Liam Wrigley: NEET Youth: Education, Needs, Hopes and Aspirations

Online seminar - May 7th 2025

Concern is mounting about the living standards and prospects of youth, but young people categorised as NEET (not in employment, education, or training) are often among the most precarious, given their heightened risks of economic insecurity, health marginalization, and socioeconomic disadvantage.

‘NEET youth’ have routinely been uncritically characterised as a homogenous bloc. The NEET label applies to a highly diverse group of young people, reflected in very different backgrounds, experiences, challenges, needs, and aspirations.

In this seminar, Dr Liam Wrigley presents his ongoing body of work with NEET young people and detail NEET experienced young people's experiences, distinct needs and aspiration for the future.

Dr Liam Wrigley is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Leeds Trinity University, UK.

Yuhan Wu: Do boys really need saving? A critical exploration of ‘Boy Crisis’ - learning from the Chinese case

Online seminar - April 30th 2025

Boy’s underachievement caught the attention of educators in the West in the late 20th century, and many began to examine why boys seemed to be falling behind girls academically and what was ‘inhibiting’ boys’ ‘masculinity’. Around 2010, similar academic discussions appeared in China under the name of ‘Boy Crisis’, referring to boys’ academic and personal development struggles. In this session, Yuhan explores teachers’ engagement with ‘Boy Crisis’ and how gender stereotypes and the varying degrees of injustice these bring to both genders permeate into and are sustained by teachers’ gendered discourse, whether direct or subtle.

Yuhan Wu is a PhD student in the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK.

Tiffany Nelson: Intersectionality & Autistic Masking: Lived Experiences of Black Autistic Girls in UK education

Online seminar - March 12th 2025

Grounded in Tiffany Nelson's doctoral thesis: ‘Before people see the autism, they see my race’, this presentation explores the lived experiences of masking Black autistic girls in UK education. Drawing on intersectionality and Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) the presentation discusses normative systems, power, privilege, discrimination, and oppression. Themes of acceptance and belonging are woven throughout, illustrating how they overlap with neurodiversity, race, and gender. Tiffany advocates for systemic change, neuro-affirming approaches, and diverse ways of thinking, along with environmental adjustments to foster acceptance and inclusion within academic spaces.

Dr Tiffany Nelson is a child, community, and educational psychologist and a proud neurodivergent practitioner.

Oliver Mutanga: Resolving the Public-Private Good Binary in Higher Education Using Ubuntu philosophy

Online seminar - February 26th 2025

This seminar employs Ubuntu philosophy, to challenge Western neoliberal frameworks that split higher education into public versus private goods. Drawing on Zimbabwean examples, it argues that Ubuntu dissolves this dichotomy by prioritising collective and individual wellbeing. By acknowledging indigenous education systems and dismantling colonial remnants, higher education can be reimagined as equitable and holistic. Ultimately, Ubuntu fosters shared empowerment and global equity, transforming higher education into a unified pursuit of societal flourishing.

Oliver is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, as well as a Research Associate at the University of South Africa.

Pascal Angerhausen: The inclusion and exclusion of students with disability in German higher education

Online seminar - January 22nd 2025

Based on interviews with 36 students who used individual accommodation in Germany, Pascal Angerhausen explores the diversity of the group of students with impairments and identifies the relevance of societal, higher education and individual contexts for their experiences of exclusion and inclusion. The analysis demonstrates that current inclusion measures only provide for the inclusion of a limited group of students with impairments, prompting the question of how genuine inclusion in higher education can be achieved.

Pascal is a research assistant at the University of Hildesheim, Germany and doctoral candidate at the International Center for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel, Germany.

Ahmad Faizuddin: Preparing Leaders for the Future: A 21st Century CPD Paradigm

Online seminar - November 27th 2024

This webinar explores the perspectives of key stakeholders on the effectiveness of 21st-century Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programs for school principals in Indonesia. By examining the alignment between the needs of school leaders and the offerings of current CPD initiatives, this research aims to identify areas for improvement. The findings will inform the development of more relevant and impactful CPD programs that prepare school leaders to address the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Ahmad Faizuddin (S.Pd.I, M.Ed., PhD) is currently serving as a Senior Lecturer and Program Leader at Centre for Higher Education, School of Education, Sunway University, Malaysia.

Sally Welsh: Recognising mature students’ unpaid care work as a form of work-based learning

Online seminar - November 20th 2024

This seminar explores how unpaid care work was positioned on mature students’ degrees in English further education (FE) colleges. The Listening Guide, a multilayered feminist framework, was used to analyse students’ life history interviews and create I-poems. The study broadened theoretical perspectives on mature students by using Gouthro’s homeplace theory. The research examined why institutional recognition of unpaid work is necessary for gender equity. FE must promote critical social literacy about gendered work to counter individualised deficit understandings.

