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The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2022

BERA Blog end of year highlights

Yuletide greetings and festive cheer to all our readers and authors, wherever you may be. In these challenging times, we thank all of you for your continued support, enthusiasm and engagement with...

Why family engagement is crucial for schools and children

As educators, we know that a child’s home environment is a vital contributory factor towards their cognitive and social development. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1979)...

Radical imagination: Enacting anti-racist practice and decolonial praxis in initial teacher education in England

Decolonising the curriculum is a complex, although not elusive phenomenon in initial teacher education (ITE). It is, however, to be actively and persistently pursued in order to enable anti-racist...

An evidence-based approach to addressing teacher mental health and wellbeing

A new approach Concerns about teachers’ wellbeing and mental health have heightened since the pandemic (See et al., 2020; Müller, 2022). While this concern has been raised and discussed in...

Spaces for activism in early years initial teacher education in England

Practices of initial teacher education (ITE) are inevitably impacted by a range of influential discourses, including those endorsed by central government and those emerging from the values,...

Digital futures in Northern Ireland: Beyond a virtual reality?

On a recent first trip outside Northern Ireland, following my two years or so of Covid-19 bubbling, I was struck by the national media coverage surrounding ‘our wee country’. With news of...

Education research: Northern Ireland

Education in Northern Ireland (NI) is characterised by segregation along religious/sectarian lines underpinned by a long history of religious tensions and fractured politics. Ninety-three per...

Editorial: Education research: Northern Ireland

Education in Northern Ireland (NI) is characterised by segregation along religious/sectarian lines underpinned by a long history of religious tensions and fractured politics. Ninety-three per...

A new agenda for teacher education research in Northern Ireland

The importance of teachers has long been recognised as central not only to the educational and personal development of children but also to societal wellbeing and economic growth (OECD, 2018)....

The ‘impractical wisdom’ of the Early Career Framework

In 2019, in response to concerns in England regarding teacher recruitment and retention, the Education Secretary announced a two-year centrally funded Early Career Framework (ECF), designed to...

Understanding and mitigating the impact of Covid-19 disruption on trainee and early career teachers in secondary schools

Covid-19 has led to significant disruption in the established systems and practices of preparing new teachers. This blog post reports on the findings and recommendations from an Economic and...

Educators learning through communities of philosophical enquiry

‘Community’ is suggestive of collectivism and plurality, while ‘enquiry’ evokes processes of exploration led by pressing questions or concerns. Combining these concepts and practices is at...