International Activities

School of Education research on intergenerational mentoring to be featured by the Australian National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education

Alastair Wilson and Sue Ellis recently met with Professor Sarah O’Shea (centre of photo) ,Director of the Australian National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) and Nina-Marie Thomas their media and communications officer.  As a result research within the School of Education on intergenerational mentoring and its impact on access to and participation in higher education will be featured on the National centre's website and form part of an international collection of evidenced interventions. 

Staff

• Alastair Wilson
• Professor Sue Ellis

School of Education working with Curtin University and Department of Education, Western Australia

Professor Sue Ellis was Visiting Fellow at Curtin University WA where she gave a series of public lectures sponsored by the Centre for Equity in Education, the Centre for Excellence in the Explicit Teaching of Literacy, the Centre for Aboriginal Studies and the Australian National Centre for Equity in Higher Education.   

The Department of Education in Western Australia are interested in adopting the Strathclyde 3 Domains Model which was developed by Sue and the literacy team at Strathclyde. Martin Cleary, Executive Assistant Director and Kevin O’Keefe, Principal Advisor for Early Childhood and Aboriginal Education (pictured below) invited Sue to work with their team of School Advisors. 

The Strathclyde 3 Domains Model is being used by academics at both Curtin University, WA and at the University of Sydney, NSW to help their student teachers explore how to ensure a more equitable literacy curriculum.

Staff

• Professor Sue Ellis

Deakin Child Study Centre, Deakin University

Prof Nicole Rinehart is one of the leading pioneers of the movement perspective on autism, publishing for the first time computational analysis of gait differences in individuals with autism.  With Prof Rinehart, the Laboratory for Innovation in Autism is working on full 3D whole body gait analysis of children with autism and other developmental disorders to understand with greater precision movement differences.  Further, the Lab’s contribution to practice in Education and in the community practice benefits from the  All Pay model of sport intervention that recognises the role of movement in health and learning.  The Lab believes this programme may serve as an important educational or social intervention, offering support and affording new opportunities for fitness and emotional well-being in Scotland.

Staff

• Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt

Exploring Initial Teacher Education Policy

This project explores the questions ‘What should Initial Teacher Education be for’, and ‘What should it hope to achieve?’ The work is mostly conceptual, but also uses data from the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) project which involves all universities undertaking ITE across Scotland. Presentations were due to be made at ECER 2020, but will be postponed until ECER 2021.

Staff

• Dr Paul Adams
• Dr Amy Burns, University of Calgary

Concordia University and McGill University

Yvette Taylor held the Lillian Robinson Fellowship Concordia University (2009) where she presented her monograph Lesbian and Gay Parents: Securing Social and Educational Capitals (Palgrave, 2009). She was a visiting scholar at McGill University (2013) where she presented ‘Excessive Presences? Class, Gender, Sexuality and the ‘fit’ to Place’, as part of McGill’s Esquisses Series, and completed the edited collection The Entrepreneurial University. Public Engagements, Intersecting Impacts (Palgrave, 2014)

Staff

• Yvette Taylor

Description

Since 2014, Strathclyde University has developed a partnership with Nanjing Normal University. This partnership includes a range of activities from student exchanges and cultural engagements, to emerging research interests and collaborations. Researchers from both institutions have engaged in various forms of exchange in a wide range of fields, such as children’s development, teacher education, curriculum and pedagogy, and social justice. In April 2017 this collaboration was cemented by a very successful Strathclyde-Nanjing educational research symposium which included presentations and discussion from the following academics from Strathclyde, Nanjing Normal University and East China Normal University

Programme

Abstracts and summary of research interests

Reflections on the symposium and next steps

Nanjing partner reflections on the symposium

Staff

• Prof Donald Christie 
• Dr Xuefeng Qiao 
• Dr Paul Adams
• Dr Rong Zhang
• Dr Claire Cassidy
• Dr Xiaoling Wu
• Dr Wei Shen
• Dr Alan Huang
• Dr David Lewin
• Prof Kate Wall  

Bridge 47

Scotland, England, Finland, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark

Knowledge Exchange Partnership which is an alliance of European countries in the North examining issues of significance relating to global citizenship and addressing the UNICEF Global Goals for Sustainability.

