Students Working with the Centre
- Nick Bottone
- Gail Bradley
- Chesterfield St. C Browne
- Paula Carleton
- Arturo Escandon
- Susannah Learoyd-Smith
- Shona McIntosh
- Denise Shelley Newnham
- Julian Pugh
- Xin Zhao
Nick Bottone
Email : nb301@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
My specific area of interest is in assessing the importance and impact of context, and context receptiveness, in achieving successful health policy implementation. Frequently a systematic approach to programme implementation, or components of a health policy implementation programme, are resisted, or fail, as a result of a lack of attention to background context, culture, prior experience, or even relevance. This is related to how individuals, or an organisation, learns and adopts practices. My research will investigate how participants learn or adopt and adapt, and internalise concepts, ideas or experience, into activity learning. Activity Theory provides an exploratory model to explore how individuals learn through interaction with their environment, in addition to how conflicts within or between different Activity Systems can lead to "Expansive Learning" where new forms of activity can be generated to resolve issues.
Gail Bradley
E-mail: cairogak@hotmail.com
Research interests:
My research interest centres on using a framework which emerges from Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and Engeström’s model of activity theory, to consider the social context and the cultural embeddedness of everyday practice, in relation to changes in institutional settings of the home and the school, and the intervention of maids.
Current project:
This framework was used to explore the perceived social and educational implications of home/school differences in pedagogic orientation, in children who have maids. The study concentrates on the issue of maid involvement in the lives of expatriate and host country children who come from the economic elite, and who attend private, fee-paying schools. It focuses on two very different schools in the Arabian Gulf, both regarded as operating in an international context. Using Engeström’s account of activity theory, the views of key stakeholders underpinned a model which could guide new practice in a situation where hired help appears to interrupt the acquisition of tools for learning.
Chesterfield St. C Browne
Email: edpcscb@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
My research interest lies in three domains: educational technology, human computer interaction and organisational change in educational contexts. I am particularly interested in using the Engeströmian model of Activity theory as the unit of analysis to study the following:
- Human Computer interaction in the work environment.
- The use of educational technology to improve student performance.
- Applying activity theory to the management of organisational change.
Current Project:
My research enquiry uses a framework in which Activity Theory is the unit of analysis. It draws on the works of Vygotsky and Engeström to explore the sociocultural influences that impact on the staff of a project office which is managing a merger of three post secondary educational institutions in Barbados. It seeks to answer the following question:
How and why do formative, historical, social, and cultural factors influence and shape the amalgamation of three post-secondary education institutions in Barbados and to what extent do these issues affect the attitudes of the planning office staff towards the merger and contribute to organisational learning as they seek to engage with the institutions?
Paula Carleton
Email: pjc28@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
My research centres on how the values which are part of any sociocultural background play a part in intercultural communication. I am particularly interested in problems of miscommunication, cultural conflict or avoidance of other cultures and how these could be obviated by an increased awareness of differing values cross-culturally.
Current project:
By working with comparatively recent immigrant communities in Somerset, I hope to facilitate projects which improve intercultural communication in an educational setting. The projects are to be negotiated with all participants, and I will make a record of the process as an ethnographic study.
Arturo Escandon
Email: a.j.escandon@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
My interests deal with acquirers' trajectories and orientations to meaning (and action) in understanding second (foreign) language acquisition. I am concerned with the relationship between certain organisational/pedagogical contexts and the pedagogical identities of transmitters and acquirers. I am interested in developing new research tools to analyse language learning at structural (organisational) and interactional (discursive) level and developing feasible interventions that can improve acquirers' language acquisition.
Current project:
I am analysing subject position and pedagogic identity of Japanese learners studying Spanish as a foreign language in communicative learning settings in Japan at the tertiary level. To this aim I use both Basil Bernstein's theory of code and post-Vygostkian analytical frameworks (CHAT/Sociocultural Theory), especially CHAT's structure of activity. I am currently writing up my thesis, after having completed the data collection and data analysis stages.The study, which comprises a vast array of qualitative and quantitative methods, is an attempt to recontextualise the issue of explicit and implicit instruction in Second Language Acquisition (the code-communication dilemma) by bringing together Bernstein's educational sociology and post-Vygotskian approaches to analysing learning.
Susannah Learoyd-Smith
Email: suels@fsmail.net
Research interests:
My area of research relates to young people who are anxious vulnerable and at risk of exclusion from mainstream education. My aim is to investigate how this group interact with their environment and how their psychological functioning is specific to social context. It is my belief that the way a child internalises a problem affects their response to other situations, and that this internalisation is based on the child's developmental processes. By applying the principles of activity theory my research project will take into account cultural factors and developmental aspects that may be involved in determining whether a young person becomes anxious vulnerable. My research will involve working with young people who are currently not accessing mainstream education and instead are attending specialist units, or on home tuition.
Further to this my interests lie in the effectiveness of computers as learning tools for social development and, in particular, how this medium of social interaction can be used to open up the doors of communication to those children who are not accessing education.
Shona McIntosh
Email: spm25@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
What social, cultural and institutional factors influence the development of an individual’s sense of agency? Drawing from socio-cultural theories in Critical Psychology and Sociology, my work tries to understand more about the processes influencing the development of agentic behaviour in Secondary PGCE Training Teachers as they negotiate a new identity for themselves through practice. I have a special interest in schools and how their different cultural contexts afford different options for actors in those settings.
Current project:
I am looking for a theoretical framework of agency from which to design a follow-up to the qualitative, empirical pilot study I completed last year. I am also a part-time Research Assistant, working with departmental staff on a small project investigating and comparing conceptions of ‘effort’ amongst secondary school teachers, pupils and their parents.
Denise Shelley Newnham
Email: dsn22@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
I have several research interests: schools and teaching-learning process; migrant mothers, in particular refugee mothers and integration; internalization and externalization of self image; families and literacy practices. The binding factor is that of their theoretical basis which is SCAT or CHAT. The Methods vary from entirely qualitative to a mixture of qualitative and quantitative.
Current research:
I am involved as a researcher on a project in Botswana that aims at implementing ICT’s in schools. The project makes use of Change laboratory method and CHAT. Furthermore I am in the process of completing my thesis that undertook to assess the value of utilizing change laboratory method in socially voluntary motivated projects. I will then write up a research carried out on refugee mothers as they attempt to negotiate integration in a relatively hostile environment. This research was a continuation of my thesis and investigated the possibility of transforming change laboratory method in a one to one situation.
Julian Pugh
Email: julian.pugh@hse.ie
Research interests:
I am a phase 3 student undertaking a Professional Doctorate in Health at the School for Health at the University of Bath. I am also a co-ordinator of addiction services in Ireland and have operational and research interests in shared care planning and integrated care pathway development in order to improve services to clients in line with current HSE policy development. This work is congruent with the Learning in Work project at CSAT.
Current project:
Professor Daniels is supervising my research project which analyses the use of a shared care plan module, in an electronic health record, in order to develop a new form of practice to provide improved interdisciplinary working and integration of services within addiction services.
Xin Zhao
E-mail: xz233@bath.ac.uk
Research interests:
My research interests lie in the area of Social-Cultural and Activity Theory, and Zones of proximal development. I am particulary interested in looking at classroom practice and the use of prosody in building mutual understanding between teachers and students.
Current project:
My current project is to investigate how the prosody of teacher-student dialogue can indicate the degree of mutual understanding between teachers and students in the IRF sequence in an EFL class in China. I hope that the research findings will support the development of teaching pedagogy and suggest ways in which teachers can use prosody as a communicative resource to improve the practice of classroom discussion and ultimately help to improve the students?
learning outcomes.