Hosted by the Doctoral College, these one hour online lunch bite sessions supplement the regular New and Established Supervisory Development Sessions and are aimed at all academic staff who are new to, or experienced at, supervising research degree students and are interested in expanding their knowledge of a specific aspect or process in research degree supervision.
Each session will be led by a senior academic who will introduce the topic, and staff will benefit from discussions aimed at sharing best practice from across BU. Bookings are arranged by Organisational Development.
This session is focused on expanding individuals’ knowledge on the challenges of and best practice for supervising overseas PGRs. This discussion will be led by Dr Hanaa Osman, BUBS.
Staff attending will:
have gained additional knowledge of the challenges of supervising overseas PGRs
have gained additional knowledge of the best practice for supervising overseas PGRs
Further details on the session as well as information on future lunchbite sessions can also be found on the staff intranet.
Date: Wednesday 9 November 2022
Time: 12:00 – 13:00, Teams
To book a place on this session please complete the booking form.
This is your one stop shop for all things impact, public engagement and research communications within RDS.
On the site, you will find resources for communicating your research, increasing its impact and engaging the public with your research.
You’ll find links to RKEDF training sessions, guides to impact, public engagement and research communications along with information about useful contacts within RDS and news about the REF.
The site is easily navigable and is divided into three sections:
Research Impact:
This section outlines how we can help you to plan, accelerate and evidence the impact of your research and includes resources, contact details of our Impact Advisers and links to useful information on impact pathways, the REF and impact training.
Public Engagement with Research:
In this section, we explain how we can help when you want to engage with the public to share your research. The ways to do this are many and varied but ultimately, high quality public engagement has huge benefits for BU, for society and for you – the academic. Here you can find links to advice, training and funding along with the contact details of our Public Engagement team and details of how to join the thriving BU Public Engagement Network.
Research Communications:
Here, we offer you support and guidance on the different ways of sharing your research with different audiences. This includes working with the media (including our partnership with The Conversation), writing for the web and using social media.
The site will be updated regularly and has been designed to be as user friendly as possible. Please make sure you bookmark and keep checking back regularly for updates and news.
The full oral presentation list will be released in due course.
This year we are delighted to announce our keynote speaker is Professor Anna Feigenbaum, with her talk ‘networking from below’.
Abstract:
As postgraduate research students and early career researchers you likely hear the word “networking” all the time. You must network at conferences, network for participant recruitment, network for jobs. You need to network for funding bids, network for sharing your research with the public and network for making an impact. But what is this elusive art of networking? In this talk Professor Anna Feigenbaum will introduce her career approach of “networking from below”. This includes building ‘survive and thrive’ networks with doctoral student colleagues, learning how to approach senior academics, identifying what you have to give and how to best ask for the support or collaboration you want to receive. Delivering this practical advice, Professor Feigenbaum will share her 4C principles for networking success: curiosity, clarity, coordination, and care.
We hope many of you can join us in supporting and promoting the postgraduate research culture and community at Bournemouth University.
This year’s International Open Access Week features the theme of “Open for Climate Justice”.
In conjunction with the International Open Access Week which is taking place all of this week, we are happy to share with you a guest blog post from Dr Lyle Skains, a Principal Academic In Health and Science Communication with Faculty of Media and Communication. Dr Skains’s feature article talks about “Building a Climate Change Educator Community through Open Access”.
You & CO2 (YCO2) is an innovative, interdisciplinary project combining research and public engagement activities to encourage young people, aged 12-15, to engage with the global problem of climate change on a local scale and to commit to behaviour changes that will reduce their carbon footprint. Specifically, we collaborate with teachers to offer a series of multidisciplinary workshops teaching teens about climate change and climate action through playing/reading and creating interactive digital narratives. We then measure the effects of the workshops on student attitudes toward climate change and action.
Because the research team is so strongly committed to action around climate change, we’ve agreed to make all materials associated with the project open access (OA) as much as possible, to ensure that not only do our peers in academia (with institutional affiliations and library access) have access to the knowledge we are generating, but also so that teachers, parents, kids, and policymakers have easy access as well.
