Ellie Campbell is the co-winner of the 2022 BERA Master’s Dissertation Award for her dissertation “An investigation into Teacher Leadership: A case study of secondary school teachers’ professional experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in England”

You can read her abstract here:

The Teacher Leadership in COVID-19 (TLC-19) project is a thematic case study investigating secondary school teachers’ perspectives of Teacher Leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic in maintained schools and Academies in England. TLC-19 aims to describe, understand, and explain what it means to be a teacher and exercise leadership during a crisis. TLC-19 adopts methods that produce qualitative data in order to investigate the conceptualisation of Teacher Leadership using methodological triangulation. First, TLC-19 conceptualises Teacher Leadership through the codified experiences of educational professionals using UK Government policy command papers; second, TLC-19 analyses the espoused experiences of educational professionals through participant produced drawings and, semi-structured interviews with five teachers; and third, theorises the data through the use of Bourdieu’s (1986b) ‘thinking tools’. TLC-19 presents my novel conceptualisation of Teacher Leadership in order to provide an original and significant contribution to how and why Teacher Leadership can be re-imagined in the post-pandemic world. This conceptualisation uses three themes, (i) Trust, (ii) Collegiality and (iii) a Human-Centred Approach to Teaching and Learning (HCATL). These interlocking and interdependent themes are essential to foster a more inclusive and educative form of Teacher Leadership post-pandemic. Importantly, TLC-19 uses Bourdieu’s (1986b) ‘thinking tools’ of capital (economic, social, cultural and symbolic) to expose the power struggles and social complexities of the field.