Just Learning? Teachers, Curriculum, Pedagogies and Literacies

Learn more about how this theme explores cultural, political, ecological and economic factors shape and constrain educational opportunities for children and young people - and for their teachers.

Learning at school is not always a straightforward matter of ‘just learning’, where children readily thrive and flourish. Instead, many children face considerable barriers in even getting to school. Learning once there can be unjust, inaccessible, incomprehensible, and disconnected to their daily lives. Such negative educational experiences can result in failure to learn and school drop-out.

This theme explores the intersections between curriculum, pedagogy and teacher development with the cultural, political, ecological and economic factors that shape and constrain educational opportunities for children and young people - and for their teachers. We seek out instances where disadvantages experienced by marginalised children are challenged and overturned by policies, practices and innovative educational interventions.

We work at global, regional and at localised levels across the global south, in close partnership with Southern colleagues, and in the UK. Taking a critical and consciously decolonial approach, we draw on rich qualitative methodologies including literature reviewing, participatory action research and ethnography, facilitating co creation of knowledges, local and global. We also have experience of multi-strategy methods, such as quasi-experimental research design and evaluation.

Research within this theme asks questions such as:

• What is the relationship between national teacher policy, teacher education programmes and practice on the ground?
• To what extent are the realities of women teachers’ lives recognised by policy makers?
• To what extent is it possible to scale up successful localised educational innovations and teacher professional development without loss of fidelity?
• Which dialogic and multilingual pedagogies in schools globally support students to develop their oracy, building on community oral practices to learn, express ideas, and enhance relationships and identities?
• How do teachers working in multilingual contexts teach children to read for meaning in two or more languages?
• How can schools critically engage children and young people with high quality texts both print and digital?

There are three sub-themes within this theme of Just Learning:

Teacher education and development

Over the last 14 years CIE members have received a series of grants to study teacher development and the work that teachers do in schools across Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and India. This work has been supported by the Hewlett Foundation, Australia Aid, the British Council, DFID and Cambridge Education.

Currently, Jo Westbrook is working with the British Council and researchers from the University of Rwanda on a process evaluation that looks beyond gender and disability responsive strategies strategies within large-scale Teacher Professional Development and towards gender& disability-transformative approaches.

‘Designing and piloting an equitable whole school approach to quality TPD: exploring conditions and support needed to succeed at scale in Rwandan Lower Secondary Schools' (2024-2026) is funded by the IRDC/FIT-ED.

Inclusive curricula adaptation and pedagogies

This sub-theme has attracted a series of projects that look critically at curricula and pedagogic interventions that address the learning and socio-emotional needs of Out-Of-School-Children in informal settings in Ghana, Ethiopia and Liberia (2011-2019), with funding from Geneva Global, Dubai Cares and the Luminos Fund.

More recently, Jo Westbrook has worked alongside the Ministry of Education & Sports, the University of Kyambogo, Save the Children and Humanity & Inclusion in the development of TPD training modules for primary school teacher educators and teachers in Uganda, funded by Sightsavers. These challenge negative perceptions of disability and suggest positive strategies and pedagogies that enable children with disabilities to access education and thrive alongside their peers (2016-2022).

Developing languages and literacies in a global context

Conceptualising literacy as both social practice and as a cognitive-linguistic process, this subtheme interrogates policy and current practices around reading, comprehension, oracy, multilingualism and multimodality. The UK-focused ‘Faster Read’ project started in 2014, led by Julia Sutherland and Jo Westbrook with Professor Jane Oakhill in the School of Psychology.

This innovative model supports struggling adolescent readers to engage and comprehend challenging whole texts and has reached over 40,000 students and 1000 English teachers across the UK. In the area of multilingualism, Jo Westbrook has worked with the Universities of Leeds and KwaZulu-Natal to explore how young children learn to read and to comprehend across home, community, ECD and primary school in two or more languages in Namibia, South Africa and Uganda, funded by the British Academy (2015-2022).

This research theme is led by Professor Jo Westbrook with engagement by Dr Birgul Kutan, Professor Julia Sutherland, Dr Gunjan Wadhwa, Dr Perpetua Kirby and Dr Rebecca Webb.