{"id":279,"date":"2019-01-28T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/?p=279"},"modified":"2019-01-28T11:04:32","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T11:04:32","slug":"a-floppy-hat-a-sense-of-occasion-and-the-delights-of-the-uwe-education-doctoral-edd-programme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/a-floppy-hat-a-sense-of-occasion-and-the-delights-of-the-uwe-education-doctoral-edd-programme\/","title":{"rendered":"A floppy hat, a sense of occasion and the delights of the UWE Education Doctoral (EdD) Programme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tuesday 27th<\/sup>\nNovember 2018 was the culmination of over four years of work \u2013 the awarding of\nmy Education Doctorate at Bristol Cathedral alongside fellow students. The\nCathedral echoed with the voices of many students, parents, friends and\nsupporters all celebrating a mixture of academic success, resilience, personal\nstruggle and the joy of learning.  The\nfloppy hat and gown worn at the ceremony added to the sense of occasion,\ntradition and the special nature of the event: it isn\u2019t often you are able to\ndon such a hat and it isn\u2019t everyone who can! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The smiles and\ncongratulations were a product of this unique award that recognises the\nprofessional knowledge, skills and practice of the student and this is foregrounded\nin the way the doctoral programme runs and how the student\u2019s research is guided\nand located. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My research was\ntitled \u2018An Illuminative Evaluation of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check:\nListening to the Voices of Children and their Teachers\u2019 and it was situated in\nmy long history as first, a primary school teacher then deputy head, Teaching\nSchool Manager and Initial Teacher Educator. I knew that the Phonics Screening\nCheck was the area I wanted to research: it was impossible to ignore the\nanecdote of a friend, a Head Teacher of a diverse inner city primary school who\nrelated the story of a number of children in her school in the year the check\nwas introduced. The Phonics Screening consists of 40 words: 20 real and 20\npseudo words that children sound and blend to read. One of the real words in\nthe check was the word \u2018nigh\u2019.  A number\nof children didn\u2019t recognise the trigraph \u2018igh\u2019 (three letters that make one\nsound) and sounded the word as \u2018n-i-g-hur\u2019. Rather than blend the sounds to\nmake the word the children were confused and upset: if they blended this word\nthey would say a word that was considered offensive, a word that their teachers\nand fellow classmates knew as rude and inappropriate. The same story was\nrecounted by a number of teachers across schools in the city. Prompted by the\ninitial stages of the EdD programme, I was able to begin to frame this as an\nunintended consequence of the Check and so an area that needed to be explored\nfurther.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Education\nDoctorate has an initial taught phase which guides, prompts and challenges the\nwide range of professionals that embark on the doctoral journey. The first part\nof the EdD encourages reflection and critical positioning and so enabled me to\nidentify my doctoral thesis focus. What is distinctive is the variety of\neducational professionals on the programme: in my cohort this included a prison\neducator; an Early Years Centre Manager; secondary, F.E and H.E teachers and lecturers;\nan air traffic controller trainer and a teaching assistant and learning mentor\nin a local primary school. It is this diverse group that enables each person to\nthink beyond the usual professional considerations, to view issues in new ways\nto \u201cmake the familiar strange\u201d (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme\nchallenged my approaches to thinking about ethical considerations in research\nand led to my thesis that foregrounded the voices of those \u201cnormally silenced\u201d (Greene,\n1994) in educational evaluation \u2013 in my case, the children who took the Phonics\nScreening Check. The EdD programme also pushed me to reflect on theory and in\nmy research, the myriad of theories that impact on the practice of the teaching\nof early reading. A study unit on policy shone a light on the different ways\nthat policy can be analysed which drew me to the work of Gemma Moss and the\nevolution of Literacy policy. All of this was in Part One of the EdD programme\nand this provided the springboard to progress to Part Two\u2013 the research itself.\nGuided by challenging supervisors who questioned, recommended and pushed me to\nexplain and explore beyond my usual comfort zone, the thesis took shape. This\nwas a period of delight in the wisdom of the five year olds I talked to in my\nfocus groups; despair in the multiple writes and re-writes of different\nsections and moments of the type of \u2018flow\u2019 that Csikszentmihalyi describes, the\ntotal absorption in the task at hand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would recommend the UWE Education Doctorate to any educational professional who wants to lay bare an aspect of practice, to approach it from different viewpoints, to dissect it with forensic care and to challenge their thinking beyond the everyday. And of course \u2013 there is the lure of the floppy hat to keep you going!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Jane Carter<\/a> is a senior lecturer in education and childhood. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuesday 27th November 2018 was the culmination of over four years of work \u2013 the awarding of my Education Doctorate at Bristol Cathedral alongside fellow students. The Cathedral echoed with the voices of many students, parents, friends and supporters all celebrating a mixture of academic success, resilience, personal struggle and the joy of learning.  The … Continue reading “A floppy hat, a sense of occasion and the delights of the UWE Education Doctoral (EdD) Programme”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}