Poetic research by teachers in higher education: Methods, features and contributions

This project explores how higher education teachers use poetry as research to enhance their teaching, contributing to global educational discussions. By incorporating poetry's artistic, symbolic, and rhythmic qualities, educators across disciplines like arts, music, nursing, and more infuse creativity, empathy, and expression into their research. The study draws on various international contexts, highlighting how poetic inquiry qualitatively enriches teaching knowledge and practices. It aims to transform local poetic research into internationally recognised public knowledge, making it accessible to a broad audience. This innovative approach advances educational practices and supports the common good by integrating scholarly creativity into the academic dialogue.

Principal investigator: Professor Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan
Funder: The British Academy

Empowering the future: Children voices and actions on climate change education in Mozambique

This project takes an interdisciplinary and participatory approach to bring Mozambican children's voices to the fore in the fight to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Mozambique is one of the countries most affected by climate change in Africa, due to its vast sea exposure through its 1,600-mile-long coastline. This awareness has led to the development of national policies aimed at increasing the country’s resilience to climate shocks. However, the role played by schools mostly focuses on infrastructural resilience, forgoing their responsibilities towards future generations. This study bridges the gap by producing policy-ready insight with children: schools are in charge of significant sections of young people’s learning – so offer the potential to impact significantly on those elements of behaviour that may be required to change to reach climate targets.

Principal investigator: Dr Francesca Salvi
Research team: Dr Elena Colonna, CoMeDia, Mozambique
Funding body: The British Academy

Mobilising cultural heritage towards climate change education: A focus on Indonesia

Indonesia is in a particularly fragile position: its reliance on fossil fuel energy and continued deforestation make it one of the major carbon emitting markets. Moreover, its peculiar geography – the largest archipelago in the world –renders it extremely vulnerable to climate change. There is thus a strong need for Indonesia to embark on a transition that is just, inclusive, and locally effective. Education plays a key part in this endeavour. However, most of the resources available globally tend to originate from western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic countries. Although valid forms of introducing climate change scientifically, they present limitations in how they encourage individual lifestyle change, and collective climate actions. As a result, there may be limited uptake. Addressing this disconnect, this project takes an interdisciplinary and participatory approach to identify, (re)read, and embed local cultural resources into an effective climate change and sustainability education.

Principal investigator: Dr Francesca Salvi
Research team: Professor Teguh Wijaya Mulya, Universitas Surabaya, Indonesia
Funding body: AHRC

Towards caring fathers: The role of young fathers' mothers in enabling alternative masculinities in South Africa

This study considers how young men in South Africa embrace fatherhood through the support of their own mothers. When African teenagers in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa become fathers out of wedlock, cultural practices around the acknowledgement of paternity and the payment of damages are invoked. However, teenage fathers are mostly in education, and therefore not economically productive, transferring this cost on to their immediate kin. Initial findings (Bhana and Salvi, 2022) suggest that grandmothers can thus act as ‘enablers’, by supporting their sons through fatherhood. Yet, the modalities of these practices remain unclear, as well as their impacts on gender norms – for both young fathers and older mothers. Focusing on this intergenerational dimension will enable us to contextualise social change around gender norms regulating masculinity and parenthood.

Principal investigator: Dr Francesca Salvi
Research Team: Prof Deevia Bhana, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Funding body: The British Academy

Strengthening the capacity, functionality and performance of TVET colleges: A research-led approach

A central driver in this large-scale Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) South Africa research programme, is for the TVET College sector to be capacitated and underpinned by an appropriate vocational pedagogy and lecturer development programme. The issue of TVET lecturer quality is a central feature of the DHET programme and Professor Volker Wedekind is bringing his expertise to the research by leading Project 6.1: Quality of lecturing staff at TVET colleges.

Project 6.1 adopts a broad notion of TVET lecturer quality that encompasses aspects of TVET lecturer knowledge, pedagogy and the curriculum, and the wider institutional structures that enable or constrain a TVET lecturer’s ability and capacity to understand and manage these aspects of their role. This conceptualisation encompasses three domains that a ‘quality’ TVET lecturer needs to navigate: TVET knowledge, holistic competencies and mediation within the skills ecosystem. 

Drawing on theoretical and conceptual work and a series of workshops and interviews the project will produce two key outputs for the DHET programme:

1. Report synthesising the key concepts and evidence base that underpins a broader agentic and institutional understanding of TVET lecturer quality
2. An evidence-based toolkit that aids the identification, development and measurement of quality related aspects of the TVET lecturer role

Principal investigator: Professor Volker Wedekind
Co-investigator: Dr Jo-Anna Russon
Funder: Department of Higher Education and Training,South Africa

Development consultants and contractors: For-profit companies in the changing world of 'Aidland'

The objective of the project is to explore the growing role of private sector consultants and contractors within the UK's development sector. We are looking at seven consulting and contracting firms, selected primarily with reference to their aid-funded contracting history. We will examine their roles in the production, translation, implementation and evaluation of development knowledge and practice. 

