Re-imagining Learning Communities
The research group Re-imagining Learning Communities (RILC) aims to create an interdisciplinary and vibrant research culture, supportive research networks and brings together researchers, from LSBU and beyond. Re-imagining Learning Communities' members build capacity through research on themes across educational policy and practice and engage with issues of equity and social justice. Re-imagining learning communities works with learning communities across the age range and in diverse settings to collaboratively re-imagine the how, what and why of education. Our participatory research aims to inform practice and policy for socially responsible and sustainable futures. We re-imagine: who is learning for? Where does learning happen? Who owns learning? Who benefits? Who is excluded? What does community-owned learning look like? What pedagogies does it need? What new ways of being/doing do we need to imagine for educators, learners and communities? Re-imagining Learning Communities' members also supervise a wide range of doctoral research projects
Proposals may be supervised by the following research group members (among others) Professor Nicki Martin, Professor Alex Kendall, Dr Martha Shaw, Dr Charlotte Clements, Dr Charalampia Karagianni and Dr Helen Young
Our group develops research and public engagement across the following themes:
- Innovative theoretical frameworks and creative methodologies for learning
- Social inclusion (exploring issues around anti-racist education, multilingualism, gender, decolonisation, SEND and neurodiversity)
- Understanding and strategising responses to youth work
- Post-compulsory education
- Inclusive and lived citizenship
- Youth school transitions to HE and employment transition
- Critical approaches to Education for Sustainable Development
- Pedagogy in Higher Education
- Academic literacies
- Beyond the classroom
Below is a dynamic list of LSBU researchers working on relevant projects.
Our members include:
Research interests: Inclusive education and critical disability studies.
Research interests: Learning identities and lived experiences of learning (in and out of formal settings), practitioner education (UK and internationally), cultures of sanctuary, creative, participatory and arts-based methodologies and pedagogies.
Research interests: Religion and worldviews in education; and education for intercultural citizenship
Research Interests: Informal education, inclusive education, history and policy of welfare and education, professional identities of youth workers.
Research interests: Teacher education, inclusive education in the further education and skills sector, intercultural education, gender studies
Research interests: Sociology of education, Democracy and citizenship, Education for sustainability, Climate justice, Education policy, Global learning, Inequalities in education, Critical pedagogy, Nature, Activism, City farms
Research interests: Educational experiences of vulnerable pupils, including children who are looked after, children who have been excluded from mainstream schools and/or those at risk of exclusion and children who experience poor mental health and trauma
Research interests: Inclusive education areas including supporting Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual families in schools, anti-racist education practice, adult education programmes for women furthest from education and diversity in youth music leadership
Our PGR students include:
Joanna Krupa
Research interests: Inclusive education; neurodiversity; parent-school partnerships.
Research interests: Academic reading/literacies, Transitions into and across HE, Universal Design for Learning
Research interests: High quality music and mathematics education in primary school, well-being and mindfulness for teachers and children
Research interests: Parental perspectives on forest schools
Alice Elizabeth Jane Speller
Betty Boachie Benjamin
Bisi Adelaja
Charlotte Rose Taylor
Elaine Mcgoldrick
Emma Sharon Rehal-Wilde
Helen Otteran Young
Jane Crussell
Jenna Mary Bent
Karen Rose Golding
Karolina Ziolkowska
Mira Wille
Research interests: Anti-Blackness and socio-economic class dynamics in higher education, particularly the impact of widening participation on the attainment and the transition to and within higher education for marginalised students
Nadia Imtiaz
Natalie Law
Research interests: Reimagining legal pedagogy by looking to northern American literature and the concept of the Rebellious Lawyer which sits intrinsically with communities,
Sarah Louise Hodgson-Jones
Sharron Jane Sturgess
Research interests: Disability, autism/neurodiversity, educational inclusion, wellbeing and belonging for students in HE, access to space and place by HE students, emancipatory and participatory research
Tiloma Chandrasekera Thenuwara
Valerie Judith Nesbitt
RILC draws on the knowledge and experience of interdisciplinary academics and practitioners to further research that understands inequalities and promotes inclusion. We form partnerships on local, national and international levels to explore issues within a broad context of education.
