Category: Research context

Reflections on working with an artist

December 2023

Gill Adams, Parinita Shetty, Cathy Burnett

Since the field of primary literacy research in England (and elsewhere) brings together so many different communities, we are constantly looking for creative new ways to communicate our research findings to diverse audiences. In this podcast episode, Layla Gharib talks to Cathy about how she visualised the findings of a scoping review of literacy research that Cathy produced.

About a year and a half into the project, when we’d generated data on teachers’ encounters with research in primary literacy and were deeply engaged in analysis, we wanted to work with an artist to represent the complexity of teachers’ encounters with research and the way these were entangled in their work and their personal lives. We were fortunate that Lo Tierney was able to take on this work.

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Exploring the movements of research in the wild

January 2023

Cathy Burnett 

When we try to explain the focus for the Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education project, we often say that we are interested in ‘how research moves to, from and among teachers’.  At this point in the project it is worth expanding on what we mean by this as we have found that this statement can be interpreted slightly differently from how we’ve intended it.

First of all, when we refer to ‘research’ we adopt an inclusive definition. In other posts I have made the point that we are interested in literacy research associated with a wide range of methodologies and topics. Here I want to emphasise that we are not just interested in research that originates in universities or other institutions but also in teacher-led research and enquiry and in research that is coproduced by academics and teachers[1] .

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Glimpsing bridges between primary literacy research and practice on distant shores

June 29, 2022

Julia Gillen

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I’ve been fortunate in the last couple of months to gain insights into endeavours that share with our project an interest in bridging primary literacy research and practice.

 

On 3rd May I attended a virtual event coordinated by Dr Shelley Stagg Peterson of the University of Toronto and hosted  by Dr Rachel Heydon, Western University, Canada, entitled, “Building Bridges between Literacy Research and Practice: diverse perspectives.”  I thought this an extremely worthwhile, inspirational and rich event and so quote its description:

“We are teachers and teacher educators with many decades of experience teaching young children to read and write. We bring diverse perspectives on the roles of oral language, phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, critical literacy, multimodal texts, comprehension, motivation, writing and spelling to literacy learning. We wish to support teachers in continuing to provide equitable literacy learning environments to ensure that all students receive the instruction they deserve. The goal of our presentation is to provide evidence from our classrooms on ways to bridge the science of reading-based recommendations of the Right to Read Inquiry’s report with research on literacy teaching and learning.”

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How do teachers encounter research?

May 05 2022

Cathy Burnett

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In the recent Schools White Paper Nadhim Zahawi includes a commitment to ‘placing the generation and mobilisation of evidence at the heart of our education system.’  The mobilisation of research evidence is a key concern of our current ESRC funded project, Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education (ES/W000571/1), which is exploring how research moves to and between teachers. The project is a partnership between Sheffield Hallam University, Lancaster University and University of Stirling.  Our starting point is that the mobilisation of research is an increasingly complex business.

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We are interested particularly in research that has potential to speak in useful ways to literacy education in primary schools. Literacy is a huge area and there is a wide variety of research available internationally that could be of value and interest to primary teachers. Some of this focuses on pedagogical approaches (such as the use of drama or group discussion) but there is also work that provides useful insights into children’s experiences of literacy at home and at school, as well as that which generates searching questions about the purposes and priorities of literacy education.

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