Ansgar welcomes applications to study for doctoral research degrees, in particular from those wishing to undertake research in the areas of educational philosophy, history and theory.

Bryony taught mathematics in a range of schools in England and southern Africa for 12 years before joining the department in 2010. She was Head of Maths in an inner-city Sheffield school for five years and joined the Senior Leadership Team of the school for a year.

Bryony has worked as a Regional Coordinator for the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. In this role, she worked with teaching colleagues in both primary and secondary schools across Yorkshire and the Humber to develop outstanding practise through collaborative projects.

Jessica is an interdisciplinary linguist and ethnographer, with particular research interests in creative practice and the arts (see her personal website https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/dr-jessica-bradley/home). Her research expertise is in creative and artistic methods, ethnographic approaches, and multilingualism, in particular lived experiences of multilingualism. She has led a series of funded research projects in creative approaches to linguistic landscapes, including developing cutting edge participatory and arts based research approaches to language in public space. Recent esearch explores how the arts can support new mothers, parents of young children and communities who experienced isolation during the COVID19 pandemic. Her professional background is in educational engagement in the arts and social sciences and in particular widening participation. She welcomes applications from potential doctoral researchers which engage with lived experiences of multilingualism and difference, motherhood and autoethnography, and is particularly keen on arts based research, ethnographic approaches, and co-production with creative practitioners, children and young people, all areas in which she has published widely.

Harriet is interested in the discourses of learning, learning difference and learning identity. She is particularly interested in the way language around learning disabilities and differences comes to shape the way diagnoses of autism, (specific) learning disability, ADHD and mental ill-health are constructed in specific places, spaces and times. Harriet is also interested in the lived experiences of people who come to be categorised as ‘deficient’ in learning or communicating, and in how systems, processes, and policies interact with these experiences, both in ‘western’ contexts and in the global South.

Heather is interested in supervising research students looking to work in the history of knowledge, intellectual history and the history of higher education

Dan supervises doctoral students in the areas of:

Critical disability studies;
Qualitative research including ethnography, narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, Inclusive education;
Queer, Feminist, Postcolonial and Crip studies, Critical Psychology, Sociology of Education, Sociology of the Body, Sociology of Emotions/Affect;
Posthuman and DisHuman studies.

David's research interests have a focus on pedagogy, particularly in a higher education context. As a result, his research currently centres around three major interlinked research areas of interest:

• Doctoral Pedagogies (specifically decentred and decolonising doctoral pedagogies)
• Higher Education Policy and Pedagogies
• The Impact of Language on Educational Processes.

Kirsty's research spans disability, gender, sexuality, the body, medicine and intimacy, and more recently, childhood and youth, with a particular interest in how disablism and ableism both inform and shape these experiences in the everyday lives of disabled people.

Kirsty centres disability activism, arts and culture in her work and makes use of co-produced and arts-informed methodologies because of the ways in which they push the boundaries of traditional social scientific thinking and enable multiple ways of thinking and knowing.

Kirsty welcomes doctoral students across a number of social science disciplines that wish to undertake research in the areas of disability, education, gender, sexuality, medicine and the body, and childhood and youth. She particularly welcomes those interested in arts-informed, participatory and narrative approaches and those who wish to undertake co-production.

Themesa is interested in using critical methodologies for inquiring into issues related to educational theory, policy and practice with focus on an emancipatory agenda for individuals’ lives, their work and the societies in which they live. She is also interested in engaging with theoretical issues around spirituality and education.

Abigail is a former secondary modern foreign languages teacher and her research interests arise from this experience. She is interested in motivation to learn a language, particularly in schools, and how this links to factors such as choice, multilingualism and socio-economic status. She uses self-determination theory in her work, which is a broad theory of motivation and wellness grounded in psychology.

Abigail would be interested to hear from prospective research students interested in language learning motivation, self-determination theory, school-level language learning or language policy, multilingualism in schools and related topics. She is particularly interested in projects with a quantitative element and those focused on schools in England. 

Andrey's research interests include language and education, sociolinguistics, multilingualism and faith-based complementary schooling. He has published in the fields of multilingualism, the sociology of language, the sociology of language and religion, language and education and language and identity. Much of his recent research is located within theoretical frameworks which view language as a social practice and language as performance. He recently led an AHRC-funded international research network on performance and faith: Heavenly Acts – aspects of performance through an interdisciplinary lens.

Katherine's research is rooted in critical disability studies scholarship and activism. Her research spans inclusive education, disabled children's childhood studies, as well as matters of health and social care in the lives of people with learning disabilities and their families. Her work draws on Feminist, Crip, Critical Psychology, Posthuman and DisHuman studies.

She engages with qualitative research approaches including: ethnography, narrative inquiry, arts-informed approaches, carried out in co-production with disabled people and their families and other allies.

Christina’s research is focused on young children’s experiences of, and access to, education
in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. More recently, Christina has worked
specifically with asylum seeking and refugee families with young children to understand
how voluntary and community organisations support them to access education.

Christina has a particular interest in participatory, visual methods with children and
methodologies that highlight children’s rights adopt the perspective that children are
competent social actors.

I am interested in supervising topics related to the area of executive control (i.e., attention, working memory and cognitive flexibility), language and literacy development in bilingual/monolingual children and adults. Specifically, I am keen to explore the following topics:

• Cognitive-linguistic processing in monolingual and bilingual children and adults
• Cognitive and neurological mechanisms underlying language learning
• Errorless learning and performance feedback learning

Dr. Anna Weighall is a Reader in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at the School of Education, with a cross-disciplinary focus encompassing Education and Psychology. She specialises in the intricate relationships between sleep, memory, and learning, along with spoken language development and vocabulary acquisition across different age groups and linguistic backgrounds. She is also an expert in sleep research, including the role of sleep in mental health and wellbeing.

Elizabeth's research focuses mainly on early childhood and primary education, including teachers and children. She has specific interests in play and pedagogy; curriculum and assessment in ECE; teachers’ professionalism, professional knowledge and leadership. Elizabeth's work on curriculum includes comparative policy analysis between the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Her work on policy analysis in early childhood education draws on critical discourse analysis and aims to understand how teachers mediate and contextualise policy in local contexts.