PhD students

Her PhD research focuses on pedagogies to aid teachers in using texts featuring Muslim protagonists for the benefit of all pupils in a diverse classroom. Ameena is passionate about incorporating texts with characters from marginalised backgrounds into the English curriculum, encouraging inclusivity and offering a view of the world through texts that depict the ‘multicultural’ demographic of many schools in the UK.  stemmed from her MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, where she focused on children's reactions to reading texts with Muslim protagonists for her dissertation.   

You can read more about Ameena’s MA project and how this has influenced her PhD research here. (PDF)

She worked in IT Management for 20 years before returning to literature and completing her MA in Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths in 2021. She’s in the second year of her PhD at Goldsmiths. Her research focuses on the representations of females (children and adults) in the Carnegie Winners from 1937 to 2022. A central component of her PhD is action research with her teenage daughter and a group of her friends to understand how they read and perceive these representations.

Prior to his doctoral study, a critical approach to arts and culture has informed his collaborative work and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of humanities and social sciences. He has been qualified as a social worker, developed his professional practice and expertise in young people and the arts, and completed a second undergraduate degree in Culture and Arts Management (Panteion University in Athens) and a Master's degree in Education: Culture, Language and Identity (distinction from Goldsmiths). Within a theoretical framework of critical race theory and cultural studies, his master’s dissertation used a sample of 26 Western school films to analyse the representation of black schoolteachers in popular movies.  

Ioannis’ primary subject of research is young people’s equality and participation in society, with secondary academic interests in politics of arts in education, the civic role of museums, heritage learning and creative methodologies in research with children and young people. Visual arts, participatory theatre, documentary and oral history have been among the methodologies he used with various groups and populations (young offenders, ethnic minority, disabled, looked after young people) in museums, schools, public services, art and third-sector organisations in Greece, Cyprus, EU and UK. He is blogging about his research at https://youtopias.org. 

Kimberley's practice-research questions the embodied encounter within the context of art pedagogy, re-framing the learning event as a material act of thinking and towards a performative pedagogical exchange. It is in this performative and live encounter that Kimberley suggests we can materiality manifest and position the object of research not as a reductive device of knowledge, but as an expansive, emotional, corporeal mode of understanding.

Kimberley works extensively with galleries and museums as one half of collaborative partnership – sorhed. www.sorhed.com.This practice focuses on the creation of pedagogical art objects that provoke and enable a questioning of authorship and agency, bringing into active consideration the pedagogical agency of social and participatory practices.

Kimberley has been a Lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Studies for over 18 years at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is currently a Lecturer in Arts, Education and Learning at Goldsmiths University of London and an MA Fine Art tutor for Open College of the Arts (UCA)

His research is broadly investigating the impact of high stakes Higher School Certificate exams on the teaching and learning of English Literature in Mauritius.

He has a master’s in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from the University of Nottingham. His research interests include teaching and learning of English, languages and culture, washback and social view of literacy.  He has taught both at secondary level and at tertiary level in Mauritius. He believes in research that can impact and help to improve the social well-being of people. His desirable goal would be to influence public policy and to improve the quality of education in Mauritius.

Given the theoretical and equally important practical complexity of multilingual pedagogies, the research is based on the assumption that it is vital for further developments in the field to understand what facilitates or hinders such agency. Thomas understands the mainstream school as a place of lived language experience, shaped by the encounter between children’s linguistic repertoires and society’s power relations as well as by teachers’ and pupils’ negotiations around the various meanings they may give to their language practices.

Thomas has been a primary school teacher for many years in inner city schools in Germany and London. He was involved in action research for academic language teaching, and debates around anti-racist pedagogies. His publications include translated and edited volumes of British chapters in those fields: ‘Schule ist keine Insel’/’School Is Not an Island’ (2000) and ‘Die Macht der Sprachen’/’The Power of Languages’ (with Paul Mecheril, 2006). In 2011-12, Thomas re-trained as a primary teacher (with MFL) at Goldsmiths’ PGCE programme, which also influenced his current research interest.

