Dr Michaela Harrison
Dr Michaela Harrison
Senior Lecturer
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
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Journal articles
Evans, S., Harrison, M., Rousell, D. (2021) 'Teaching in the afterward: undoing order-words and affirming transversal alternatives.' Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 43(5) pp. 785-803.
Harrison, M. (2020) 'Deleuze-inspired action research in the university: mobilising Deleuzian concepts to rethink research on the reflective writing practices of student teachers.' Educational Action Research, 30(3) pp. 395-410.
Harrison, M., Davies, C., Fox, S., Bell, H., Goodley, C., Downing, B. (2020) '(Un)teaching the ‘datafied student subject’: perspectives from an education-based masters in an English University.' Teaching in Higher Education, 25(4) pp. 401-417.
Harrison, M. (2019) 'Experimenting with data and analysis in researching the writing practices of student teachers.' International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 43(3)
Harrison, M.J. (2017) 'Implicated reading: a method for reflecting on practice.' Reflective Practice, 18(3) pp. 312-325.
Press and media
Media appearances or involvement
News piece: Millions of children return to school – but to a very different classroom