12 minute read
Research and KE activities
Building a community level response to educational inequality?
Building on previous research work that pioneered the use of different forms of mentoring for children and young people, Alastair Wilson and Katie Hunter have been funded by the Scottish Government and local authorities to trial and explore the potential of interventions that address educational inequality by working with local communities.
Advertisement
This work is ongoing and supports development work across local communities and schools and is framed around models of community development. It is founded on building and creating opportunities for relationships and supporting engagement in learning across communities.
Presently, work being developed includes reading cafes in primary schools for parents and children, a community- led book club for parents with younger children (The Bowmar Bookies), a summer programme of excursions for families, volunteer- led reading mentor projects and mentoring for young people seeking to enter higher education.
Crucially, these interventions seek to facilitate schools to work more effectively within their communities, engaging for example in family literacy work and more closely combining schoolbased experiences of reading with what children experience outside of school.
The research aspect of this work is fundamental in terms of informing potential projects and supporting an iterative process of research and development as they grow. These interventions represent the realisation of ideas developed and shaped by both the engagement of communities as well as more established research- informed interventions that need tailored to local contexts and challenges. The formation of a social enterprise has helped further the community development and practice elements of the work.
The ambition for this work is to develop a bid for the substantive funding that will enable local communities to work in partnership with community groups, schools and researchers to develop innovative ways to address educational inequality.
We are currently looking for help! If this sits within your overall research interests, please get in touch. Equally, if you think you can help a child with their reading, assist a young person hoping to enter university, or help build a Santa’s Grotto please contact us.
For more information please visit www.intergenerationalmentoring.com
i
Dr Katie Hunter
Research Fellow School of Education katie.hunter@strath.ac.uk
Projects in Speech and Language Therapy to tackle speech disorders in children and adults
Researchers in Psychological Sciences and Health are contributing significantly to the University’s Strategic Health and Wellbeing Theme. Drs Joanne Cleland, Anja Kuschmann, Eleanor Lawson and Prof Anja Lowit in Speech and Language Therapy have been successful in growing their research into assessment and treatment of speech disorders in children and adults, with current projects totalling over £1M. Speech Disorders can affect people of all ages, from young children who have difficulty learning the sounds of their native language, to people with cleft lip and palate and older people with acquired speech difficulties due to neurological problems. Research in Speech and Language Therapy tackles the whole life span.
A large ESRC project “Variability in Child Speech (VariCS)” started this summer. This project is looking at how children’s speech changes as they grow. Currently, we know very little about how primary-school aged children coordinate the complex systems required to produce clear speech, and how much children vary in terms of how and when their speech production patterns mature. However, this variation is important for us to better understand the development of speech in children with speech disorders. The researchers will use specialised acoustic analysis techniques to measure speech in children of different ages in Scottish Primary Schools. Anja Kuschmann, Senior Lecturer in SLT is the principal investigator, with Joanne Cleland (Reader in SLT), David Young (Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Statistics), and Jane Stuart Smith (Professor of Phonetics, Glasgow University) as co-investigators. This project will record children’s speech using an app to make sure all children do the same tasks and have fun when recording their speech. Based on the recordings, we will gain essential information about the functioning of each speech system and collate these in an interactive web resource for Speech and Language Therapists.
This new web resource will complement the ongoing ESRC-funded Secondary Data Analysis Initiative project “Speech Therapy Animation and Imaging Resource (STAR)”. STAR involves the creation of SLT teaching websites. The websites will provide free online access to real-time videos of vocal organ movement during speech, using
ultrasound tongue imaging technology; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and MRI-based vocaltract animation. The project makes use of preexisting ultrasound tongue imaging speech corpora, collected as part of Joanne Cleland’s ongoing research at Strathclyde, to enable SLTs and their clients to learn more about how the tongue moves in both disordered and nondisordered speech. The principal investigator of this project is Eleanor Lawson. After many years at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, Eleanor joined the team at Strathclyde as a Chancellor Fellow in SLT in August. CoInvestigators on this project are Dr Joanne Cleland and Dr Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow).