Barad’s (2003) theory of ‘intra-action’ inspired a topological exploration of the two main themes which entwine throughout her research: the skin and the line. She explores the notion of the skin as a new materialist methodology. Through extrapolating the possibilities of the skin as a morphing and ever changing ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari:  2004) and by mapping within pedagogical situations Clare discusses how this informs creative and inventive Deleuzian theories of ‘becoming’. The refiguring of the skin as a new materialist and topological agent, which grows, scars, wrinkles and sheds continuously through and with the world, interrogates the traditional constraints of the patriarchal and colonised lines of historical female imagery. By (re)viewing the skin as a ‘leaky sense of self’ (Manning: 2013) the research explores how this can inform creative and inventive refiguring’s of the skin as a political agent for change.

Prior to this Clare received a BA in Scenic Art from Rose Bruford College and an MA in Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practice from Goldsmiths University London. She is also a practicing artist, researcher, teacher working in secondary education in South East London. Publications include The Artist-Teacher in the Classroom and Changes in the Teacher-Student Relationship, with Reference to the Issue of Censorship (2011) and Beauty and the Beast - Can Life Drawing Support Female Students in Challenging Gendered Media Imagery? (2013). 

Angela’s research interests developed through experiences as a teacher working with adjudicated youth in San Diego, California over the past 20 years. Her Master’s degree in Education emphasized curriculum and instruction and now she is a PhD candidate in Arts Practice and Learning at the Centre for Arts and Learning. Her practice, as socially engaged art, explores the ‘work’ of art in the lives of her students and other artists in Barrio Logan, San Diego. Through her practice-based research she utilizes collaborative curation to create openings for conversations to emerge. The conversations in the form of testimonios, verbal journeys, are most often narratives of resistance and imprints of trauma. Within the context of her practice; the stories, artwork, poetry and music serve to initiate conversations as a form of critical pedagogy. The use of testimonios as a critical pedagogy seeks to reveal untold stories that veer from dominant narratives while confronting power structures. Building upon her bachelor degree in geography her research also studies the use of visual imagery and corporeal perceptions in the creation of place in Barrio Logan. Within the testimonios, new stories of place emerge, forming a critical pedagogy of place. Operating an art space in Barrio Logan is central to her own art practice and in establishing a place for local artists and musicians to exhibit, perform and create works of art and music.

Her dissertation discusses a study she conducted in a Key Stage 2 classroom consisting entirely of multilingual pupils who were learning a foreign language. The study focuses on how multilingual children negotiate their linguistic and cultural identities, and how they use their language repertoire to aid them in their learning of a new foreign language. Further, she explores how classroom dynamics, the role of the teacher, the monolingual school culture, and English as an Additional Language (EAL) policies in the English educational system influence multilingual children’s learning of a foreign language.

A native of Hanover, Germany, Katharina Kayser began working with multilingual pupils while she was a classroom teacher at a primary school in Germany. She later held a teaching position in a primary school in London where she also performed the duties of Ethnic Minority Achievement Coordinator, and Modern Foreign Language Coordinator. Her latest post was at the Goethe-Institut in Boston, USA where she worked as a regional language consultant and foreign language learning advocate for the Northeast of the USA.

Her research, practice and profession combine an interest in languages, language and society, language learning and teaching in school, multilingualism, language policies in education.

Catia’s dissertation discussed the development and implementation of Portuguese language policies for overseas. It traced the official language policies from their formulation, through to their implementation as a project, to their execution by a group of teachers and their administrator in the local community. Her ethnography of language policy involved textual and historical analysis of policy texts and long-term engagement with the agents, arbiters and influencers at different levels of language policy activity. Her collection of focused life stories, using three-part phenomenological interviews and the timeline method, afforded her an in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by a language provision that sits at the intersection of national and international language policies and practice.

Catia is a qualified teacher of Modern Languages and Literature, with a degree in Portuguese and English studies. She was a teacher of Portuguese and EFL in Portugal and in the UK. She completed an MA in Portuguese Language and Culture, with a dissertation on the challenges and opportunities of multicultural education in Portugal. She was Author and Principal Examiner of Portuguese GCSE and A Level exams for Oxford Cambridge RSA and Cambridge International Examinations. She holds a PG Diploma in Translation and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She was a Portuguese Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton, where she founded a community school with funding from the Southampton City Council. Currently, she is Deputy Director of Camões UK and contributes to the management of a network of 26 teachers and 14 lecturers allocated to schools and universities all over the UK and the Channel Islands.

I examine the ways in which educational and social policy are constructed in the lives of marginalised children and young people in the UK context. My PhD research focuses on the experiences of girls and young women from low socio-economic groups. My PhD thesis will be published in 2018.