The initial event took place at the University of Stirling in January 2020

Staff

• Dr Joan Mowat

Comparing intersectional Lifecourse Inequalities among LGBTQI+ Citizens Across 4 European Countries (CILIA-LGBTQI+)

Germany Portugal England

The NORFACE transnational research programme ‘Dynamics of Inequality Across the Life-course: structures and processes’ (DIAL) focuses on the complex and highly intertwined sources of inequalities in contemporary societies, and their consequences. Bringing together an international and multi-disciplinary team of researchers, this 3 year funded project investigates the potential inequalities experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) people across the lifecourse.  The key objective is to provide new cross-cultural evidence concerning life course inequalities experienced by LGBTQI+ people, comparing and contrasting these across four European countries with different yet interrelated social, historical, economic and political backgrounds: England, Germany, Portugal and Scotland.

Staff

• Professor Yvette Taylor (Principal Investigator)
• Dr Maja Andreasen (Research Associate)
• Dr Matson Lawrence (Research Associate)

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism is working with a new initiative at the University of Hanover between Prof. Bodo Rosenhahn and Dr Bodo Frank to enable fruitful collaboration between Informatics and Special Education, respectively, bridging the gap between technology-focussed and child-focussed work for innovation in research and assessment methodologies. This work advances from earlier work also with Prof. Ulrike Lüdke to develop new, computational methods of social interaction analysis to improve understanding of the role of movement in human meaning-making.

Staff

• Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt

Description

Dr Paul Adams, Dr Karsten Kenklies and Dr David Lewin have developed a collaborative partnership with Dr Taehee Choi, Professor Bob Adamson, Dr Wai Lam William Sin, Dr Hei Hang Hayes Tang and Dr Euan Auld of the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) in the areas of education philosophy and policy. Joint seminars have been held in Strathclyde and Hong Kong exploring areas of mutual interest, particularly relating to intercultural aspects of education and shared conceptions of policy and privatisation. Visits have been made by staff from both institutions and presently plans are underway for two, joint conferences one in Strathclyde in August/September 2020 and one in Hong Kong in 2021. Papers have already been accepted for publication, co-authored by members of staff in both institutions, and edited texts are also in preparation to be published in 2020/2021.

Staff

• Dr Paul Adams
• Dr Karsten Kenklies
• Dr David Lewin
• Dr Taehee Choi
• Professor Bob Adamson
• Dr Wai Lam William Sin
• Dr Hei Hang Hayes Tang
• Dr Euan Auld

Transformative change: educational and life transitions (TCELT) research centre network

Palestine, Sultanate of Oman, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, UK, France, Norway, Republic of Ireland, Germany, Thailand, The Netherlands  

This network brings together researchers across the world with an interest in transitions research at all life stages. It hosts events (seminars, reading groups) on a regular basis online.

Staff

• Dr Joan Mowat

International Early Years Research Project: International Study of Social and Emotional Experiences in Early  Transitions’ ISSEET

Brazil, Finland, USA, New Zealand, Australia

This project, led by Dr Helen Marwick, comprises an international group of researchers in the early years who are all collaborating to carry out a multi-site international longitudinal study examining the interpersonal experiences, well-being, and conceptual and communicative interactions of children in group-based educational settings from the earliest experiences through to pre-school years and early school years. Using the same protocol, the study is taking place in early years settings in Scotland, New Zealand, Finland, Brazil, Australia and the United States of America.  The project has received funding for international research visits and Strathclyde University has hosted research visits and research seminars from Professor White, Dr Rutanen and Dr Amorim. An international  research symposium was held by the project in Brazil, Sau Paulo in September 2019  involving the research teams from all the countries, and for which Dr Marwick was a keynote. Dr Marwick is a research collaborator and advisory board member for the related Finland led TRACE project – ‘Tracing children’s socio-spatial relations and lived experiences in early childhood education’, funded by the Academy of Finland.

Staff

• Dr Helen Marwick
• Dr Eleni Karagiannidou
• Nicky Shaw

With Prof. Filippo Muratori and his clinical colleague Dr Sara Calderoni at the IRCCS Stella Maris Foundation and University of Pisa, and with Dr. Alessandra Retico and Dr Paolo Bosco at and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the Laboratory for Innovation in Autism is working to help elucidate the brain growth differences in young children with autism spectrum disorder.  The Lab recently provided evidence of significant brainstem growth differences with implications for learning in preschool children, and are currently working on new data from the University of Southern California in analysis of brainstem differences related to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Coordination Disorder.  The work is expanding with recent support from SINAPSE to pilot a state-of-the-art 7T study of its internal structure with continued collaboration with Pisa and new partners at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities. 