Sally Welsh is an independent researcher.

Alison Phipps: Neo-feudalism, platform capitalism and the re-enclosure of women

Online seminar - June 12th 2024

This paper builds on an understanding of sexual violence as a strategy of enclosure (Phipps 2023) and explores how women are re-enclosed in post?-neoliberal economies. Alongside hyper-extractive industries in the Global South with production models reliant on sexual violence, emergent modes of extraction in the Global North (communicative/platform capitalism) are highly sexually violent. The paper argues that these modalities shift the neoliberal capitalist incorporation and commodification of (some) women into more explicit and neo-feudal (Dean 2020) forms of servitude.

Alison Phipps is a Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University

Catherine Atkinson & Weiyuan Wu : Inside the Chinese Heterosexual Matrix

Online seminar - May 29th 2024

Inside the Chinese Heterosexual Matrix: Exploring Sexuality, Leader Identity and Agency Among Lesbian and Gay Mid-Level School Leaders in China

In this paper, we introduce the concept of the 'Chinese heterosexual matrix' to understand how heteronormativity is maintained within Chinese schools and reinforced by Confucian culture and Party-State ideologies. Using this framework, we move to explore the opportunities found by teachers and leaders to disrupt heteronormativity, and highlight how these were significantly more constrained by the heightened visibility of a leadership position.

Catherine Atkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester. Weiyuan Wu is a PhD candidate in Education.

Don Passey: Parents, education and digital technologies

Online seminar - May 15th 2024

It has not always been clear what roles or functions (apart from perhaps encouragement and funding support as appropriate) parents, guardians and carers should take when their children attend schools, colleges or universities. Digital technologies have affected shifts in roles (particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic), and they still are, sometimes (and increasingly so) in major ways. This seminar will explore these shifts and changes, highlighting recent research work that Don and colleagues have undertaken in different contexts in this field.

Don Passey is Professor of Technology Enhanced Learning in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University.

Gwenda Mynott: Questioning the ideal of the good student

Online seminar - May 1st 2024

Undergraduate business students are frequently thought of as being career focused and outcome driven to the detriment of their development as independent learners. Much of the research in this area looks at how we can support students to become good, successful, independent learners. However, I argue that the idealised norm of the good student, who is independent in their learning and whose engagement and success is measurable, is unrealistic and therefore problematic. This has implications for policy, practice and research.

Gwenda Mynott is a senior lecturer in the Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University.

Rita Hordósy, Meryem Betul Yasdiman & Asadullah Lashari: What is sociological research?

Online seminar - March 20th 2024

What is sociological research? Exploring Norwegian, Hungarian and English student and staff views, and curriculum documents

This talk explores sociology through a mixture of curriculum document analysis and interviews with sociology students and staff in three European countries. An overview and comparison of curriculum documents from Hungary, England and Norway explores the theoretical, methodological and thematic foci of undergraduate degrees. Alongside this, student and staff interviews show how they see the diversity of the discipline as something to embrace to help solidify students’ reflexivity and sociological imagination.

Rita Hordósy is a Nottingham Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham.

Asadullah Lashari is affiliated with the University of Sindh, Pakistan as a lecturer.

Phil Moffitt: Online Change Laboratories: facing contemporary challenges through the expansive development of activity systems

Online seminar - March 13th 2024

Online Change Laboratories provide arrangements for expansive change of work and learning, uniting geographically distal communities. The methodology yields qualitatively meaningful outcomes, yet has a reputation for being esoteric and theoretically dense. This online seminar will set out a range of supporting resources for Change Laboratorians, developed and shared by a global network of educational researchers, with examples of their application in the author’s online research-interventions.

Phil Moffitt is a Lecturer in Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University.

Sonia Ilie: Schools and teachers engaging with evidence to address educational inequality: Insights from a ‘place-based’ programme

Online seminar - March 6th 2024

This talk explores schools’ and teachers’ experiences of a ‘place-based’ programme aiming to improve learning outcomes by increasing their engagement with evidence. While schools were interested, they often needed the evidence re-cast for their own local contexts. School-to-school work was important, as was leadership support and an ethos of teacher collaboration, but this required substantial relational expertise and an emphasis on professional learning. Practice changes were possible, especially where risk taking was seen as positive and evidence contextualisation was present.

Sonia Ilie is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

Ishaq Al-Naabi: Can Professional Development Webinars Transform Teaching Practices in Higher Education?

Online seminar - February 28th 2024

Despite the widespread adoption of professional development webinars within higher education, a fundamental question persists: can these platforms truly transform teachers’ online pedagogical approaches? This seminar unveils findings from a case study, rooted in transformative learning theory, investigating the efficacy of professional development webinars for university language teachers in transforming their online teaching methodologies. The seminar provides some recommendations for enhancing professional development webinars within the context of higher education.