My career to date has included programming, policy, research and funding positions at Tate Modern, Goldsmiths College, Nottingham Contemporary and Arts Council England. My previous research specialisms and publication history focus on the role of contemporary art education in school and gallery contexts and the role of participation in contemporary arts pedagogy and practice.

Teaching at Goldsmiths

Associate Senior Lecturer - Reimagining Social Class in Education; Culture and Identity; Body, Gender, Culture – Module planning, teaching, student supervision and assessment.

Chunwen Su has been working as an IELTS/Chinese teacher in different independent schools, as well as being an education guardian for teenage Chinese EAL students in London since 2012. She holds a Master's degree in English Language Teaching (Studies and Methods) from the University of Warwick. Now she has completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Her PhD thesis tells the story of four teenage Chinese EAL students’ learning journey in an independent school in England. The purpose of the study was to understand, in depth, the issues of cultural, linguistic, and academic adaptation they faced as teenage Chinese EAL students and find out how these students were supported to meet linguistic, cultural, and academic challenges in their learning journey. Ethnography was adopted as the methodology in this study because it is an ideal educational tool that enables learners to describe aspects of their cultural lives, feelings, beliefs, needs, and actions.

The study shows that although the participants had positive expectations of UK education and considered it an alternative route to success before coming to the UK, they encountered significant challenges such as failing to form friendships with local students, encountering gaps in modes of learning, and having difficulties in studying their core subjects, as well as other issues due to cultural, linguistic and academic factors. EAL lessons were arranged by the school with the aim to improve student's English proficiency. However, participants were concerned that the EAL classes did not correspond with international students’ linguistic needs.

The study suggests that intercultural communication and understanding should be enhanced through further development of linguistic and cultural awareness to help teachers develop a better understanding of students’ cultural differences, previous educational experiences, and their learning styles to better support young international students in their academic transition. International students especially teenagers should be given more cultural, linguistic and academic preparation and support before and after the journey begins.

Theoretically, his approach draws on Stuart Hall’s notions of the discursively constructed identities and ‘articulation’ (Hall, 1996; Slack, 1996). These understandings of identity as fluid and contingent are set against the use of fixed and separate categories pertaining to ethnicity and social class in equality initiatives.

The research works with a sociolinguistic understanding of subject positions and identities as emergent in processes of interaction (Buscholtz & Hall, 2005). It uses linguistic ethnography to track these processes empirically through linguistic micro-analysis of how students ‘acquire, construct and mobilize communicative repertoires’ (Perez-Milans, 2016:87) as they negotiate their studies. In this way, the study treats learning environments as ‘cultural context[s] with [their] own sites of struggle, local institutional imperatives and affordances’ (Creese, 2008:235) which feed off and into wider socio-historical structures.

Steve has an MSc in Social and Political Theory and an MA in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching. He has taught in Higher Education for over ten years and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Creese, A. (2008) ‘Linguistic Ethnography’, Encyclopedia of Language and Education. London: Springer.

Hall, S. (1996) ‘Introduction: who needs identity?’ in Hall, S. and Du Gay, P. Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.

Perez-Milans (2016) ‘Language and identity in linguistic ethnography’ in Preece, S. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of language and identity. London: Routledge.

Slack, J. D. (1996) ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’ in D. Morley & K-H. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. London: Routledge.  

Her research is employing an ethnographic methodology alongside questionnaires/interviews with staff working across England.

Allison is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before moving to Montreal, Quebec, in 2006 and London in 2010 to work as a teacher. In her professional capacity, Allison manages the BTEC and Functional Skills qualifications, ensuring every student leaves her secondary school having achieved at least one qualification.

She runs the ‘Rainbow Club’ in her school for the LGBTQ+ young people and engages the school in wider equalities work. She is a trustee of KeshetUK, England’s Jewish LGBTQ+ charity, and a member of the #LGBTed steering committee.  

Allison is the Student Rep for the PhD Educational Studies programme.

Her research investigates family language policies and identity developments in Turkish-speaking families in the UK. She focuses specifically on children’s agentive roles and identity constructions through language and other communicative resources.

Her study employs ethnography in discovering children’s influence on the construction of family language policies and practices. It further examines the role of children’s identity negotiations in the multilingual and multicultural home settings.