YCO2 materials encompass three areas: research outputs, teaching materials, and creative/coding materials. We’ve made all three areas OA. Some are easier than others! There’s no publishing industry or career metrics associated with the production of teaching materials and creative/coding texts, so we’re free to distribute those via the internet, direct from us to you. Our research outputs, however, are a different story.
For a lot of academics (me included!), the words “open access” are, to para-quote Anthony from Season 2 of Bridgerton, the “bane of our existence, and the object of all our desires”. As researchers, we’d love for all of our work to be open access—in general, we got into this gig to generate and share new knowledge, not to be content monkeys for an overgrown publishing industry.
Of course, somewhere along the line that’s what we became, and if we actually want our work to be OA (and we do, and our funders do…), we have to bail out that publishing beast with every OA article by paying some pretty steep publishing fees. Not to mention the fact that we have to navigate a maze of rules, regulations, bureaucracy, changing funders’ requirements, and institutional agreements just to get our research in a respectable form that everyone can access. It’s… a lot.
For every journal article we publish on YCO2—and so far we’ve published three, with two more in review—we jump through every one of these hoops. It’s important that we do. Our program’s purpose is to educate and influence people to act against climate change. It does no good whatsoever if no one knows about it. The project is designed to be run in schools, so it needs buy-in from teachers, headteachers, principals, IT professionals, and parents.
We don’t have a built-in distribution service. We rely on word of mouth, social media, presentations at public events, and direct contact with schools. Teachers find us through Twitter and Royal Society newsletters. If we are going to be able to convince them to run our program in their classrooms, they need to see what we’re doing with it. What we (and by extension they) are getting out of it. We shouldn’t be the only ones benefiting from the knowledge they help us generate.
When they see our website, our publications, our freely offered teaching materials, teachers can determine exactly how the program fits with their needs, how they can use it to improve their curriculum, and how their input and activities contribute to future iterations of the program. Making our materials OA helps us develop a relationship between teachers and the YCO2 program, establishing a network of climate change educators dedicated to effecting change.
That makes it worth all the hoop-jumping and red tape, not that we don’t wish there were a better way!
This year’s International Open Access Week features the theme of “Open for Climate Justice”.
In conjunction with the International Open Access Week which is taking place all of this week, we are happy to share with you a guest blog post from Dr Xin Zhao, a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Journalism with Faculty of Media and Communication. Dr Zhao’s feature article takes us into an “Exploration of the concept of environmental justice”.
I like things to be categorised. This is perhaps the biggest reason why when approaching an academic topic or area, I am so drawn to the definition of a concept, as well as its components. The same occurs to my study of environmental justice.
You have probably seen a generalised definition of environmental justice somewhere, like the one below:
…fair treatment for people of all races, incomes and occupations, regardless of gender, residence, educational level, age, political position or background, regarding the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, policies, and meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government, and the fair distribution of environmental burdens and benefits to all. (Quan, 2002, p. 464)
Then a simple question arises, how would we evaluate whether an activity is “just” or not, environmentally speaking. I appreciate that the world is too complicated to be answered in such manner. But at least we need to know what standards we would use in the evaluation.
So as a researcher, I dig. Although there is no comprehensive list of all standards, I pieced together available literature in areas such as environmental science and organisation communication and came up with my own list. The list includes components such as “rich people pay”, “openness and participation”, “adequacy”, and “transparency”. With operationalised definitions, it became straightforward when evaluating relevant statements prevalent in various discourses, such as news articles. For example, “Greenpeace praised the Orange Alert that had been declared for putting restrictions on construction and industry, but said that it was “clearly not enough”” from The Independent (Griffin, 2015) clearly addressed the adequacy issues in environmental justice which points to the all-around (not partial), timely (not outdated), and accurate (not wrong) way of addressing environmental issues.