| Project | Funder |
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Making Gender Equality Matter in Schools (MGEMS) Project Lead: Professor Alex Kendall Research Assistant: Dr Charalampia Karagianni Brief summary MGEMS will explore concept-making around gender identities and how discourses about gender play out to position teachers and students in particular kinds of ways and with specific effects within the context of school education. As such the project will provide opportunities for teachers of all genders to reflect on their own positionality within their setting and the impacts that they have on others within their own practices and spheres of influence. This will provide opportunities for positive and productive challenge of both self and others in a supported and structured environment leading to new observations and insights that will have significant implications for decision making and practicing otherwise. Critically participants in all MGEMS activities will have opportunities for taking responsibility for their own actions and decision making and the impact these have on challenging or reproducing gender inequalities within the school and classroom. | British Council |
Project Lead: Professor Alex Kendall Research Assistant: Dr Charalampia Karagianni Brief summary The project will make put to work creative and arts-based practices to build collective ethnographies that pay attention to women ’ s lives and experiences opening up discussions with participants as co-creators and collaborators about voice, identity and learning. In so doing STEM-POWER will provide important opportunities for reflection on gender relations and the way they impact on access, participation and persistence in education. These conversations will be firmly located in local social and cultural contexts and afford departure points for participants to explore gender relations within their own workplaces, communities and settings. In describing optimal conditions for engagement of women leaders these issues will be captured in the project recommendations providing response pathways for key stakeholders including women themselves, leaders and managers in higher education with responsibility for human resources and people development and policymakers. | British Council |
Understanding the interplay: Education, lived worldviews & citizenship Project Lead: Dr Martha Shaw Brief summary This is a qualitative investigation conducted through Lego based workshops and semi-structured interviews in 3 different schools. The aims of the project can be summarised as : To strengthen articulation and understanding of ‘worldview’ within RE, Religion & Worldviews and citizenship education. To increase understanding of the importance of religion & worldviews education to broader educational aims of inclusive citizenship and engagement in plurality. To enhance teaching, teacher education, pedagogy and curriculum development through the provision of recommendations and teaching materials that support and resonate with the complexities of young people’s intercultural navigation and the role of religion/worldviews therein. To inform worldviews education with an enhanced understanding of young peoples’ lived experiences and their reflexive engagement in plurality. Increase support for freedom of belief in society through the development of educators’ understandings of how students’ belief (and/or non-belief) interacts with their experiences of secular institutions and civic life. | |
Brief summary Since 2016 the YVC have been consulting with young people and working with academics and practitioners to better understand how serious violence manifests itself in young people’s lives. We have spent the last five years examining the root causes of youth violence in England, Scotland and Wales in our search for solutions. We held a series of evidence sessions in Parliament and worked with our academic partners to produce an interim written report with policy recommendations in summer 2018. This was followed by the publication of our final report in July 2020, which also considered the added pressures created by the COVID-19 crisis. | Youth Violence Commision |
Innovative Religion & Worldviews Researcher: Dr Martha Shaw Brief summary Building on previous research into stakeholders' aspirations for RE that reflects the 'real religious landscape', this project showcases ways in which teachers are engaging with a 'worldviews approach' as proposed by the Commission for Religious Education (CoRE, 2018). These resources are aimed at both supporting teachers in adopting a 'worldviews approach' and at further stimulating discussion around reform of RE. | Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) |
Exploring Worldviews Education & Citizenship in Schools Researcher: Dr Martha Shaw Brief summary The Exploring Worldviews Education & Citizenship in Schools project is funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council and led by Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. | Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council |
‘Every teacher is a language teacher’: Supporting EAL students in the further education sector. Project Lead: Dr Charalampia Karagianni Brief summary The project aims to investigate the pedagogical principles and teaching practices that further education (FE) lectures use to support students with English as an additional language (EAL) in the further education and skills sector. The increasing number of young adult EAL students in the FE classrooms (Cara, 2021) has placed challenges on the FE lecturers who are expected to teach their vocational subject to a culturally and linguistically diverse pupil population without having the appropriate pre-service or in-service teacher education. A multiple case study approach will be adopted to explore this phenomenon in depth and from different perspectives. Classroom observations and ethnographic interviews will be conducted to reveal the teaching practices and underpinning perspectives of four experienced FE teachers in South Bank colleges who have high numbers of EAL students. Such an investigation will contribute to the development of situated teacher education materials for South Bank colleges. | London South Bank University |
Group members are involved in a range of projects and collaborations.
