BERA Bites, issue 12: Education and the environment
Today, in 2025, as an Earthly community, we face the ongoing triple planetary crises of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste. Across the UK, and in many other...
BERA Blog
Research-practice partnerships: Implications for REF 2029
The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a UK-wide assessment of research quality, which informs the allocation of approximately £2 billion per year of public funding for...
Practices and learning needs of Romanian school-based teacher educators
Initial teacher education (ITE) varies across countries. In many educational systems, including Romania, universities are responsible for preparing future teachers, collaborating with schools for...
Raising Critical Confidence as a root to knowledge of self
hooks (1994, p. 34) advises us to ‘renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions and society so the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our...
What lessons do students infer from Holocaust education?
‘The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it.’ —Adorno,...
Neoliberal metrics and a curriculum for competence
Neoliberalism – the free market ideology of individual liberty and choice, combined with limited government interference in a competitive marketplace – has been a growing international trend...
A digital learning model integrating Bronfenbrenner’s Human Ecology Model with the Chinese He and Xie Principles that support diverse learners
The rise of online learning has led to new digitally connected teaching models. With the growth of learning platforms and AI tools like ChatGPT, the higher education sector faces the challenge of...
School health and wellbeing, and national education system reform in Wales
The Curriculum for Wales prioritises young people’s health and wellbeing, with a strategic aim for all children in Wales to be healthy and confident individuals. Following national roll-out,...
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Research-practice partnerships: Implications for REF 2029
The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) – a UK-wide assessment of research quality, which informs the allocation of approximately £2 billion per year of public funding for...
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The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029: Threat or opportunity for early career researchers?
For early career researchers (ECRs), REF 2029 represents a challenge but also an opportunity to position and shape their scholarly activity in the short and medium term. In this blog post, we...
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The ‘Dear Researcher’ workshop on participatory research spaces at the BERA 2024 conference: Insights and practical examples of researching with youth co-researchers
The ‘Dear Researcher’ workshop that I facilitated at the 2024 BERA Conference, had developed through years of research working alongside children and young people as co-researchers. The...
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From compliance to conversation: New guidelines push for ethical reflection in research reporting
Academic outputs, conference and journal papers, are the primary mode of communication for academics, whether with other researchers, policymakers, or practitioners and the wider public. Scholarly...
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Editorial: Beyond ‘navel gazing’: Autoethnography as a catalyst for change
Autoethnography holds significant relevance as a methodology in social justice work within educational research and practice (Boylorn, 2006; Ellis, 2002; Skousen, 2022). It is defined as a...
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Narrating self, narrating us: Autoethnography in Black women’s storytelling
Telling stories has been part of my upbringing since birth. My Jamaican immigrant grandparents used stories to shape my identity, build character, and share their histories – stories of arriving...
Continue reading blog postAutoethnography and stakeholder engagement
In this blog post I report on my Winston Churchill Foundation research fellowship study on the adultification of Black girls in state care in 2023 (Ikomi, 2024). Adultification can occur in a...
Continue reading blog postRipple effects: From the ‘auto’ to wider narratives of social purpose
Historically, self-reflective work has been disparaged as narcissistic or uncritical. In this blog post, I outline two ways, drawn from my own research and practice, in which starting from an...
Continue reading blog postBeyond navel-gazing: Why is there a lack of Black male teachers in the United Kingdom?
‘Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.’―Paulo Freire In this blog post, I will share how autoethnography has shaped my doctoral research on...
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