Core components include a critical financial analysis to map and analyse financial flows and contracts; understanding policy contexts; detailed understanding of personal and institutional profiles in the sector, including governance, management techniques and influencing roles. Central to the research are detailed case studies of multi-million pound projects in eight countries, with seven in low and middle income countries. The case studies are grouped around three distinct themes:

• finance
• governance
• education

Co-investigator: Jo-Anna Russon (University of Nottingham)
Research team: Emma Mawdsley (Principal Investigator, University of Cambridge), Jessie Sklair (University of Cambridge), Paul Gilbert (University of Sussex) and Brendan Whitty (University of East Anglia) 
Funding body: ESRC

Gatekeepers of Knowledge Production on Higher Education: Journal Editorial Board Networks and Working Practices

This project explores how academic knowledge about higher education is shaped and sanctioned by the editorial boards of higher education journals. To do so, it will provide an analysis of editorial board practices in relation to the published aims and objectives of higher education journals. In particular the research will identify the range of different approaches adopted when recruiting new editorial board members; the extent to which editorial boards appear to be exclusive or open networks of scholars; and, the degree to which editorial boards overlap or interlock. The research will explore the likely extent that some scholarship about higher education is effectively excluded from publication for factors such as its geographical origination or authorship outside of known networks. By doing so the research will provide evidence of the inclusivity or exclusivity of knowledge production about higher education.

Principal investigator: Dr Rita Hordósy
Research team: Dr Martin Myers, Anto Castillo-Vega and Elizabeth Brown
Funder: Society for Research into Higher Education Research Awards 

Environmental capacity building for ECEC preservice teachers in Indonesia and the UK

This project aims to improve Early Childhood Education and Care by developing and systematising locally-minded approaches to pedagogies for sustainability in the UK and Indonesia. Its objectives are to:

• develop British and Indonesian ECEC pre-service teachers’ capacity to teach and practise sustainability in educational settings: How can preservice teachers become effective agents of change in the sustainability agenda?
• advance pre-service teachers’ ability to pursue child-centred, participatory learning: What matters to children in their environments, how do they want to nurture them, and how can teachers best enable this?
• positively impact upon the quality of early years pedagogy, practice and teaching by developing tangible resources: What practises best enable the development of a more equal partnership between children and practitioners in the early years setting?

Principal investigator: Dr Francesca Salvi
Research team: Dr Teguh Wijaya Mulya, Universitas Surabaya, Indonesia
Funding body: The British Council
Further information: Project website

Towards IDPs economic empowerment: Leveraging the Matarenda entrepreneurship model toolkit

This project aims to test and refine an entrepreneurship training toolkit for the ground breaking non-credit based  Matarenda entrepreneurship model, founded by the ZAOGA Forward in Faith Ministries (ZAOGA-FIFMI). While the model has impacted the lives of many poor people, especially members of ZAOGA-FIFMI, it lacked a training toolkit to enable its use with diverse groups. The toolkit was created by the ZAOGA-FIFMI as part of a UKRI/GCRF/Newton funded project researching Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with a team of education academics and trainers from ZAOGA FIFMI and NANZ (the NGO who work closely with the IDPs community), the toolkit will be further developed and trialled with IDPs representatives, using the train the trainer approach, who will thereafter continue to train other members of the community to empower more people. Results will be used to improve and further adapt the toolkit for use with other vulnerable populations within ZAOGA FIFMI and NANZ national and international networks. 

Principal investigator: Juliet Thondhlana
Co-investigator: Roda Madziva, School of Sociology and Social Policy
Funder: University of Nottingham

Writing for sustainable development: Developing, mentoring and strengthening African grant and research writing for publication

Principal investigator: Professor Juliet Thondhlana
Funding body: The British Academy

Research Development Fund 

Principal investigator: Dr Yuwei Xu
Funding body: Yueyang Xisiteng Education Consulting Co Ltd

Teacher retention at an NGO school in Cambodia

Principal investigator: Professor Lucy Cooker
Funding body: University of Nottingham

Engagement with Froebelian pedagogy: understanding of play by low-income families in socio-economically challenging times

Principal investigator: Dr Yuwei Xu
Funding body: Froebel Trust

Developing teacher education capacity at the Neeson-Cripps Academy, Phnom Penh, Cambodia - phase 2

Principal investigator: Professor Lucy Cooker
Funder: University of Nottingham

Multi-stakeholder perspectives on learning and teaching of comparative and international education during global emergencies and uncertainties

Principal investigator: Dr Tingting Yuan
Funding body: British Association for International and Comparative Education