Vanessa Cui, Senior Research Fellow in the faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences, discusses research with Associate Professor of Education Louise Lambert.
VANESSA CUI
Senior Research Fellow in Health, Education and Life Sciences
Vanessa: Who are you and what do you research?
Louise: I am an Associate professor in the School of Education and Social Work at Birmingham City University. I research pedagogies of teaching and learning and professional development across education sectors, usually through the use of creative, participatory, and art-based approaches. My projects have been with schools and colleges, wider communities, and Higher Education both in the UK and Internationally. I’m interested in posthuman and feminist new materialist theories and these underpin my approach to my research practices (see a selection of research papers at the end of this blog post). I used to be an English teacher, and I still like to write about that too and recently co-edited a book about English teaching.
Vanessa: Looking at your research through the lens of impact, what are your overall goals?
Louise: The overall goal of my work is to think about and practice broader and more inclusive pedagogical practices in our institutions, to diversify pedagogical practices, and to consider the possibilities such diversification might afford for the ways in which we do teaching and learning and the spaces we do them in. If we re-think some of the ways of doing education that we take for granted and invite more people into the conversation about what the effects of these practices are on different groups of people, then we are in a better position to be able to reimagine education’s impacts and outcomes in practical ways.
Vanessa: Why do pedagogical practices need diversification?
Louise: Many of our practices in educational institutions have become determined through a narrowing and homogenising of curriculums. This is in part due to a focus on measurable outcomes. In schools, for example, we see high-stakes testing regimes throughout children’s school lives, with learning orientated to exam success. In HE it is often shaped by particular metrics, economic drivers, and employability agendas. It is also the case that historically our education systems in the UK have been based on particular ways of knowing and experiencing the world that is rooted in colonial and patriarchal practices, and this can lead to a narrowing of perspectives. How we think about and organise time and space in our institutions is also really significant in shaping learning and teaching experiences, and these are very much a part of our pedagogies. So, it is not just about what we do and how we do it, but also where, when, and why.
Vanessa: So why is it important to diversify pedagogical practices? Who does this matter to?
Louise: I think it matters to us all. At a micro level, it is about the enjoyment and success of students and lecturers in our own institutions, who represent a diverse body of people. Education is a significant driver for change, social justice, and transformation of life chances, so how we go about it matters a lot for the communities and societies we live in. Through theorising and researching our practices, exploring them rigorously, and creatively, and including as many people in the conversation as possible, we are better able to respond actively to the very many challenges we are faced with locally, nationally, and globally.
Vanessa: Thanks for sharing your research and impact vision. It would be helpful to use some examples from your work to contextualise some of the points you made so far. Can you tell us about what you are currently working on?
Louise: The project I am working on at the moment with Dr Alex Wade looks at hybrid pedagogies in the post pandemic university. Here, we used digital comic making to explore students’ experiences of hybridity using a hybrid ethnography (across digital and physical locations). From this, we were able to re-conceptualise and theorise the pedagogic spaces of the university in terms of hybridity. This gives us new ways to talk and think about pedagogies with others to develop new practices/ ways of evaluating teaching and learning that account for some of the affordances of the hybrid university and address some of its challenges. These insights will lead to a new MA module, co-created by students and we hope will also form the basis of new research into how we support young people in navigating hybridity as they transition from college to university.
(This image is created using the software (StoryboardThat) used by participants in the project to design their own comics based on experiences of teaching and learning in the post-pandemic university.)
I also work with a team of people on Co-Map (‘Collaborative Mapping of Young People’s Learning Experience during COVID 19’). This is a project in its final year working across five European countries to explore young people’s learning in lockdown. Young people worked with artists to create a range of art pieces that were exhibited at a public exhibition as well as became part of a digital platform that also hosts a range of training materials and resources to support teachers in using art-based methods to support young people in times of disruption and crisis. A number of teachers across sectors and colleagues from Birmingham Schools of Sanctuary joined us on the project and are able to advocate more widely for the project in their own workplaces, as well as use them in their own practices.