Ishaq Al-Naabi is a lecturer in the University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Oman.

Jessica Wren Butler: ‘I hope to be a role model’ or ‘go away, don’t follow’?

Online seminar - January 24th 2024

‘I hope to be a role model’ or ‘go away, don’t follow’? Authenticity, performativity, and differing perceptions of role-modelling and pedagogical practice

As some of the most visible staff to HE students, those with teaching responsibilities may find themselves positioned as role models, especially if they occupy a minoritised identity. However, this ‘burden’, as one participant put it, may not fall equally or sit comfortably for everyone. This seminar draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with teaching-responsible staff at a UK STEMMB-focused university to identify a variety of beliefs about the nature, function, and utility of role models and role-modelling, and the connection between authenticity, identity, in/visibility, and teaching values and practice. Who is able to opt out of being a role model, who is expected to convey ‘authenticity’, and who feels required to ‘act’?

Jessica Wren Butler is an interdisciplinary qualitative researcher.

Rob Miles: Tackling the Contradictions in the Technology Enhanced Face to Face Classroom

Online seminar - November 29th 2023

In the wake of a pre-COVID Change Laboratory, a number of contradictions emerged in laptop-mediated English language classrooms at a federal institution in the UAE. The post-COVID return to classroom teaching means there is now the opportunity to explore these contradictions and put new models of practice into place. In this session I’ll briefly describe the Change Laboratory, and then focus on three areas of contradictions that I am currently investigating. These areas are effective device usage, different devices for different purposes, and effective use of space and deployment.

Rob Miles is an English language professional, currently based in the United Arab Emirates.

Naomi Hodgson: False dichotomies and the problem of "methodology" in educational research

Online seminar - November 22nd 2023

Does educational research have a particular problem with methodology? The extent to which it has been the subject of external criticism has arguably fostered a heightened concern with validity and rigour. Rather than leading to a greater methodological sophistication, however, the discussion of research methods seems to ossify around binaries that arguably delimit the questions it is possible to ask. To move away from this, educational research is considered here in terms of constitution and the post-critical to explore what is educational about educational research.

Naomi Hodgson is a Reader in Education at Edge Hill University.

Yusuf Oldac & Lili Yang: Dynamics of international research collaboration in higher education: South-South and South-North collaborations

Online seminar - November 15th 2023

Global research is diversifying and becoming more connected than ever. International research collaborations are increasing not only in the established Global North but also in other parts of the world. In fact, data shows that the significant increase in global research and collaborations is driven by contributions from the Global South/East. However, there are additional challenges for Global South/East researchers when contributing to global research through international publications. This seminar examines the power dynamics and inequalities in South-South and South-North collaborations.

Yusuf Ikbal Oldac is an Assistant Professor based at Hong Kong Lingnan University. He is also a Core Centre Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies of the same institution. Lili Yang is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong.

Murray Saunders & John McGovern: Higher Education as a soft power mechanism: using a practice-based realist approach to evaluative inquiry

Murray Saunders & John McGovern: Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University & Higher Education Consultant 14.6.23

The seminar will report on a series of evaluations of British Council interventions which use the mechanism of a high-level conference to promote positive predispositions toward the UK and disseminate UK based expertise. It will critically outline the key elements of a ‘soft power’ strategy and provide a theoretical approach to evaluation in these contexts. It will illustrate the strategy by using data from 10 countries from case study evaluations of ‘Going Global’ (high level HE policy themed international conference) and ‘New Directions’ (English language themed international conference).

Murray Saunders and John McGovern form IDEAs which is an evaluation consultancy specialising in Higher Education.

Murray Saunders has a chair in Evaluation in Education and Work in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University.

John McGovern is a Higher Education consultant specialising in change and organisational strengthening in global HE environments and formerly Director of Marketing and Student Recruitment and Director, Institute for English Language Education at Lancaster University.

Video unavailable for this seminar.

Markus Andrä & David Brody: Digging Deep into Narratives - Metaphor Analysis as a Qualitative Research Tool

Markus Andrä & David Brody: University of Applied Sciences, Dresden, Germany & Orot Yisrael Academic College, Elkana, Israel 31.5.23

Metaphor analysis is a powerful tool for interpreting narratives. Emanating from Lakoff and Johnson’s epistemology of “embodied realism”, it involves a close examination of metaphors bringing together mind and body. The seminar explores this methodology’s potential through the presentation of metaphors used by two male kindergarten teachers in their career narratives. We will unpack the theory, and present our analysis, demonstrating how the metaphors along with the socio-cultural context of each man’s career reveal an in-depth understanding of their career choices and professional development.

