School of Education
Research and Enterprise Conference
Keynote Speakers
Dominic Wyse
Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE). He is President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), and the Founding Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 years) (HHCP). Dominic is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), and of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Prior to a role at the IOE as Head of Academic Department Learning and Leadership from 2012 to 2019 Dominic was Faculty Director of Research, Consultancy and Knowledge Transfer, in the Faculty of Children and Learning.
Dominic has significant experience in music that began with his undergraduate studies at The Royal Academy of Music. Before joining the IOE Dominic was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He was also appointed as the first Director of Music-Making at Churchill College Cambridge, where he was a Fellow and Director of Studies for Education. In the past Dominic was a Reader at Liverpool John Moores University, and a teacher with experience working in London, Bradford and Huddersfield in infant and junior phases.
The main focus of Dominic’s research is curriculum and pedagogy. Key areas of work are the teaching of writing, reading and creativity. Dominic has extensive experience of funded research projects which he has disseminated in numerous peer-reviewed research journal articles and books. Dominic’s recent major contribution is published in his book How Writing Works: From the Invention of the Alphabet to the Rise of Social Media (Cambridge University Press). Other publications include major international research volumes for which he is the lead editor e.g. The The BERA/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research and The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment), and bestselling books for students, teachers and educators e.g. Teaching English, Language and Literacy – 4th Edition (Routledge); and The Good Writing Guide for Education Students 4th Edition (SAGE). He has been an editor, and on the editorial board, of internationally recognised research journals. For six years Dominic was one of the editors of the BERA Curriculum Journal.
Dominic’s main teaching is supervision of PhDs. He also undertakes teaching for Master’s programmes in the areas of research methodology and topics related to his research interests.
Pandemic, Protests, Recovery, Opportunity: What’s next for research in Education? University of Brighton Conference 12 July 2021
Education: The State of the Discipline
Professor Dominic Wyse
UCL Institute of Education
President of the British Educational Research Association
Founder of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy
Learning and teaching are phenomena that are uniquely human, and part of the very long history of humans’ development over thousands of years. Education as an organised academic discipline has a much more recent history yet its roots lie in human development. Following some brief introductory historical notes about education the first part of the talk addresses the nature and importance of education as an academic discipline. The idea that a weakness of education as a discipline is its relationship with education practice is critiqued drawing on a recent empirical study of ‘close-to-practice-research’, and other work. The second part of the talk explores some of the theories outlined in the first part through an examination of the nature of academic writing, and writing more generally in schools and in society. The talk concludes with opportunities for education, and next steps, in a society no longer in lock-down.
Vini Lander
Professor of Race and Education and Director of the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality in the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University.
Her research uses the framework of critical race theory to examine ‘race’ (in)equalities in education, specifically in teacher education. She is leading research on the policy to promote fundamental British values in English schools and initial teacher education. In collaboration with colleagues she edited a special issue on fundamental British values for the Journal of Education for Teaching. This edition has proved very popular and has been published as a book.
Vini has an international research profile including delivering keynote lectures and seminars on race on equality and diversity within the UK, in Germany and Sweden. She has worked in Oman and was a member of the ESRC funded Diverse Teachers for Diverse Learners national and international network of teacher educators working with colleagues in Norway, Canada and the UK.
She is a member of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and co-convened the Race, Ethnicity and Education Special Interest group. She is a member of the steering group for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, Reflecting Realities Project which is examining the representation of BAME characters in children’s literature. Vini is Chair of the UCET Equalities sub-group and a member of the NEU Independent Commission on Assessment. She serves as a member of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee at Leeds Learning Alliance a multi-institutional group of Leeds-based institutions committed to addressing educational inequalities in the city.
In June 2014 she was awarded a HEA National Teaching Fellowship. The persistence of educational inequality from early years to higher education has spurred Vini to educate teachers to think beyond the status quo which may perpetuate these inequalities. Teachers make a valuable contribution and deserve better preparation to teach in a diverse society. This has led to her inspirational teaching. Vini challenges students to think differently, supporting them to find ways to act to make a difference. Charley, who is now a teacher, said: “Sadly, it is very easy to brush diversity under the carpet by buying ‘welcome mats’ in 40 different languages. Your teaching taught me we need to do more than this …race equality has to be an attitude embedded into teaching not a tick list.”
From 2004-2010 Vini was appointed Deputy Director of Multiverse, a Training and Development Agency (TDA) funded national professional resource network on achievement and diversity which had a significant impact on teacher education provision with respect to equality and diversity.
Pandemic, Protests, Recovery, Opportunity: What’s next for research in Education? University of Brighton Conference 12 July 2021
Hopeful or Hopeless? Race and Teacher Education in turbulent times
Vini Lander
Professor of Race and Education
Director of the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality
Carnegie School of Education
Leeds Beckett University
The result of the Referendum in 2016 to leave the EU and the subsequent rise in racist hate crimes demonstrated how racism is ever present in liberal democracies. This was highlighted by the Windrush Scandal in April 2018 when elderly people of African-Caribbean heritage having lived the majority of their lives in England were deported. The COVID pandemic and its disproportionate effect on people of colour set against the perpetual pandemic of racism highlighted by the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the statistics which demonstrate the pernicious presence of structural racism have increased a sense of precariousness which has heightened a sense of not belonging among Britain’s Black and global majority citizens. The continued absence of Black and global majority people in public office and academia reinforces this marginality.
Education policies continue to sustain the simultaneous notions of assimilation whilst maintaining the discourse of the “Other” within. Teacher education in England continues to be part of an education system designed to assimilate Black, and global majority school students, be they newly arrived children of migrant families or born in England, through monocultural curricula which largely fail to reflect culturally and ethnically diverse lives. Using critical race theory and whiteness the paper examines policy silences and the avoidance of ‘race’ in teacher education practice through the narratives of teacher educators. The tools of whiteness framework (Picower, 2009) is used to analyse how policy and practice erase race from preservice teacher education.
These policy silences and omissions in teacher education practice are dissonant when we consider the increasingly diverse pupil population. This in turn is contrasted by a predominantly White teacher workforce which is mandated to promote fundamental British values, to act as state instruments of surveillance to monitor students who are “not quite British enough”, to advance Eurocentric curricula and thus perpetuate the dominant discourse of whiteness.
So, amidst the turbulent social and political milieu how can teacher education be cultivated as a place for hope and change? The presentation will examine how whiteness in teacher education can be disrupted to advance student teachers’ understanding of race and racism, and how they can become catalysts for hope and change.
Gerry Czerniawski
Professor Gerry Czerniawski leads teaching on the doctoral programmes (PhD and Professional Doctorate in Education) in the School of Education and Communities (University of East London). In addition to his role as a researcher, author and teacher educator he is the Chair of the British Curriculum Forum, Lead Editor of the BERA Blog and a trustee, director and elected council member of the British Educational Research Association (BERA).
Gerry is a trustee and director of the British Educational Research Association (BERA). BERA is a membership association and learned society committed to advancing research quality, building research capacity and fostering research engagement. In his presentation Gerry will talk about some of the awards, scholarships and writing opportunities available to its members and will answer questions in relation to these opportunities.