GLEA Newsletter October 2019

Welcome to the latest news from the

Centre for Global Learning: Education and Attainment

'Research that Informs, Transforms and Influences Global Education’

Dear Reader,

The Centre for Global Learning: Education and Attainment (GLEA) are pleased to introduce a new PhD programme in Global Education that will be starting in January 2020.

The PhD in Global Education has been designed for professionals working as educators in various settings around the world, with a key focus on the global nature of education. It’s a programme for those who want to gain and use research skills in order to improve practice in their settings, from a background of understanding global educational issues.

The online PhD is a structured doctorate, which means it has key milestones en-route. Throughout the programme you will learn more about yourself as a professional and how research can enhance your day to day work. The purpose, as with any doctorate, is to develop a substantial piece of original research, with a specific focus on research that has clear relevance to policy and/or practice. The main aim of the programme is to enable you to acquire advanced knowledge and a critically reflective understanding of a range of research skills, and this knowledge will be related to a specialist field of study and applied within a professional context, in order to contribute to developing professional understanding and practice.

The programme aims to develop reflective, well-informed and competent researchers able to support professional colleagues and others undertaking research. Its key features are:

 · An approach which allows participants who may be working full-time in education to take advantage of a structured submission process, according to an agreed timetable, thus supporting timely submission;

· A pathway with Masters modules to enable participants without a Masters to gain skills and confidence in research and clarity of focus;

· An approach which allows for innovative assessment with the consent of the supervisory team;  

· Structured support workshops online as part of the Coventry Doctoral College research community. 

 We welcome you to view the advert and to contact us if you have any queries.

With best wishes,

Professor Megan Crawford
Programme Director

News from the Intercultural Engagement and Global Education Theme

EDUHACK

Dr Luca Morini recently attended a project meeting in Leuven for the EduHack.eu project which is now entering its final year of activities. GLEA are working closely with Dr Daniel Villar-Onrubia a lead colleague for CU on EduHack from the DMLL. The project is built around critical digital capacity building. EduHack has built an online repository of accessible activities meant to upskill teaching staff towards working with digital resources and the open web, and to support the deployment of “EduHackathons”, focused events which facilitates teaching staff in designing their own bespoke digital resources. 

The September meeting was focused on refining plans to maximise impact and engagement in the final year, and in the planning for the last two main hackathons, which will  be held in Turin (March-April 2020) and Coventry (June 2020). These final two hackathons follow two successful pilots in Logrono and Coventry. The EduHack network, which already spans across Europe, in parallel to the publication of our EduHackathon Organisation Toolkit, will run a recruitment drive to further broaden the reach of its approach, and allow any association to be part of our efforts toward making the legacy of the project enduring and sustainable. If you are interested in joining either of the next two hackathons, please free to contact us, or to apply to join directly on the website. 

With the project coming into its last phase, the research and evaluation element is also gaining pace, with focus groups and interviews being planned across all the involved institutions. Research outputs from GLEA in collaboration with DMLL and the project partners will focus both on the policy level (expanding and articulating EduHack’s link with the DigiCompEdu framework) and on the experience of teaching staff engaging for the first time in actively building digital learning resources.

Though I was born in Abuja, my family left the city only a few months later, as we relocated to Lagos, Nigeria. We spent a couple of years there and moved again to Uyo, Nigeria, which is also my ancestral city (where both of my parents and their great-grand parents and more hail from). In 2012, at the age of 17, I made my own relocation to Cambridge, UK, for University foundation study at EF Cambridge. I was enrolled in an international school with students from over 60 countries. A year later at 18 years of age, I started studying Media and Communications at Coventry University. Through this course, I started to learn that ‘things aren’t really as they appear to be in the world’. These experiences of sojourn, and their consequent sub-experiences, kick-started something that would later become very relevant to me, which is ‘the reality of internationalisation’.

The reality of internationalisation has become personalised to me. From my experience, this reality entails: not really having a physical/tangible sense of ‘home’ which is fixed, to hold onto; always being in a state which sees you missing someone who is physically elsewhere; being seen as ‘different’ by those of similar national and ethnic origin as you, or seeing your nation and/or ethnicity differently, because of your experience of internationalisation.

These experiences and more raise internal questions such as: where is home? Who am I becoming? And, what do my added experiences and knowledge mean for me, as I continue to navigate the society around me. My research attempts to deconstruct these questions.

New Projects Awarded

ENTENDER (ERASMUS+ Capacity Building in Higher Education)
Principal Investigator: Professor Lynn Clouder
Coventry University will be the lead partner in the Entender Project ‘Enabling Students with Neurodiversity’ to improve access, retention, attainment and employment prospects of people with neurodiverse conditions in Argentina and Mexico, allowing them to achieve their full potential by capacity building of neurodiversity support across higher education and employment sectors. The project aims to foster inclusion, and building knowledge with 9 partner institutions in Argentina, Mexico, UK, Spain, Italy and Greece.

iKUDU (ERASMUS+ Capacity Building in Higher Education)                          
Principal Investigator: Professor Katherine Wimpenny                          
GLEA is pleased to be a partner and work package lead on a recently awarded KA2 Erasmus+ Capacity Building programme in Higher Education (2019). ‘iKUDU - Transforming Curricula through internationalisation and virtual exchange,’ will involve five historically disadvantaged South African universities with five European university partners. The project will address equity and democratisation of higher education in internationalisation using Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) approaches. IKUDU will build capacity for governance, strategic planning and management of higher education institutions relevant to internationalisation.