Below are a sample of our project partners.
- After Religious Education: Curricula Principles for education in Religion and Worldviews
- Our Shared World
Events
| Research Group seminar series |
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Title: Imagining a Rebellious Legal Pedagogy - How to educate for a critical legal praxis Date and time: 23/05/2025, 12-1pm Should a vocational legal education required to prepare students for the world of work and professional roles? Should a critical legal pedagogy which examines the role of law in society? This presentation looks to the prevailing construct of the Regnant Lawyer, who sits extrinsically from the client experience and the traditional form of legal education where learners replicate the established Regnant form. It then examines North American literature to understand the concept of Rebellious Lawyering which is intrinsic to the communities in which it exists, and demands that the lawyer immerse themselves in the client’s lived experience to better understand their needs and look for holistic solutions to what are often complex issues. This paper invites an imagining of an alternative legal education inspired by Rebellious Lawyering- a Rebellious Legal Pedagogy. Traditional legal learning is generally concerned with the study of doctrinal law and judicial reasoning and replicates social norms and a professional monopoly of legal services. A Rebellious Legal Pedagogy comprises immersion in community, collaborative working and learning, deliberative democracy, and power sharing and dialogue with and within communities. It offers the potential for tomorrow’s lawyers to take up positions, not restricted within traditional legal professions, but within communities – whether social, commercial, ethnic, linguistic, economic or virtual. questions for consideration What are the risks faced by the Rebellious Legal Pedagogy - the debate around an evaluation of higher knowledge versus socially constructed knowledge Could a Rebellious Legal Pedagogy offer a bridge between a vocational and critical legal pegagogies? How might a Rebellious pedagogy offer a potential response to the challenges posed by AI? |
Title: Forest schools and the commodification of nature - an analysis of the discourses about nature that parents drawn on when discussing forest schools Presenter: Sophie Mackay Date and time: 02/06/2025, 12-1pm Summary Forest schools have been described as an example of a neo-liberal approach to the consumption and commodification of nature (Fletcher 2017, Morgan 2018, Leather, 2017, Hursh et al 2015, Dickenson, 2013). This is what McAfee, (1999) (in Buscher and Fletcher 2020, p.19) describes as “saving nature to sell it”. This paper looks at how this paradox between conservation and consumption of nature, plays out in the discourses about nature that parents draw upon when discuss their motivation for attending forest school sessions with their pre-school aged child. I will provide insights from 70 interviews I conducted with parents attending forest school sessions in London. One of the themes this paper explores is parents’ discourse about intergenerational environmental justice. The idea of parental responsibility for the future is discussed by Rosen and Suissa (2020) when they refer to the imagery of the child as the ‘embodiment of “the future”; with the corresponding understanding of parents as having particular claims to “the future” (p.2). Rosen and Suissa (2020) go on to discuss how the human capital module emphasises child development for the benefit of familial and national futures and that, ‘good “parenthood” is increasingly understood as both inoculating and preparing one’s own children to thrive in the face of uncertain futures’ (p.2-3). |
| Be the Change in Education |
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| On 15th March 2024, a one-day conference was hosted by RILC with the title Be the Change in Education. The aim of the conference was to explore and examine how the social fabric of social justice is enriched by the praxis and work of educators and pedagogues committed to social justice. This event provided an opportunity to highlight ongoing or recently completed individual research projects, as well as cross-institutional and cross-sector collaborations within educational sectors. The focus of this event is to create a space where what Freire calls ‘problem-posing education’ (Freire, 2000, p. 79) can have a forum to disseminate research and collaborate with others. Conference programme |
Across The Divide: Reimagining Educational Futures |
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Programme Welcome and introduction - ED4SJ leads Zoe Leadley-Meade & Martha Shaw Session one (Speakers will present for 15 minutes each after which there will be a 20 minute Q& A for all speakers in the session)
Session two
Session three
Closing remarks & summary |
| Lightning talks Online |
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| Education Across the Divide conference posters |
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By Sandra Howgate Dr Pen Mendonca |