Intervention for speech disorders is an important area of research for SLT. A recent award from the Multiple System Atrophy Trust to Prof Anja Lowit for the project “ClearSpeechTogether” will allow her team to trial an online intervention for people with speech problems caused by Multiple System Atrophy. This rare nervous system condition causes problems with coordination, motor control and speech. The project begins in January 2023 and will compare standard NHS treatments from improving speech with online speech intervention that incorporates peer-support. This project adds to our ongoing research into speech interventions for children and adults with speech sound disorders, including an ongoing Chief Scientist Office Project, “Sonospeech” investigating intervention for children with Cleft Lip and Palate (Principal Investigator, Dr Joanne Cleland) and an NIHR funded project looking at maximising the impact of interventions for children with speech sound disorders (Coinvestigator, Dr Joanne Cleland, PI – Dr Yvonne Wren, Bristol).
STEM project in Gaelic has produced exciting resources for schools
Sneak peek of some of the resources associated with the Rannsachadh Àrainn Eucoir: Am Puffin Bochd project. © Dr Kirsty Ross CC BY 4.0
In July, Drs Kirsty Ross, Jane Essex and Ingeborg Birnie (School of Education) successfully applied for an Outreach Fund Large Grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), worth in total £10,000. Their project, titled: Rannsachadh Àrainn Eucoir: Am Puffin Bochd (English: Crime Science Investigation: The Poor Puffin), is an expansion on their existing work on the Erasmus Plus funded knowledge exchange project called DiSSI.
Rannsachadh Àrainn Eucoir: Am Puffin Bochd
adapts a forensic workshop previously created for secondary school workshops at Prestwick Airport STEM week 2017 and 2018, as well as the Widening Access Team’s primary school RSC project called “Thinking Inside the Box”. It is a Gaelic Medium Education project that will see young people and their teachers/community leaders investigating the cause of death of a puffin found closed to fly tipped rubbish on a (unnamed) Scottish beach. CLPL sessions and kit boxes are a key component of the project,
i
Dr Joanne Cleland
Reader, Speech and Language Therapy joanne.cleland@strath.ac.uk
Follow our work: @strath_SLT @DrJoanneCleland @AnjaLowit @AnjaKuschmann
matched with additional sessions around the GlasWeeAsian Plant Explorers and editing the world’s largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and her sister projects. Dr Ross also hosted three young people from Woodhill High School and Hamilton Grammar on work experience over the summer. Jack, Jessica and Reese worked incredibly hard, pulling together resources for the kit boxes as well as providing suggestions for improvements.
These resources will be donated to Gaelic Medium Educators across Scotland following their upcoming in person CLPL sessions. To read more about the project, please check out their website.
https://dissi.uk.engagementhq.com
i
Dr Jane Essex
Senior Lecturer School of Education jane.essex@strath.ac.uk
KE grant success: Building primary teachers’ confidence in craft, design and engineering
David Roxburgh, Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Education, has been successful in a bid of £9,046 to Round 4 of Education Scotland’s ‘Enhancing Professional Learning in STEM Grants Programme’. The project will exemplify the Curriculum for Excellence Technologies strand of Craft, Design, Engineering and Graphics (CDEG) in primary schools through a programme of professional learning within up to 9 local authorities in the School’s ‘West Partnership’. Contemporary research highlights that CDEG can be a neglected aspect of Technologies in primary schools, something echoed through discussions with school colleagues, and through David’s extensive work with student teachers in this area. Practitioners’ confidence can be built through exemplification of up-to-date models that can easily be replicated in classrooms. This requires both subject-based and pedagogical knowledge, as well as meaningful links to other areas of the curriculum.
The project aim is to exemplify high quality, research-led practice with the ambition of boosting teacher confidence, knowledge and pedagogical skills. Both phases of funding will engage teachers in primary school clusters through workshops that:
• explore key principles of CDEG i.e., design process; subject pedagogy and design projects; • exemplify practical tasks where staff take on learner roles and consider implications for inclusivity; • plan for classroom projects addressing grant themes e.g. curricular integration, stereotyping, creativity, parental engagement, world of work etc.
These will support a period of trialling of approaches in participants’ schools, with evaluation of the initiative and its impact also included as key elements in the sharing of experiences more widely in a bid to sustain and grow practices.
