Dr Alison Straker Joined USW in 2022 as a lecturer on the Initial Teacher Education programme in Post-Compulsory Education and Training (PCET). This is a role she cherishes as it allows her to draw upon her extensive experience as an educator in diverse formal and community settings, and to make good use of her hard-earned (but subsequently neglected) PhD in Education. Importantly, the values-based approach to Initial Teacher Education in PCET at USW allows her to continue to play a small part in the long journey towards equity and social justice.
Participating in the Embedding Research and Enquiry in Schools (EREiS) research project has provided an opportunity to rekindle her research career and to further develop her long-standing interest in the nexus between theory and practice. Her knowledge and experience of practice-based research, along with a well-honed toolkit of participatory methods, enabled her to contribute to the research team’s work in supporting schools to work collaboratively in developing their capacity for research-informed practice.