School of Education

Our work in this area includes our concern to better understand the relationship between place and educational disadvantage in the Glasgow City Region, and also in other regions in the world, in particular in the global south. We seek to identify the drivers of disadvantage, as well as lifelong success, and to inform policy options for narrowing the gap in educational attainment experienced by young people and adults from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our distinctiveness is based a) on the use of novel and sophisticated quantitative methods, for example through our work within the ESRC funded Urban Big Data Centre led by Catherine Lido and a team that includes Mike Osborne, Phil Mason and Muir Houston b) taking an interdisciplinary approach working with other leading academics within the College of Science and Engineering, the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Institute of Health and Well-being, specialising in engineering, environmental sciences, health, housing and transport, and c) addressing global challenges. We recognise in this work that combating inequality within and among countries, preserving the planet, creating inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and fostering social inclusion are mutually interdependent, and are underpinned by learning. 

In the Greater Glasgow area, the major initiative, Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland (CNS), led by Chris Chapman, with funding of £2.2m from the Scottish Government, and additional support from Baillie Gifford, Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership, South Lanarkshire Council and West Dunbartonshire Council offers a distinctive and innovative place-based approach to tackling child poverty. It brings together people, organisations and other resources in a local area so that they can all work more collaboratively to promote better lives for the children and young people living there.

Our work, through a number of projects supported within Global Challenges Research Fund and funded by AHRC, the British Academy, ESRC, EPSRC and MRC, led by staff including, Evelyn Arizpe, Sinead Gormally, Mike Osborne, Mia Perry, Alison Phipps, Barbara Read, Oscar Valiente, Oscar Odena, Michele Schweisfurth, and Bonnie Slade builds on these themes. This includes, the UKRI-funded, Centre for Sustainable, Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods, and a British Academy-funded project on the contribution of HEI systems to urban development (SUEUAA), both within Global Challenges Research Fund. Also, within GCRF, a British Academy-funded project funded within its Education and Crises programme, Educational Peacebuilding in Medellin and Acapulco, is focused on the city as the unit of analysis. Led by Evelyn Arizpe and Sinead Gormally, this project from a lifelong learning perspective, seeks to understand the infrastructure, engagement, resources and policies required to educationally transform a community in order to contribute to reducing the negative impacts of drug-related violence and crime.

Many of our research projects in this area involve extensive collaboration beyond the social sciences. This includes working with engineers, environmental scientists, health scientists and the NGO sector in implementing technological, environmental and health initiatives through community engagement using arts-based and public pedagogies. Led by Mia Perry, this work covers diverse fields including palliative care in Bangladesh, geo-thermal engineering in Ethiopia, and environmental initiatives in Uganda, Botswana and Nigeria. Arts based approaches are also used in a GCRF project funded by the AHRC, led by Oscar Odena, which investigates the role of Performing Arts for Peace Education in conflict zones in Latin America. 

The School of Education has a longstanding and sustained strand of work deriving from language education, and the use of the arts in awareness raising for refugee integration and migration that has grown out of work undertaken over 20 years in collaboration with the School of Modern Languages, importantly through the vehicle of GRAMNet co-ordinated by Alison Phipps. It relates to work funded on four occasions by the AHRC (and its precursors), the British Academy and Leverhulme Foundation that investigated the place of and performance of multilingualism in varieties of migrant integration. 

A major AHRC project, Researching Multilingually, has provided the basis for the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts held by Professor Phipps. In early 2019 the South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub, (Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ)), was established with funding for a major five-year project under the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), involving Alison Phipps, Giovanna Fassetta, Tawona Sitholé and Gameli Tordzro  from the School. In 2020, led also by Alison Phipps, the Culture for Sustainable and Inclusive Peace Network Plus (CUSP N+) was funded by AHRC with GCRF. The network draws together non-academic partners in the UK and in low and middle-income countries (Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine and Zimbabwe) who work with people in different artistic and cultural settings to strengthen arts and cultural institutions/organisations in LMICs so they can become a reference point for the identification and transformation of social conflict.

Related work led by Evelyn Arizpe, Julie McAdam and Lavinia Hirsu concerns the development of visual, multilingual, emotional, critical and digital literacies using multimodal texts that are crucial for understanding and developing migrant children’s and young adult’s meaning-making and intercultural competences in the global 21st century. This includes the AHRC-GCRF project, Children’s Literature in Critical Contexts of Displacement, working with collaborators in Egypt, Mexico and Central America. 

Giovanna Fassetta runs an Impact Acceleration GRCF project to maximise the impact of the Online Arabic from Palestine (OAfP) language course. The OAfP is the main output of an earlier AHRC-GCRF project called “The impact of language”. The OAfP course was designed and developed in collaboration with the Arabic Center at the Islamic University of Gaza (Palestine).

Work within an AHRC/ESRC funded GCRF Forced Displacement project, Building Futures: Aspirations of Syrian Youth Refugees and Host Population Responses in Lebanon, Greece and the UK, involving Lesley Doyle and Kristinn Hermannsson as Co-investigators has linked to our concern with skills development and focused on displaced Syrians in the Lebanon, Greece and the UK. Bonnie Slade has led a British Academy funded project concerned migrating medical professional knowledge. Marta Moskal has been the Co-I on an ESRC funded project concerned with identity, citizenship and belonging among settled Eastern European migrant children in the UK

The School of Education has sustained demonstrable research strengths in the fields of philosophy of education, religion and education, and religious education, and includes the work of Jim Conroy, Bob Davis, Catherine Doherty, Penny Enslin, Leonard Franchi, Nicki Hedge and Stephen McKinney. These contributions illuminate issues of ethics, values, character and morality across school curriculum, classroom pedagogy, childhood, and teacher education. These bodies of scholarship are distinguished by rigorous attention to the history of ideas, metatheory, principled scholarly reasoning, and theory building applied to contemporary issues. This scholarship underpins the broader school strength in social justice and equity studies. As the key institution preparing teachers of religious education for Scotland’s Catholic schools, the school hosts a critical mass of scholars in theology, religion, and pedagogy, whose interactions with culture, politics and education are highly significant. It hosts the St Andrew’s Foundation for Catholic Teacher Education.

The expertise of our scholars in this area is recognised in an international handbook chapter on Religious Education. The large project ‘Does Religious Education work?’ (2007-2010), led by Jim Conroy and Bob Davis, and jointly funded by the ESRC and AHRC), has continued to generate new publications, and a follow-up study for Character Scotland led by Jim Conroy. Attention to religious formation implicates questions around liberalism and post-liberalism, secularism and post-secularism, religious literacy and illiteracy and the expression of these different orientations in the school curriculum and its possible futures.

The school’s research in the philosophy of education takes controversies about understanding education itself as central, especially in the face of contemporary neoliberal influences on policy and practice. The focus on ethics and justice addresses a range of problems to do with social and global justice in education, in interpreting what education is particularly in a global context, who gets what education, delivered by what means, and where on the globe. This incorporates themes of inclusion and exclusion; the ethics of internationalisation; postcolonial relationships in the distribution of educational goods; feminist ethics; citizenship; sex education; capabilities; caring; and autonomy.