Staff

• Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt

3D renderings of brainstem segementation.  Reproduced from Bosco, P., Giuliano, A., Delafield-Butt, J., Muratori, F., Calderoni, S., & Retico, A. (2019). Brainstem enlargement in preschool children with autism: Results from an intermethod agreement study of segmentation algorithms. Human Brain Mapping, 40(1), 7-19. doi:doi:10.1002/hbm.24351

Graduate research seminar and Early social development

Tsukuba Summer Institute (TSI)

Professor David Kirk co-Directs a Graduate Research Seminar each July at the TSI with colleagues from the USA and Australia.

Up to 40 students from a range of countries attend. The Research Seminar is an intensive week of research training for students about to enter or in the first year of their PhD.

Staff

• Professor David Kirk

Early social development: An embodied, ecological, and intersubjective approach

Collaborative research between Professor Koichi Negayama and his team at Waseda University, including Professor Keiko Momose, and Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt at the University of Strathclyde conducted the world’s first motion-capture analysis of cultural differences between Japan and Scotland in infant-adult interactions.  This project was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and grants from Waseda University and the University of Strathclyde.  The main paper from this project is available free to download from Frontiers in Psychology.  This work is ongoing through shared editorial work bridging anthropology and primatology with child psychology for improved understanding of children’s social and emotional development, and how this can best be supported professionally in early childhood education.

Staff

• Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt
  
  

Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University

Supported by a JSPS Fellowship, Prof. Delafield-Butt is developing new work with Prof Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Prof. Yuko Hattori, and Prof. Misato Hayashi at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto on motor control in chimpanzee.  The Primate Research Institute is a world-leading centre for comparative psychology of primate intelligence.  In particular, it specialises in a touch-screen methodology suitable for chimpanzees.  In this collaboration, the team seek to advance a novel computational analysis of chimpanzee movement to determine its motor kinematics, with an eye to understanding differences in the degree of variability, or adaptive flexibility, in those movements.  This may shed important light on the degree of control in children with autism, and resistance to differences, or preservation of sameness.  The work will help to understanding the role of movement in child development and learning.

Staff

• Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt

 Inuyama Castle overlooking the Kiso River, near Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute

Dr Paul Adams spent a week at Oslo Metropolitan University in November 2019 wherein he initiated work in the area of education policy with staff from there and The University of South-Eastern Norway. He also acted as a discussant at a two-day seminar organised by staff from both universities.

Staff

• Dr Paul Adams
• Professor Sølvi Mausethagen, Oslo Metropolitan
• Professor Tine Prøitz, University of South-Eastern Norway

The University of Strathclyde is collaborating with Crescent School to bring a fresh approach to the country’s teacher education. Strathclyde is delivering its PGCert Educational Issues and MSc Educational Studies (blended learning) programme to teacher in Lahore. This collaboration stemmed from an initial approach to Strathclyde’s School of Education by Crescent School Principal Sobia Lodhi, who previously studied at Strathclyde. The first cohort of 20 students on this programme graduated in January 2020, with the contract covering a further three cohorts. The course itself consists of four modules which are taught through face-to-face sessions in Lahore, with the focus on student professional reflection and development.

Staff

• Ingeborg Birnie
• Angela de Britos
• Jonathan Firth

 Find out more

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism is working with Dr Anna Anzulewicz and Krzysiek Sobota on smart device development and serious game early detection of autism using machine learning methods.  This work stems from EU H2020 funded work to test the efficacy of an iPad serious game assessment for autism.

Staff

• Dr Jonathan Delafield-Butt

Smart tablet serious game assessment for autism developed and tested in collaboration with colleagues in Poland, Sweden, and Scotland. 

Professional Development Programme

This programme is being run by Dr Ghita and staff from the School of Education. A longer term collaboration contract was successfully secured within a competitive market to undertake a programme of staff development at Al Jouf University, Saudi Arabia, focusing upon approaches to effective teaching, learning and research. The programme contributes both towards the professional development of staff at Al Jouf university and towards professional accreditation. 

In 2018, the School of Education at Strathclyde University successfully secured a contract with the Saudi Ministry of Education to deliver the programme: ‘Building Leadership For Change through Educational Issues, Impact and School Immersion’ for both primary and secondary “Khebrat” teachers.