(Young people from a Birmingham school drawing together about their COVID-19 lockdown learning experiences at a Co-Map workshop.)
Vanessa: So for these projects, what you aim to change or influence about diversification of pedagogical practices?
Louise: Education has experienced a significant disruption through the pandemic, one that has shifted how we think about and engage with our educational institutions in ways that require us to consider some of the ‘taken for granted’ ways of doing learning and teaching. We need to start by understanding and exploring what the effects of these shifts are and how they affect people differently. From there we can begin to consider of our practices, use of spaces (digital and physical), and ways of evaluating these might change or be adapted so that we respond to these shifts and can keep responding to the demands of a rapidly changing world. So, this might be about ways of doing assessments or of organising classrooms and spaces of learning at a micro level. It might also be about policy change to foreground particular principles about learning or different ways of evaluating, or about what technologies and institutions invest in.
Vanessa: How do you plan to achieve this? And how would you know if your research made such a change or influence?
Louise: It works at different levels and is a slow, ongoing, and iterative process that involves lots of people. There are tangible things such as new modules, new assessment practices, or approaches for example – research that directly benefits teaching and learning. There are also tools that can be used more widely, such as the digital platform of resources from CoMap (see above). There is also the impact of being able to contribute to debates on the development of thinking and practicing which is more emergent but is often the foundation for change, through published papers and reports. One of the things I like about the ways my research, professional and teaching practices are often blurred, is that you do get a lot of feedback over time and from a lot of people about how things are working/ not working!
Vanessa: A key characteristic of your work is the participatory approach you use. This blurs the boundaries between research and pedagogy. How do you go about capturing and reviewing the impact your research has made?
Louise: This is tricky to answer because I don’t see it as a ‘capture’. The approaches are experimental and messy, situated and relational – in the moment and particular to that group of people. I think what is generated through participatory approaches are ideas and relationships and often inspiration to try something new. I see changes over time, for example in the ways in which students engage with particular approaches or assessment models, but also in people’s desire to work, research, and practice in ways that are different from the ones that dominate educational institutions.
Vanessa: So far, what’s the most challenging/tricky experience you’ve had when it comes to create change/influence on practice through your research?
Louise: The fact that not enough time is available for thinking and experimenting, especially for those working for example in schools or in highly regulated workplaces. Bureaucracy and excessive administrative demands prevent people from being able to engage and participate with each other. Sometimes change is also about shifting cultures and ways of thinking and this is a slow process and doesn’t ‘deliver’ in short and easily measurable timeframes or solution-focused approaches.
Vanessa: And any particular approach you’ve used in your work that you find helpful for generating meaningful impact?
Louise: Co-creation can be highly generative of change that works for the people it impacts the most because it allows people to really be part of the dialogue about what matters to them. Co-creation is also inspiring because it is amazing what can be generated when people make, think, and talk together about the issues and problems that they face.
Vanessa: Thank you Louise for sharing your research impact work experiences and reflections.
A selection of Louise's research:
Lambert, L. (2021) Diffraction as an otherwise practice of exploring new teachers’ entanglements in time and space, Professional Development in Education, 47:2-3, 421-435, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1884587
Alexandra Kendall, Tran Quynh Ngoc Bui, Thi Hoang Yen Duong, Thi Thuy Trang Kieu, Louise Lambert, Tan Huynh, Kim Anh Le, Thi Thu Lieu Le, Nguyen Duc Hanh Luu, Stuart Mitchell, Thi Thanh Hai Pham, Thanh Trung Nguyen, Thi Thu Trang Nguyen & Hoang Cam Tu Tran (2020) Giving up and getting lost in Hanoi: playing with creative research methods in transnational contexts, PRACTICE, 2:1, DOI: 10.1080/25783858.2020.1843126
Lambert, L. (2019) Becoming teacher, becoming researcher: reconsidering data analysis in post-qualitative practitioner research, PRACTICE, 1:2, 151-168, DOI: 10.1080/25783858.2019.1659633