Busra has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Essex and a master’s degree in Modern Turkish Literature from Erciyes University. She has taught in both primary and secondary schools in Turkey for over two years.

Busra is funded by the Turkish Ministry of Education for her postgraduate studies in the UK.

Her PhD research project investigates the ways children of refugee and immigrant backgrounds negotiate their ecological identities through the reading and writing of poetry.

It draws upon an interdisciplinary framework that brings together theories of ecopoetics and critical pedagogy. Employing a participatory ethnographic methodology, the study further explores the effectiveness of the ecocritical approach to poetry in helping children reconcile the dualities of self/other, familiar/foreign, local/global and human/non-human.

Sara’s MA thesis was on ‘tracking animal traces: the role of animals in selections of children’s poetry by Ahmad Shawqy and Ted Hughes’. She obtained her MA degree in English and Comparative Literature from Ain Shams University (Egypt), where she has been teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) since 2011. Besides her academic path, Sara has experience working with children in Montessori settings in both Cairo and London.

She then moved into Teacher Education and co-founded a national Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic Network for practitioners.

Jessica is currently a Director of Participants and Alumni Impact at Teach for All where she supports teacher education programs across the globe to refine, develop and nurture their mandate to change educational inequity and delivers diversity, equity and inclusion training to teachers and teacher educators.

Jessica’s PhD is part-time and focuses on the practices of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and its implementation in UK schools.  

Devina has a strong interest in researching inequalities within the education system and corresponding policy implications. Her thesis aims to incorporate a blend of qualitative and quantitative research methods to collect and analyse data.

She has completed her MSc in Political Economy of Development from SOAS, University of London. Her MSc dissertation was titled ‘A Comparative Study on the Effects of Remittances on Poverty Reduction in Kerala and Nepal’.

Devina also completed her PGCE from UCL specialising in History. Through her teaching experience, she has taught History in both international and secondary school settings.

Her BSc was in History and Politics from Brunel University London, where she also volunteered to tutor GCSE English to disadvantaged students from local schools.

Her most recent publications include : 

'A Proposition: Collaborative Practices in the Secondary Curriculum for Cultural Sustainability',  'Collaboration is Uncomfortable' and ‘Miss, what should we do with this now?’  They can be found via her Academia page. 

Terri is also the Head of Creative Arts and Head of teacher training and development at Elstree Screen Arts Academy in North London.

This is an adaptive exercise, using The Paston Letters, RLS’s original 15th century source material, drawing on other texts based on the same material, and adapting forward to create an original work of Young Adult historical fiction. He is particularly interested in the concept of history as a text which can be subject to adaptation, as well as the dialogic nature of adaptation, not least in how transmediation can affect the reception and structure of a source text. This draws on the work of Bakhtin, Kristeva, Nikolajeva and latterly Cutchins.

Before doing his MA at Goldsmiths Harry worked at the BBC and Granada TV for many years, including stints as a script editor, drama producer and ultimately executive producer of the BAFTA nominated The Great Train Robbery. He has published three middle grade children’s novels, a selection of writers prompts and written three award winning short films.

Her research interests are centered around LBGT inclusion with pupils with SEND. Her research is employing qualitative methods.

Klaudia is originally from Gelnica, Slovakia, and has lived in the UK since 2002. She worked for 16 years in London as an SEN educational practitioner. Prior to her Ph.D. studies, she held a leadership position managing the Ofsted area of Behaviour and Attitudes in an SEN school for the Blind.

She has appeared in several publications, including Dr. Sewell’s book titled ‘Diverse Voices in Educational Practice’, in which she contributed to the ‘Voice Practices to Support LGBTQ+ Educators and Pupils chapter.

Klaudia gained her MA in Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her MA dissertation was titled ‘Strategies for supporting SEND young people into employment: a case study of a SEND college in Surrey'.

She completed her PGCE studies at London South Bank University, specialising in SEND. As a teacher, she has worked in primary, secondary, and Sixth Form settings with children and young people with a vast range of SEND.

Klaudia also holds a BA (Hons) Degree in English Language and Literature from the Open University.

Using ethnography and drawing on methods from Visual Anthropology, Ben’s research will explore the placemaking practices of skateboarders to investigate ways to design public space to be more diverse, inclusive and playful.

Ben is interested in various community-led skateboarding initiatives which are emerging in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and surrounding areas of East London. He will be closely affiliated with City Mill Skate, a research project which uses a participatory design process to build a series of ‘skate dots’ (skateable architectural sites) throughout UCL East campus, with the aim of broadening participation in education.