Markus Andrä is Professor for Social Work with experience as researcher, preschool teacher, social worker, and teacher in the vocational training of ECEC practitioners. He encourages students not only to criticize social conditions, but also to search for liberating alternative courses of action.

David Brody is Associate Professor of Education. His career spans a lifetime of work with young children, teacher education, and research in Early Childhood Education, focused on professional development of teacher educators and men in early childhood.

Jelena Brankovic: Performance comparisons, rankings, and organizational status competition in higher education

Jelena Brankovic: Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany 17.5.23

Nowadays, status competition between higher education institutions is considered inextricable from rankings. And while status distinctions between colleges and universities are usually acknowledged long historical roots, performance comparisons are typically seen as having become relevant only recently. A closer look at the historical interlacing of performance comparisons, status distinctions, and rankings over the 20th century—which will be the focus of the seminar—urges us to reconsider the received narratives about the structural origins of organizational status competition in higher education.

Jelena Brankovic is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. Her current research focuses on the institutionalization of rankings and other practices of comparison across sectors, with a particular attention to higher education and transnational governance.

Video unavailable for this seminar.

Troy Heffernan: Fighting for breath in the modern university: Surviving in inequitable settings

Troy Heffernan: Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester 3.5.23

After decades of neoliberal change leading to universities experiencing funding cuts and adopting corporate approaches that see teaching, learning, and research monetised for profit, where does this leave staff and students as we continue through the twenty-first century? This presentation examines who gets to succeed in this performance driven era, and who is left to struggle for survival in a sector that prides itself on diversity and inclusion, but is far from an equitable or merit-driven learning and research space.

Dr Troy Heffernan is a Senior Lecturer and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Manchester's Institute of Education. His research examines higher education administration and policy with a particular focus on investigating the inequities that persist in the sector.

Joanne Hardman: Implications of COVID-19 on pedagogical practices across fee and no-fee schools

Joanne Hardman: School of Education, University of Cape Town 8.3.23

COVID-19 led to the immediate closure of schools around the world, with teachers and students turning to Information Communication Technologies to continue the school year. In South Africa, lockdown threatened to widen already great inequality gaps between the have and have nots, as people tried to get devices to learn with and ensure connectivity. A survey of 1089 teachers across South Africa, in both fee and no fee-paying schools was carried out to ascertain the impact that COVID lockdown had on pedagogical practices in schools in the country. Using a survey with both open and closed questions, the current paper addresses how pedagogy changed under COVID. Two broad pedagogical types emerge from this research. Collaborative pedagogy is characterised by the use of novel technology to develop students’ understanding while reinforcement pedagogy relies on traditional chalk and talk methods to reinforce content that is already known.

Joanne Hardman is an associate professor in the School of Education, UCT. A psychologist by training, her research focuses on child development and teaching/learning with technology. She holds the Distinguished Teachers’ award from UCT and is an NRF rated scientist.

Priscilla Echeverria De La Iglesia: The pedagogical agency capacity in novice teachers: The responsibility of initial teacher formation programs from a critical

Priscilla Echeverria De La Iglesia: Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. 8.2.23

Valuing an integral perspective of education - opposite to a technocratic one - this seminar addresses initial teacher formation as a crucial and formative space to restore a perspective of what a critical education can look like. This seminar discusses the need for initial teacher formation programs to assume a responsibility enabling pedagogy students with agency capacities to deal with a technocratic school culture that empties education of meaning and makes them become bureaucrats, and in turn be able to relate to their future students to promote the development of their own agency capacities, contributing to develop more democratic societies.

Priscilla Echeverría is a PhD student in the Educational Research Department at Lancaster University, where she is developing research focused on formation of teachers for social justice. She has dedicated twelve years working in Initial Teacher Formation programs in Chilean universities from a reflective and critical approach. Her research interests are related to sociology of education, philosophy of education, social justice, and critical pedagogy.

Bekir Gur: Inequality in Transition to High Schools in Turkey

Bekir Gur: Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey 25.1.23

All incoming students were placed in a high school based on their standardized exam scores between 2013 and 2017 in Turkey. After 2018, somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of all incoming students are being placed in high schools based on standardized exam scores. Using a recent study based on a large data set obtained from the Ministry of National Education and several other studies, I will talk about the socioeconomic inequality in the transition to secondary schools and the impact of the recent changes on the secondary education transition system in Turkey.

Bekir Gur holds a PhD in instructional technology from Utah State University. He is an associate professor at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey. Previously, he was on a visiting research appointment at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley as well as an adviser to the Minister of National Education of Turkey. Currently, he is also an adviser to the President of the Council of Higher Education. His primary research interests include data science, computational social science, educational policy studies, comparative and international education, and higher education.