Pat Sikes is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. Pat began her research career in 1978 at the University of East Anglia as a research assistant on Lawrence Stenhouse’s Nuffield/Gulbenkian project, The problems and effects of teaching about race relations. A PhD at the University of Leeds came next, followed by a period working at the Open University with Peter Woods and Linda Measor on the ESRC funded Teachers’ lives and careers study. Then there were a few years as a member of the OU TVEI evaluation team convened by Roger Dale, as well as a stint at the Counselling & Career Development Unit at the University of Leeds. From 1988 to 2000 Pat was at the University of Warwick, working closely with Barry Troyna in developing and practicing auto/biographical pedagogy. Four years after Barry’s untimely death in 1996 she went to Sheffield.

Since 2014 Pat’s interest has been in using narrative auto/biographical approaches to investigate the perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with young onset dementia, receiving funding from the Alzheimer’s Society for this work.