ASEAN Interdisciplinary Network Grant (Academy of Medical Sciences)
Principal Investigator: Professor Lynn Clouder

This new award will seek to establish an interdisciplinary network in higher education in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries which addresses Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 4, advocating “inclusive and quality education for all”. The network will collaborate to scope current challenges and support for disabled people in higher education, including gender specific issues and disciplinary differences, and identifying key areas for future research. It will also develop a framework and tools for a robust research project to underpin inclusive higher education for disabled people. The project will involve collaborations with Philippine Normal University (lead partner in the Philippines), Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Upcoming Event: World Access to Higher Education Day 

Supporting Care Leavers in Higher Education: Optimising Success through Understanding the Challenges

Date: 26th November – 13.00 - 17.00

Venue Room SCGF in the Technology Centre

The Research Centre for Global Learning: Education and Attainment would like to invite you to an event, during which a number of internal and external guests will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented to care leavers entering higher education. Delegates will be encouraged to exchange knowledge and experiences of effective strategies that universities can and have employed to support care leavers, from a range of different perspectives.

This event will also consider the current research and practice in this area and generate questions that still need to be addressed to ensure universities, local authorities, and NGOs are supporting care leavers in order to optimise their success. As part of the World Access to Higher Education Day, this event aligns with the broader aim to encourage dialogue on equity policies across the globe. To register for this event, please click here.

Welcome

New PhD students
A warm welcome to our new intake of students who began their PhD study with GLEA in September 2019.

Farhana Lunat has a university-funded studentship to carry out research entitled: An investigation of student engagement and non-engagement with mathematics and statistics support services.  She will be supervised by Professor Duncan Lawson, Dr Mark Hodds and Dr Farzana Aslam.

Rosida Rakhmawati Muhamma is funded by the Indonesian Government and will carry out a study entitled: Ethnomathematics: geometric exploration of tapis lampung in teaching mathematics.  She will be supervised by Professor Duncan Lawson, Dr Fazana Aslam and Professor Megan Crawford.

Thomas Joseph Murtagh will carry out research entitled: Restorative justice as a tool to reduce school exclusions. He will be supervised by Professor Megan Crawford and Dr Sylwia Holmes.

Also, a warm welcome to Samena Rashid who, as a member of staff at Coventry,  has joined GLEA to continue her research exploring “The impact of internationalisation on University students from a widening access background”. Samena will be supervised by Professor Katherine Wimpenny, Dr Peter Wolstencroft and Dr Tina Bass.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Prof. Megan Crawford who has become a Fellow at the Chartered College of Teaching. Fellowship (FCCT) of the Chartered College of Teaching is an accolade held by some of the most committed teachers and leaders who have shown a significant and sustained contribution to the teaching profession and their own professional development. For more information, please visit: https://chartered.college/fellowship

Recent Publications

Eddy-Spicer, D., Bubb, S., Earley, P., Crawford, M. & James, C., 1 Mar 2019, Headteacher performance management in England: Balancing internal and external accountability through performance leadership. In : Educational Management Administration and Leadership. 47, 2, p. 170-188 19 p.

Clouder, D., Cawston, J., Wimpenny, K., Khalifa Aly Mehanna, A., Hdouch, Y., Raissouni, I. & Selmaoui, K., Aug 2019, The role of assistive technology in renegotiating the inclusion of students with disabilities in Higher Education in North Africa. In : Studies in Higher Education. 44, 8, p. 1344-1357 14 p.

Wimpenny, K., Beelen, J., & King, V. 2019 Academic development to support the internationalization of the curriculum: A qualitative research synthesis. In: International Journal of Academic Development, Accepted, forthcoming.

Clouder, D., Billot, J., King, V. & Smith, J. 2019 Friend or Foe: the complexities of being an academic and a doctoral student in the same institution. In: Studies in Higher Education early online.

Smith, J., Billot, J., Clouder, D. & King, V., 4 Aug 2019, Juggling competing activities: academic staff as doctoral candidates. In : Higher Education Research & Development. (In-press), p. (In-press) 26 p.

Clarke, S., Arnab, S., Morini, L. & Heywood, L., 1 Jan 2019, Dungeons and dragons as a tool for developing student self-reflection skills In: Games and Learning Alliance - 7th International Conference, GALA 2018, Proceedings. Söbke, H., Gentile, M. & Allegra, M. (eds.). Springer-Verlag London Ltd, p. 101-109 9 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); vol. 11385 LNCS).

Lawson, D., Grove, M. & Croft, T., 22 Sep 2019, The evolution of mathematics support: a literature review. In : International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. (In-Press), p. (In-Press) 32 p.

Paciello, M., Tramontano, C., Nocentini, A., Fida, R., Menesini, E. (2019). The Role of Traditional and Online Moral Disengagement on Cyberbullying: Do Externalising Problems Make Any Difference? In: Computers in Human Behavior.

Conference Papers

Invited Keynote
Professor Duncan Lawson gave the invited keynote address The development of the mathematics and statistics support community: An objective, subjective, pragmatic and theoretical reflection at the CETL-MSOR conference Bringing together mathematics communities in Dublin on 6 September 2019.  CETL-MSOR is the leading mathematics education conference in the British Isles and the leading mathematics support conference in the world.