Every year BERA recognises academic excellence and rigour in research by a Masters student. This underscores BERA’s commitment to developing capacity, advancing quality and methodological originality within the field of educational research.

This year we received a number of high quality applications and the judges were very impressed by the volume of exciting new researchers.

We are pleased to announce the 2019 Winner of the BERA Masters Dissertation Award is Joyce Kim (University of Cambridge for her thesis Contested Cosmopolitanisms: A Comparative Case Study of Student Experiences and Identities Within Internationalizing South Korean Universities

The abstract for her thesis is below:

In this dissertation, I apply a theory of cosmopolitanism to understand the experiences and identities of students in South Korean universities that are affected by internationalization policies in service of the global knowledge economy. I employ a comparative case study approach, which involves 34 semi-structured interviews, critical discourse analysis of university-affiliated documents, and archival research of South Korean government education policy across three internationalizing South Korean universities. Based on my analysis, I argue that cosmopolitanism manifests in student identities in ways that are contested and variegated and relate to the unexpected consequences of these internationalization policies. Findings of this dissertation challenge existing literature on the relationship between global processes and higher education that largely center around research using discourse of globalization and internationalization. Although such research has made valuable contributions, my findings suggest that cosmopolitanism shows theoretical potential in critically examining the role of universities as centers of knowledge production in the wake of a world affected by global processes.

The Judges also highly commended:

Ashley Elkington, (University of Oxford) for Incorporating faded worked-examples into the mathematics classroom: exploring gender and socioeconomic effects with two Grade 9 groups from South Africa.

Zoe Parsons, (Oxford Brookes University) for Implementing a Morphological Approach to Spelling in the Classroom:
an Investigation into Teacher Experience and Effect on Children’s Writing.