Definitions make me feel secure because it functions as a foundation for any further research. I employed the above components in my study of the media representations of environmental justice in the case of China’s air pollution by China’s outward-focused news media (Zhao, 2021). My study showed the consistency of China’s mediated international communication in covering the overall architecture of governmental policies in dealing with air pollution issues (“adequacy”). Interestingly, it also identified an extension of the scope of the content of communication. China’s news media also exposed the general causes of air pollution (“polluter’s responsibility”) and the detailed demands from the public, especially those from the vulnerable groups (“special need”) and those concerning the public’s involvement in the decision-making and execution procedures (“openness and participation”). With the aid of the conceptual mapping about the notion of environmental justice, I am able to generate meaningful findings regarding real-world issues.
Of course, the list of components I came up with needs to be honed through tests and debates, like any other concepts, let alone we are talking about one of the trickiest concepts, i.e. justice. The list needs to be expanded and revised when bringing in the issues such as race, colour, and national origin when discussing environmental justice issues in the international and cross-cultural settings. Only with clear and straightforward concepts can reasonable responsibilities be assigned and executed, for example, who should shoulder the duties of managing the hazardous waste and which groups or communities should receive extra protection from the harms. This could be a fruitful area of study and I look forward to relevant collaborations.
Reference:
Griffin, A. (2015). Beijing Smog ‘Red Alert’ Issued, The Independent. 7 December. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/beijing-smog-red-alertissued-schools-and-businesses-to-completely-shut-down-as-chinese-capital-issues-first-everextreme-warning-a6763286.html (Accessed: 19 September 2021).
Quan, R. (2002). Establishing China’s Environmental Justice Study Models. Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, 14(3), 461-487.
Zhao, X. (2021). How ‘public’ is communicated in China’s public diplomacy: communicating environmental justice in the case of air pollution in China. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 14(2), 65-94.
The Doctoral College Newsletter provides termly information and updates to all those involved with postgraduate research at BU. The latest edition is now available to download here. Click on the web-links provided to learn more about the news, events and opportunities that may interest you.
If you would like to make a contribution to future newsletters, please contact the Doctoral College.
Hosted by the Doctoral College, these one hour online lunchbite sessions supplement the regular New and Established Supervisory Development Sessions. They are aimed at all staff who are new to, or experienced at, research degree supervision and are interested in expanding their knowledge of a specific aspect or process.
Each session will be led by a senior academic who will introduce the topic, and staff will benefit from discussions aimed at sharing best practice from across BU. Bookings are arranged by Organisational Development.
Join us next week in celebrating the 2022 International Open Access Week at BU. Open Access Week 2022 is an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open can be a means for climate justice.
There will be a series of exciting communications and events happening across the week, so read on to find out more!
Daily blog posts on the Research Blog highlighting the different elements relating to open access at BU and why it matters!
An OA Daily Riddle competition will be launched on each day on the Research Blog; with a chance at winning a £20 Amazon voucher!
Featured articles by BU academics on the theme of climate justice
An online OA information session jointly organised by RDS and BURO on 24th October (Monday) at 2pm – Click here to join the session!
Available templates for BU staff to download and use as teaching template to highlight the International Open Access Week and what it means at BU
Open Access Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge with the advancement of policy changes and the importance of social issues affecting people around the world. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions and organizations around the world. So do join in to celebrate this important week and to make a difference!
The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek.
The call for abstracts for The 14th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference is still open, closing Monday 24 October.
The conference is a great opportunity for postgraduate researchers to showcase and promote their research to the BU community whether they have just started or are approaching the end of their journey at BU.
Attending the conference is a great opportunity to engage and network with the postgraduate research community and find out more about the exciting and fascinating research that is happening across BU.
Abstracts are invited from postgraduate researchers to take part in the live research exhibition or to present via oral or poster presentation.
This autumn, visitors to Weston-super-Mare on the west coast of England will be confronted by the strangest of sights, a repurposed oil rig and temporary art installation and high-rise garden dubbed the “See Monster”.
Located in a shallow pool at the former Tropicana open-air swimming baths, once home to artist Banksy’s Dismaland, it is one of ten major commissions that comprise Unboxed: Creativity in the UK. A £120 million year-long programme of free events and activities, Unboxed was conceived and funded by the UK government as a post-Brexit celebration with a mission to inspire conversations and future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
See Monster is a huge, ambitious project. It is one of the UK’s biggest public art works and the first to reuse a structure synonymous with fossil fuels to raise awareness of the climate emergency, renewable energy and sustainability.
But questions have been asked about the project’s impact and legacy. Particularly, critics have mentioned how the decision to tear it down after only six weeks of operation (on November 5) appears wasteful and counter to the environmental message – although this is necessary to avoid any impact on the wading birds that migrate to the area in the winter.
The See Monster has also been caught up in criticism of the Unboxed festival itself, which has been branded “an irresponsible use of public money” at a time of great economic uncertainty and hardship.
Like London’s controversial Marble Arch Mound, an artificial hill designed to attract shoppers to Oxford Street that came in over-budget and which was widely panned, the See Monster calls into question the value of “pop-up” attractions in revitalising our towns and cities, and of culture-led urban regeneration in general.
Pop-up tourism
At 35 metres tall and weighing 450 tonnes, the See Monster is split over four levels with a 10-meter waterfall cascading from the lowest level. It features small trees, plants and grasses. There is a playground slide and animated sculptures, including some 6,000 “scales” attached to the exterior that move in the wind. There are also water atomisers to generate clouds and numerous vantage points offering unrivalled views of the resort and surrounding countryside. It attracts a range of visitors, from curious tourists to organised visits by school groups.
These “here today, gone tomorrow” visitor attractions are the extension of a trend that began in the 1990s with pop-up shops in empty units along high streets and in shopping centres and precincts. The “experience industries”, including tourism, have long been used as a tool of urban regeneration, with former factories, warehouses, harboursides and deep mines rebuilt into museums, bars and restaurants, hotels, and shopping malls.
Structures like the See Monster take this one step further. Instead of a permanent change of use, they temporarily occupy, reuse and adapt existing structures and infrastructure in towns and cities left redundant or in danger of redundancy by economic and financial crises and other triggers of change, such as the pandemic.
These temporary installations are made for the Instagram age, generating countless selfies, positive comments and “likes” on social media.
Research has shown that pop-ups can attract significant footfall, spending and publicity for the host town or city. They can also help reimagine a run-down or underutilised site, as with the Tropicana, with a view to attracting private investment and a permanent change of use (such as Castlefield Viaduct park in Manchester). More altruistic possibilities include creating open space for communities for recreation, promoting behaviour change (for example taking up exercise or sustainable living) or raising money for good causes.
The ‘cult of the temporary’
Despite the reported benefits, geographers Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki question whether the pop-up phenomenon is good for cities. Temporary urbanism, they argue, promotes short term fixes to complex and enduring urban problems. It can also create precarity (think zero hours jobs and short-notice evictions).
These pop-ups are a distraction from the deeper problems of capitalism and the pathologies of urban life, such as air pollution and grinding poverty. In this, they tend to perpetuate inequalities rather than tackling their root causes.
A lot depends on the pop-up. Ambitious, expensive projects like the See Monster can struggle to live up to the hype and are vulnerable to the criticism that the money would be better spent on schools and hospitals. Smaller, community-led schemes with modest ambitions, or serendipitous events like Dismaland that seem to come out of nowhere, are likely to be better received and to leave a positive legacy.
While pop-ups are themselves transitory in nature, the trend towards ephemera, simulation and event-based tourism in urban areas is here to stay. That means the debate on whether they are good or bad for our towns and cities will carry on, long after the See Monster has retreated from public view.
The Doctoral College team have been delighted with the nominations that have come in recently for the ‘Doctoral College Outstanding Contribution Awards’. We wish to extend our congratulations to all recipients who have recently received their award certificate.
Here are some of the heartfelt nominations we have received:
“He was one of my examiners for my major review viva. He was interested, facilitative and supportive throughout my viva. He offered advice of other texts for me to read and concepts to include in my thesis.”
“She provides the best advice in the most difficult situations aligned with the Code of Practice. Thank you very much for supporting us in our roles as academics. Much appreciated.”
“She is an outstanding supervisor, superb at challenging me, supporting the development of my research/critical thinking skills. She is incredibly knowledgeable and has provided me with outstanding levels of support and stellar guidance during my PhD journey so far.”
Why not make someone’s day and take five minutes and nominate a PGR, academic or professional staff member for a Doctoral College Outstanding Contribution Award to say thanks and give recognition for their hard work?
These awards recognise the outstanding contributions to postgraduate research degrees at BU by any PGR, academic or professional staff member. They can be nominated throughout the year by any member of the postgraduate research community to anyone that they feel is exceptional, has exceeded expectations, and has had a positive impact on the postgraduate research culture at BU.
Eligibility
You can nominate anyone involved in postgraduate research at Bournemouth University to receive an award certificate. There are no award criteria, as long as the submission falls within the guidelines, whoever you’ve selected will receive a Doctoral College Outstanding Contribution Award!
How to nominate
We’ve made it really easy for you to nominate someone for a Doctoral College Outstanding Contribution Award – it’s just a short online nomination form!
The call for abstracts for The 14th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference is still open.
The conference is a great opportunity for postgraduate researchers to showcase and promote their research to the BU community whether they have just started or are approaching the end of their journey at BU.
Attending the conference is a great opportunity to engage and network with the postgraduate research community and find out more about the exciting and fascinating research that is happening across BU.
Abstracts are invited from postgraduate researchers to take part in the live research exhibition or to present via oral or poster presentation.
Whether you are a new supervisor, you plan to be one, or you have experience but are new to Bournemouth University, this development workshop is for you.
The workshop, which is mandatory for new supervisors, offers the necessary knowledge to supervise Postgraduate Research students by placing this knowledge within both the internal and external regulatory framework.
This workshop will cover the following key areas:
Nature and scope of doctoral study and the role of a supervisor
Code of Practice for Research Degrees at BU, its purpose and operation
Monitoring, progression, completion and process of research degrees at BU
Importance of diversity, equality and cultural awareness
Student recruitment and selection
Keeping students on track: motivation and guidance
Book your place onto one of the Doctoral Supervision: New Supervisors Development workshops below. Further details about this workshop can also be found on the staff intranet.
Knowledge exchange is defined as a collaborative, creative endeavour that translates knowledge and research into impact in society and the economy. This, in turn, helps to inform research, enrich education and enhance professional practice.
BU’s performance in the KEF demonstrates a number of areas of strength – including our research partnerships, our work with business, and supporting local growth and regeneration.
About the KEF
The KEF is published annually to allow universities to better understand and improve their own performance in knowledge exchange, and provide businesses and other users with more information on the knowledge and expertise of universities.
Universities are measured across seven perspectives:
Research partnerships,
Working with businesses,
Working with the public and third sector,
Skills, enterprise and entrepreneurship,
Local growth and regeneration,
IP and commercialisation,
Public and community engagement.
These areas have been measured through a combination of data collected through the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey and three narratives that summarised our institutional context, our contribution to local growth & regeneration and our public & community engagement.
In recognition of the fact that universities have different areas of expertise and work in regions with different needs, all universities in England have been placed into 7 different clusters according to their expertise, size and research activity.
The results are shared in the form of dashboards on the KEF website, with BU placed in Cluster E alongside other large universities with a broad portfolio of research across all disciplines.
Our KEF results demonstrate the breadth of activity across all of these important perspectives.
BU’s performance
Our performance in the latest KEF highlights several areas of strength – including our research partnerships and our work with business. We work collaboratively with organisations locally, nationally and internationally to embed our research in practice and support economic growth and innovation.
For example, the Institute of Medical Imaging and Visualisation (IMIV) is delivering education and professional development programmes to help meet the needs of the local community, the NHS and industry, as well as current global medical imaging workforce demands. Facilities including a 3T MRI scanner are also facilitating joint research opportunities with NHS trusts, primary care, industry and academia – helping to improve health outcomes for the region.
Through our partnership with University Hospitals Dorset, we are working on collaborative research that can make a real difference to patients. This includes a current joint project to explore commercialising a medical device which uses smartphones to screen nerve function in patients at risk of peripheral neuropathy – a condition which affects 2.3 million people in the UK and can lead to loss of sensation in the fingers and toes.
We are also developing new areas of research that have the potential to support industry – such as ADDISONIC, which explores how ultrasonic fatigue testing can quickly and reliably predict how materials will perform and last. This has a range of commercial applications – from jet engines to medical devices – and could help to create more efficient manufacturing processes and reduce global waste.
We share our work, research and expertise through public engagement activities, such as our regular Café Scientifique events and our online public lecture series, which gives audiences around the world the opportunity to learn more about BU research.
Ian Jones, Head of External Engagement at BU, said: “It is good to see an assessment of our progress in knowledge exchange and the impact we’ve made through our work.
“A part of our vision as a university is to enrich society. Our knowledge exchange work takes the knowledge we create and looks to embed it in society, and I’m proud that our work embodies this vision.”
David Sweeney CBE, Executive Chair of Research England, said: “Knowledge exchange (KE) is integral to the mission and purpose of our universities, and its importance in contributing to societal and economic prosperity is strongly supported by the Government.
“Today’s new version of the Knowledge Exchange Framework takes further forward the vision and potential of KE activity, providing richer evidence to demonstrate universities’ strengths in different areas when set alongside their peers.”
On behalf of the BU Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice, this is an invitation to join us at a film screening of Indian Space Dreams, followed by a Q&A discussion on 5th October at 5.30pm in the new Poole Gateway building on Talbot Campus.
The film was produced and directed by Dr Sue Sudbury and has been screened on TV in 98 countries. It is a wonderfully inspirational film and was long-listed for the Best International Feature Documentary Academy Award.
The event begins at 5.30pm with a drinks reception, with Prof John Vinney introducing Dr Sue Sudbury and our special guest speaker and discussant, Dr Hugh Mortimer – the renowned space scientist:
Hosted by the Doctoral College, these one hour online lunch bite sessions supplement the regular New and Established Supervisory Development Sessions and are aimed at all academic staff who are new to, or experienced at, supervising research degree students and are interested in expanding their knowledge of a specific aspect or process in research degree supervision.
Each session will be led by a senior academic who will introduce the topic, and staff will benefit from discussions aimed at sharing best practice from across BU. Bookings are arranged by Organisational Development.
This session provides an introduction to the UK Council for Graduate Education’s (UKCGE) Good Supervisory Practice Framework and the Research Supervision Recognition Programme which allows established supervisors to gain recognition for this challenging, but rewarding, role.
This discussion will be led Dr Martyn Polkinghorne, UKCGE Recognised Research Supervisor, BUBS: Associate Professor, FLIE: Education Excellence Theme Leader, TeachBU: Academic Lead.
Staff attending will be able to:
use the Framework to navigate the wide-ranging, highly complex and demanding set of roles that modern research supervisors must undertake to perform the role effectively
reflect on their own practice, compared to a benchmark of good practice
identify strengths and weaknesses and build upon the former and address the latter with targeted professional development
work towards recognition of their expertise by a national body.
Further details on the session as well as information on future lunchbite sessions can also be found on the staff intranet.
Date: Tuesday 4 October 2022
Time: 12:00 – 13:00, Teams
To book a place on this session please complete the booking form.
Support and skills development for early career researchers at BU
The BU Early Career Researcher (ECR) Network is designed to support early career researchers and PGRs at BU, offering general advice and support as well as tailored workshops for skills training and career development.
The network also provides an opportunity to network and form connections – creating a community in which expertise can be shared, and collaborative working encouraged.
