Dr Michaela Harrison

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’.

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.