About Our research
We place the wellbeing and lives of children, families and parents at the heart of our work.
Many projects engage with some of the youngest children, their families, and a range of early years-focused practitioners in nurseries, schools, museums, galleries and other arts organisations.
Our research programme provides a strongly-theorised holistic perspective that resists narrowing early years provision and practice, paying attention to issues of social justice. We avoid ‘deficit’ models of parenting and child development.
We are developing models for working/researching in collaboration with partners, bringing different combinations of researchers, practitioners, organisations, parents and doctoral students together in teams including:
- researcher-in-residence
- arts-informed co-production
- working with doctoral students, researchers and cross-sector practitioners in co-produced research projects
Our group collaborates with the Arts and Humanities and Health, Psychology and Social Care faculties to:
- build interdisciplinary research teams to address particular, complex and contemporary research issues
- create doctoral supervision teams across faculties to meet the needs of increasingly diverse scholarship research topics and innovative methodologies
Research activities
We promote research-focused activities across the Faculty of Education and beyond through a range of events and ongoing processes that include:
- conferences, methodology training and seminar series
- mentoring and reviewing work, supporting publishing, engaging with co-authoring, co-writing and reviewing grant bid writing
- training doctoral students and engaging them in research projects
- teaching on and working with teams developing new undergraduate courses and postgraduate programmes
2020 - 2021 seminar series recordings
Watch the videos of our latest seminar series: