An MA in Childhood and Education in Diverse Societies will prepare you to work with children, young people, and families. It will support you to make social change and improve life chances among children in diverse societies. This course is ideal for graduates with an interest in working with children and families, who have a strong sense of community and want to explore how to make real social change through their work.
•Practise making change with children, young people and families through placements that give you the chance to carry out ‘real world’ investigations
•Study completely online (or just come to campus a few days a year), so you can study at your own pace or still get access to our teaching even if you don’t live in London
•Undertake your own research project in the second semester and explore a topic you’re passionate about Get support from a supervisor to plan out your personalised path through the course, based on your career aspirations
This event was hosted 12-12.45pm on Monday 22nd Feb. It was a free online event.
This paper pursues storytelling in the Anthropocene as a method of earthly survival and multispecies flourishing from capitalist ruins. Storytelling emerged from (an accidental method of) walking-with during a global pandemic; the figure of the modern-day flâneuse is mobilised as a feminist praxis to investigate infected, entangled and affective relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human as they unfold in the daily tangles to emerge from lock-down life in the city. It is through the art of noticing (Tsing, 2015) and the arts of living on a damage planet (Tsing et al., 2017) that a commitment to engaging with the ordinary, mundane and habitual muddle, that the world is viewed, sensed and encountered through a different set of optics. The stories that are told about lichen, a dead pigeon, and a deadly virus are curated from a specific geopolitical moment where the early childhood workforce, as a highly gendered and classed group of ‘essential’ frontline workers, suffer disproportionately. Storytelling provides a means to attune to life in Anthropocene that emphasises precarity, indeterminacy and hope. It is only by recognising that trans-corporeality demands an ethical response-ability to all life forms (Alaimo, 2016) that we might find a means of earthly survival.
Bio: Dr Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education (Early Years & Gender) based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by feminist new materialism. Through her work she seeks to maintain a concern with issues of social justice and to critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Through her work she seeks to extend understandings of the workforce, families, ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts. She has published extensively within the postmodernist paradigm including Special Issues of the journal Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood (2006, 2016 and 2017) and Narratives from the Nursery: negotiating professional identities in Early Childhood (Routledge, 2012) and currently Feminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury Series). She is a member of several editorial boards including Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, British Education Research Journal, and is Co-Editor of Gender & Education Journal and Co-Editor of Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology.
All seminars are hosted online 12-12.45pm on Mondays, on the dates listed below. Registration and zoom links will be released in advance of each seminar.
The Bright Start Conference 2020 was a unique opportunity to connect with and learn from global leading experts across Early Childhood Care and Education. As part of the conference, Dr Jacqueline Harding hosted a roundtable on the topic of children’s mental health. The roundtable brought together the voices of teachers, early childhood educators, counsellors, art and music therapists, child mental health workers, occupational therapists and health professionals.
Dr Jacqueline Harding, CERS’ guru of children’s television, has been working on a new series for the BBC which has just gone live. The show ‘My Very First’ is a documentary series following a group of children as they discover, learn and experience things for the first time. Although it’s television for children, the programme aims to help parents and carers to extend their understanding of child development and how to support their children as they learn and grow.
In this phEminar, we introduce an intervention into practice that explores the refusal of the belittlement and rejection culture of academia, focusing on scholarly publishing, and specifically on peer review. As a production of a creative project that the two of us worked on together, we created an affirmative peer-reviewing practices workshop that presented an alternative vision and tools for conducting affirmative, rigorous peer reviews that, rather than cutting down or serving as a stoppage for potential authors, seeks to provide a supportive experience that produces very different affects. We argue that this workshop, which we’ve since used with reviewers for a special issue and for faculty professional development, serves as an example of an alternative, affirmative vision for academia that can help to build trans-disciplinary connections & solidarity and establish mentorship as a norm of peer-reviewing. As part of the phEminar, participants will engage directly in the workshop and then hold a facilitated audience discussion afterward.
The Leadership in Early Years Education RIG held an online symposium on Tuesday 19th January 2021. We were fortunate to welcome a fantastic trio of speakers to the event, bringing local, national and international perspectives to the issue of making the early years sector better heard in society and policy.
Our speakers were:
Aaron Bradbury Coffey, academic, author and early years campaigner
Taneshia Thompson, nursery manager at Brixton Community Nursery, part of LEYF
Ellen Dektar, specialist on advocacy work for childcare policy in California
Each speaker gave a ten-minute talk on their professional views and experiences. These talks were followed by breakout room discussion for participants and then an open dialogue among speakers and participants.
We want to make the lively discussion as accessible to as many as possible, and so we’ve published the following outputs:
The relaunched Leadership in Early Years Education RIG held an online symposium on Tuesday 10th November 2020. We were fortunate to welcome a fantastic trio of speakers to the event, bringing local, national and international perspectives to the problem of how we move forward as a sector in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
Our speakers were:
Julian Grenier, headteacher of Sheringham Nursery, working with the DfE on EYFS reforms
Sharon Quamie, baby room leader at the New Cross Nursery, part of LEYF
Professor Julie Nicholson from Mills College CA, trauma-informed practice specialist
Each speaker gave a ten-minute talk on their professional views and experiences. These talks were followed by breakout room discussion for participants and then the opportunity to pose a few questions to the speakers.
We want to make the lively discussion as accessible to as many as possible, and so we’ve published the following outputs:
