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Education Departmental Seminar Series

We host speakers from academia and professional practice doing interesting, exciting and significant research or work in the field of education.

This page contains information about our upcoming seminars and seminars we have held in the past (many of which were recorded and available to watch).

The research presented in each aligns with the work the University of Bath's Department of Education is doing. They cover topics such as, research in the fields of educational leadership, management and governance, internationalisation and globalisation, language and educational practices, and learning, pedagogy and diversity.

Attend a seminar

All of our seminars are free to attend and take place on the University of Bath campus or online. If you have any questions about our seminars, please contact Dr Nicola Savvides or Dr Basma Hajir

Upcoming 2023 seminars

Find out more about our upcoming seminars in 2023.


The alternative university: lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela

  • Date: 29 November 2023
  • Time: 12.15pm - 1.15pm
  • Location: Room 3.107, 1 West and online (Zoom)

During this seminar, Dr Mariya Ivancheva (Senior Lecturer at Strathclyde Institute of Education) will talk about her research into the decline of the public university. She'll explore how it has dramatically increased under intensified commercialisation and privatisation, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions over the last few decades. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a socialist university that challenged national and global higher education norms. Through participant observation, extensive interviews with different groups involved and archival inquiry, Mariya historicises the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, the vanguard institution of higher education reform, and examines the complex, often contradictory policies and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality.

Find out more and book your place

Reparative futures of education

In this talk, Professor Arathi Sriprakash (University of Oxford) will explore how the idea of reparation can help address the injustices of education systems. The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed, they can endure in social institutions – such as education – which also shape lives-to-come. Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons of educational theory and practice.

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Mitigating poor literacy skills with technology: evidence from Spain

In this seminar, Professor Ismael Sanz (Rey Juan Carlos University) will present a recently published article in which he and his co-authors estimate the effects of a low-cost and scalable computer-assisted learning (CAL) language program on students’ academic performance. The CAL program aims to enhance writing and reading skills using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to model the cognitive processes of students with learning difficulties, providing content tailored to their academic level. To estimate the effects of the program, they exploit variation in its implementation and adoption across primary schools in the Region of Madrid (Spain) and combine survey data with administrative records on external blindly standardised tests. Professor Ismael will present the findings of this research and discuss its implications for policy discussions on effective strategies to mitigate poor literacy skills in a cost-effective and inclusive manner. 

Find out more and book your place


Upcoming 2024 seminars

Find out more about our upcoming seminars in 2024.


A comparative international study of differences in beliefs between future teachers and their educators

  • Date: 26 January 2024
  • Time: 1.15pm - 2.15pm
  • Location: Room 3.107, 1 West and online (Zoom)

In this seminar, Professor Maria Teresa Tatto (Arizona State University) will present a study that examines the differences in beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics among future teachers and their teacher educators/professors across five countries - Chinese Taipei, Poland, Russian Federation, Singapore, and the United States. The study analysed data including teacher educators and future primary and secondary teachers grouped within institutions in each country, utilising meta-analytic methods to estimate effects within institutions and synthesise them across institutions within a country.

Find out more and book your place

Enacting health/life education as curriculum making across sites of activity: patterns of (in)disciplinarity and citizenship

  • Date: 28 February 2024
  • Time: 1pm - 2pm
  • Location: Online (Zoom)

In this seminar, Associate Professor Stavroula Philippou (University of Cyprus) will explore the enactment of the Health/Life Education curriculum in the classroom, the nano-site where curriculum-making is instantiated through teaching, as at interaction and intersection with other sites.

Her research draws on an ethnographic study in Cyprus and data include policy and curriculum materials, video recordings of lessons and respective teaching materials used as well as multiple teacher interviews. The analysis illustrates the complex directions the Health/Life Education curriculum as enacted has been taking and presented through ‘curriculum events’ which are theorised as joint ‘negotiations’ in classroom settings. These are often shaped by teachers and pupils, but also as they emerge from/through (im)material conditions, pertaining to the classroom/school space, but also beyond those, and the disciplinarity of Health Education.

A Pedagogy of hauntology: decolonizing the curriculum with geographic information systems (GIS)

  • Date: 20 March 2024
  • Time: 1pm - 2pm
  • Location: Online (Zoom)

In this seminar, Professor Michalinos Zembylas (Open University of Cyprus), Professor Vivienne Bozalek (Rhodes University and University of the Western Cape, South Africa) and Dr Siddique Motala (University of Cape Town) explore how a pedagogy of hauntology might be enacted in a higher education curriculum, taking into account the ghosts of South Africa’s apartheid and colonial past. To do so, the presentation focuses on the ways in which Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and analysis reveal the absence/presence of the there/then, here/now and the effects of the past/present on people's lives and the land. Situated in engineering education in a South African university of technology, the presentation shows that GIS can be used to animate hitherto occluded injustices of the past by means of a micro-instance of activism in the form of a storytelling intervention. The talk is based on their book chapter in: Higher education hauntologies: Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (edited by M. Zembylas, V. Bozalek, S. Motala and D. Hölscher).

Previous seminars

Watch recordings of our previous seminars.