David’s particular pedagogical approach to CDEG also raises awareness of traditional societal bias in STEM gender roles and highlights that practical activity is for everyone, regardless of
access needs, through differentiated classroom practices. It stresses the design process is enhanced by the skills that each pupil brings to the task, regardless of perceived ability and background when collaborating, and celebrates diverse CDEG role models who have made worthwhile contributions to the area.
This project is further evidence of the School of Education’s success in providing high quality CLPL provision in local, national and international contexts, aligning well to the socially progressive vision for our work.
i
David Roxburgh
Senior Teaching Fellow School of Education david.roxburgh@strath.ac.uk
The Security & Resilience Research Centre (SRRC) is a small pan-university centre whose purpose is to enable and grow Strathclyde academic participation in ‘Security and Resilience’ and, with colleagues across Strathclyde, to co-design the University’s strategy for these sectors.
‘Security & Resilience’ covers a breadth and diversity of activity. Key funders include the UK Ministry of Defence (including Dstl and DASA), international equivalents like US DoD and their labs, the wider UK Government National Security community (including organisations like the National Cyber Security Centre) and the industrial companies active in the sector. These organisations fund projects of various types from universities, often studies, consultancy and advisory work, generally relying on (and more recently partnering with) Research Councils to invest in the underpinning knowledge and research base. In addition to more established areas, there is also now opportunity to develop research visions and innovative propositions to address resilience-building to minimise society’s vulnerability to disruption, address underlying fragility and build more secure and resilient futures; this is where we see most alignment with Research Council agendas. 9 People & Society | Issue No. 8 | Autumn 2022 The greatest thing about working in these sectors is the fascinating and important nature of the challenges being addressed – challenges where academic expertise can really make a difference. The work is often ‘mission focused’ serving the needs of operationally-minded communities. It could be to build security and resilience into critical power and communications networks, to develop resilience-thinking skills in the future workforce, to counter terrorism or crime, or to help our Armed Forces get ahead and stay ahead. Those already active in the sector – and it may not be for everyone – enjoy the impactful nature of the work.
We know that the often quick-response, shortterm and applied nature of opportunities can be off-putting and that there are practical challenges of engaging with customers who speak in their own code, impose security requirements and use complex contracting frameworks (things like R-Cloud, Progeny, Serapis, ASTRID, ACE and DASA). This landscape is difficult to navigate and engage with but SRRC – with RKES and other colleagues – are here to make that all a little easier.
If you think you might be interested in getting more involved in this sector, please look out for some SRRC awareness events coming your way soon. We’ll ensure these are publicised within the Faculty. They will however be panUniversity events because this sector demands inter-disciplinary working and innovation across traditional organisational and discipline boundaries. The SRRC team relishes the opportunity to drive this agenda forward with you and explore some new ways of working. The SRRC core team have extensive experience of working in Industry and Government in this sector and, if we haven’t already, we look forward to collaborating with you. Please feel free to contact us: • Dr Heather Anderson heather.e.anderson@strath.ac.uk (SRRC
Operations Director) • Professor of Practice Fiona Strens fiona.strens@strath.ac.uk (SRRC CEO) • Professor of Practice Jeremy Ward jeremy.ward@strath.ac.uk (SRRC part time
CTO)
Nuffield Research Placements for school pupils - can you be a mentor?
Nuffield Research Placements provide engaging, hands-on research projects, where S5 pupils, especially those from marginalised communities, have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution towards the work of a host organisation through a well-supervised but independent research collaboration relating to an area of science, quantitative social science, computing, technology, engineering or maths (or a combination). Over 90 placements were undertaken in 2022 and both students and placement hosts found it to be a very worthwhile experience. Placements will take place during the summer of 2023, with students undertaking 2 weeks in-person working with an industry or university/college partner and up to 2 weeks online completing additional planning and research work. Students will also receive pre-placement induction courses to prepare them for their placement.
An online session for potential mentors will take place on 22nd Nov 2022, link below for registration, and will cover an introduction to Nuffield Research Placements, outlining key dates and what mentoring involves. You will also hear of the experiences from previous placement hosts in an employer and a university department. If interested in being a mentor, register at:
Nuffield Research Placements - Employers, Universities and Colleges Tickets, Tue 22 Nov 2022 at 16:00 | Eventbrite