The participants were awarded a post graduate certificate which leads on to Master and PhD degrees.

The programme was recommended to be an example of excellent strategic development in the faculty of Humanities and Social Science.

Strathclyde University is one of only a few universities in the UK to be selected to participate in this ambitious programme.

Staff

• Dr Ismail Ghita

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism has a long-standing collaboration with Nanyang Technological University in the development of new technology for fun, gamified assessments for young children with Prof. Domenico Campolo, Director of the Robotics Research Institute.  The Lab is currently collaborating with shared work with PhD student Adam Mitchell on pressure sensors for iPad gameplay analysis, and on bespoke engineering for analysis of sensory feedback during motor control with Capita-funded PhD student Yu Wei Chua.

Staff

• Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt
• Yu Wei Chua (PhD student)
• Adam Mitchell (PhD student)

School of Education PhD students Adam Mitchell with colleagues at the Robotics Research Centre at NTU, Singapore

From 9-11 October 2019, Professor Hilary Janks (photograph below), University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, presented a public lecture at the University of Strathclyde: Texts, Identities & Ethics: Critical Literacy in a Post-truth World. Dr Navan Govender, a lecturer at Strathclyde, was privileged to host the internationally acclaimed researcher, academic, and teacher.  In the public lecture, Janks explained how ideology is encoded into texts and the need to read both with and against texts. Here, critical literacy serves a social justice agenda and involves working with texts (meaning-making) from a socio-cultural theory where power and ethics, identity and diversity, access, and (re)design are intrinsic to understanding how texts serve some interests at the expense of others. Prof Janks also conducted seminars with the BA2 Primary students, the PGDE English cohort, and some MEd and PhD students. In each, Janks drew on the practical elements of her work in Literacy & Power (Janks, 2010) and Doing Critical Literacy: Texts & Activities for Students & Teachers (Janks and colleagues, 2013). For example, the PGDE English students were asked to develop a range of questions for a Stephen Spender poem: from comprehension questions that dealt with meanings in the text, to critical questions that require learners to unpack the social effects of texts.

Staff 

• Navan Govender

Professor Hilary Janks

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism works closely with Professor Christopher Gillberg and his team at the Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre (GNC) at the University of Gothenburg.  The clinic is Europe’s most prolific research centres in childhood neurodevelopmental disorders.  His team have worked closely with the Lab to complete our combined Sweden-UK trial of the iPad early assessment for children with autism, and the Centre and the Lab are working together to develop a new work in novel forms of psychological and motor assessment for young children, and the development of a new birth cohort study to include wearable assessment of movement in early life as a biomarkers of neurodevelopmental distress.  Prof. Delafield-Butt is an associate member of the GNC.

Staff

• Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt
• Erin Lux
• Dr Szu-Ching Lu

Strathclyde Literacy Team Working with Salem State University, Massachusetts

Professor Sue Ellis, Dr Vivienne Smith and Jenny Carey developed the Strathclyde 3 Domains Tool to empower literacy teaching in Scotland, but it has been adopted by literacy educators at Salem State University in the USA. Professor Francesca Pomerantz (below), a well-known literacy expert in the USA is exploring how the tool can work to improve educational outcomes for children living in poverty in America.  A British Academy grant enabled her to meet the Strathclyde literacy team, visiting Scottish schools and speaking to both teachers and Strathclyde students about how they used the tool to design a responsive, more enabling literacy curriculum. 

Staff

• Sue Ellis

Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism works closely with Professor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and her team at the A-Z Lab set within Prof. Antonio and Hanna Damasio’s Brain and Creativity Institute. The team works to investigate motor differences in children with autism and those with developmental coordination disorder using novel iPad methodologies together with fMRI and standardised psychometrics.   

Staff

• Professor Jonathan Delafield-Butt
• Dr Szu-Ching Lu

Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis

The Laboratory for Innovation in Autism is working with Prof. Susan Rivera and PhD candidate Emily Fourie at the Center for Mind and Brain on assessment of differences in perception and action of the 2/3 power law.  Emily’s PhD will employ a novel smart game assessment with data analytics generated at Strathclyde to support experimental studies with children with autism carried out at UC Davis.  The project dovetails with aligned work at Gothenburg.

Staff

• Dr Szu-Ching Lu
• Prof Jonathan Delafield-Butt