Ben has a BA in Philosophy and Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and an MSc in Anthropology from Aarhus University. His MSc thesis focussed on embodiment and risk in extreme sports subcultures.

This research builds on Helen’s MA in Children’s Literature which she completed at Goldsmiths in 2019. Helen is passionate about children’s literature, comics studies and how comics can be used in education. As part of her research she runs an after school comics club for children.

Helen is completing her PhD part time, and currently works as a Lecturer in Primary Education at UCL Institute of Education, where she leads the Primary PGCE MA Specialism in Children’s Literature. Prior to this Helen worked in schools in London for 12 years, in which she had a range of roles in both leadership and the classroom. She was an Advanced Skills Teacher, a literacy coordinator and a literacy lead for Wandsworth local authority. Helen has taken part in international educational research trips to Finland and Canada.

Helen contributes to the Comics Club Blog, which is full of comic making tips. You can visit the blog here: comicsclub.blog

Lidiya believes that combining perspectives of sociolinguistics, social psychology and psycholinguistics might give a deeper insight into interpersonal behaviours of foreign language users who are involved in cross-cultural interactions.

Her current research project is focused mainly on investigating the inner world of late foreign language learners who have grown up familiar with one /low-context/ lingua-culture, but later in life are required to operate successfully in another /high-context/ lingua-culture.

Lidiya has long teaching experience in various settings, ages and levels and is the founder of a language centre in Sofia. She obtained her first MA degree from Sofia University in ELT with a project on the role of developing musical abilities in foreign language teaching and learning at pre-school age. Her second MA degree was in Applied linguistics and communication, obtained as a full-time student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her dissertation employed statistical analysis in discovering ‘The Degree of Foreign Accent in Adult Foreign Language Learners of English: A Question of Aptitude or Attitude’.

My project is autoethnographic in approach and is inspired by my own experience of being a teaching assistant for thirteen years and then becoming a classroom teacher. I am interested in analysing the multifaceted roles that Black and Brown TAs play in the school community and challenging the intersectional inequalities that Black and Brown women face in the workforce.

I have a BA in Education from the University of Greenwich and a PGCE and MA from Goldsmiths.

Alongside my studies, I am a community leader and volunteer and help to run several community groups in the local area.

I work as a full-time primary school teacher in Peckham.

She studies museum educational practices and encounters with abstract modernist art with a new materialist approach in her PhD project. What might be the educational potential of abstract art? How is abstract art mediated and experienced in museums?

Heidi’s research interests are centred around museum education and curating, Deleuzean methodologies, abstract art and modernisms, and art with children and young people.

In 2020, Heidi curated an exhibition about abstract modernist art for the Children’s Art Museum, a section dedicated for children inside Sørlandets Art Museum in Kristiansand, Norway, creating and important empirical part of her PhD project. The exhibition displayed Finnish Post-War abstract art from The Nicolai Tangen Collection together with interactive and digital solutions, focusing on multisensory experiences, movement, and participation in the museum space. In the later stages of her project, she has studied children’s experiences with abstract art both in traditional and experimental settings, with and without video.

Heidi comes originally from Finland. She has a master’s degree in art history (major) and museum studies (minor) from the University of Turku, Finland. She has worked many years as a museum educator in Finland on the side and as part of her studies. Heidi has previously had exchange periods in the United States (Alfred University in Upstate New York 2013), France (Université Paris 8 2015-2016) and Germany (2008).

Alice is focusing on the novels of Patrick Ness and Frances Hardinge, especially Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go and Hardinge's Face Like Glass.

This research builds on Alice's dissertation for her MA in Children’s Literature, which she completed at Goldsmiths in 2019; she became increasingly interested in the subjectivity of 'normal' as represented in YA fiction and the role that language plays in shaping a sense of self. Alice is passionate about children’s literature and YA fiction and the importance of young people having access to wide-ranging, diverse fiction as well as new, critical ways of reading texts and seeing their relevance to both representing and also shaping society and the world. As part of her research, Alice is using close analysis and a school-based project as her methodologies. She will be visiting a secondary school in the third or fourth year of her PhD and running critical literacy-based workshops with young people to engage with the YA fantasy fiction of Patrick Ness and Frances Hardinge.