College, a PGCE in Social Studies and a BSc in Politics and Sociology. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 

Experience

I am currently Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University, where I am working with colleagues to build research capacity. I have worked in schools, charities and higher education for the past twenty years, starting as a teacher of history and sociology in London secondary schools. After six years in the classroom I moved on to become Education Director at the Institute for Citizenship, and then moved into the university sector, initially in Anglia Ruskin University as History and Citizenship PGCE Course Leader. At London Metropolitan University I was Head of Initial Teacher Education and then I moved to Queen's University Belfast to establish a new MSc in Children's Rights. Over the years I have taught on a variety of undergraduate, post graduate and professional courses in traditional face to face classrooms and on-line environments.

 

I explore three main themes in my research and writing:

1. Citizenship education

I have published work on the development of citizenship education policy, the establishment of citizenship education as a new curriculum subject in England and I am co-editor of Teaching Citizenship, the journal of the Association for Citizenship Teaching. I am currently conducting research funded by the Gordon Cook Foundation and SCOTENS on children's conceptual development in citizenship education.

 

2. Children's rights

With colleagues at London Metropolitan University, UNICEF UK and Amnesty UK I helped to establish a Rights Respecting PGCE in which the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child were established as a foundation for the teacher education course. I continued to explore this theme in my work at the Centre for Children's Rights at Queen's University Belfast, and in 2014 I led an international research project to establish a baseline assessment of child rights education (CRE) across 26 countries and I am curretly working on a book project exploring the implications of CRE for pedagogy.

 

3. Teacher education

I have developed professional development courses on assessment and planning and published occasional related pieces over a number of years and in 2015 Marcus Bhargava and I published a book on medium term planning. This built on interviews we conducted with experienced colleagues to identify how they planned their teaching. This resulted in the development of the 5A's model (articulation, alignment, activation, assessment and adjustment) as a framework for teacher education.

 

I'm interested in exploring these three themes through research, consultancy, professional collaborations and through postgraduate supervision, so if you have an idea, please get in touch.