Dr Michaela Harrison

My profile

Biography

After a short time working as a Key Stage Two teacher, I joined Manchester Met in 2008, as a senior lecturer, initially as part of the Initial Teacher Education teaching team. I now mostly work on the faculty’s masters courses. My teaching focuses mainly on research methods and methodologies. I lead a large module called Principles and Practices in Educational Research, which is taught to all students across our range of education-based masters courses. I also lead the MA Social Research, a research degree accredited by the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC’s) White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership. I supervise students undertaking PhDs and professional doctorates. My supervisees’ projects are usually practice-orientated practitioner research. Their work focuses on how to improve or better understand aspects of their own work as educators.

I completed my professional doctorate at Manchester Met in 2014.

The title of my doctoral thesis was; ‘Travelling Through Written Spaces: a nomadic enquiry into the writing of student teachers’.

Interests and expertise

My research activity includes work aiming to explore the relationship between students’ writing, masters study more generally, and professional development.

More recently I have been undertaking projects that seek to describe and explore the embodied aspects of teaching. I focus on describing what teachers’ bodies ‘do’ in the classroom, how they relate to other bodies (human and non-human) and why and how these bodily acts and relations matter.

My theoretical and methodological interests include, but are not limited to; post foundational inquiry, material-discursive relations, feminism, new-materialism, post humanism, practitioner research and writing as a form of enquiry.

Research outputs

Press and media