It is open to all who identify as being in the early stages of their research career – whether you’re a Postgraduate Researcher, newly-appointed academic, or you’re returning to research.
The network meets monthly, with events and networking opportunities. Upcoming workshops will cover academic publishing, public engagement and impact, and pay and promotion – as well as regular drop-in surgeries where you can pop in for a chat or discuss particular concerns.
The first ECR Network event of the academic year takes place on Wednesday 28 September, with a welcome and surgery session.
There is also a dedicated Brightspace community to share ideas, ask questions and access support and resources.
The ECR network is coordinated by two academic leads, Dr Sam Goodman (FMC) and Professor Ann Hemingway (HSS), and is supported by Research Development and Support (RDS).
Dr Goodman said: “The BU Early Career Researcher Network is a great way to connect with other ECRs from across the university, learn new skills and get access to mentoring, coaching and career development in a crucial phase in your career.
“We cover all the issues facing researchers that we can, from academic subjects like how to publish, how to engage the public and develop impact, through to how to deal with work/life balance and managing imposter syndrome. However, the ECR Network is driven by its members – if there is a topic you need impartial help or guidance with, then this is the forum in which to raise it.”
You can find out more about the ECR network and see the full schedule of events for 2022/23 on the ECR Network page.
If you’d like to join the network, or you have any questions, please contact: RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk
Dr Sarah Hodge writes for The Conversation about research asking teachers about their experiences of how young people use technology and the effect it has on them…
What teachers think of children and young people’s technology use
Mobile phones, computers, social media and the internet are part of the daily lives of children and young people, including at school. Concerns over the risks of too much screen time or online activity for children and young people have been tempered by the reality of technology use in education and leisure.
The experience of life during the pandemic, when much schooling and socialising went online, has also changed attitudes to technology use. UK communications regulator Ofcom reported that in 2020 only a minority of children and young people did not go online or have internet access.
Teachers are in a unique position when it comes to assessing how children and young people use technology such as mobile phones and the effect it has on them. They see how children and young people use technology to learn, socialise, and how it affects their relationships with their peers.
Together with colleagues, I carried out in-depth research with eight teachers from different backgrounds, ages, years of professional experience, and type of educational institution from across the UK. We asked the teachers about their experiences of children and young people’s use of technology: how they thought it affected their emotions, behaviour and learning both before and during the pandemic.
The teachers talked about the importance of technology as a tool in the classroom and learning and the opportunities it provides for creativity. As one teacher put it:
It is what the children are used to, and it engages them more – it is a useful tool that can add to our teaching.
Empowered through tech
We also found that teachers were optimistic about the role technology could play in empowering children and young people. One said:
They use social networking sites to learn from one another and to express their beliefs – even children who are quiet in the classroom, they find it easier to express themselves online.
They thought that children and young people could learn to understand and recognise the signs of unhealthy technology use from their own emotions and behaviour when using technology. This included showing empathy and care through noticing how they and others feel. One teacher said children and young people were becoming more compassionate and offering their help to friends who were showing signs of distress through their online posts.
However, some teachers did express concern about how interacting online affected children and young people’s social skills. One teacher said:
They don’t know how to have proper conversations with their friends. They don’t know how to resolve anything because it’s easy to be mean behind a screen and not have to resolve it.
Another questioned how technology use was affecting play. They said:
They don’t know how to play and actually you will see groups of them surrounding a phone.
Teachers also pointed to the problems of disengaging from technology use. One teacher stated:
The parents have ongoing battles trying to pull their children away from screens and the next day they are exhausted, and they find it difficult to get them into school because the children are so tired.
Teachers discussed how they encouraged their pupils to take part in team sports as a way to encourage face-to-face communication and conflict resolution. However, while some online safety and internet use is covered at school, guidance on how to live with technology, be resilient towards challenges and use technology in a balanced could be more explicitly taught.
The PHSE Association – a national body for personal, social, health and economic education – offers guidance on online safety and skills for the curriculum, such as the potential harms of pornography but there is much scope to develop a broader approach to supporting healthy technology use.
Teachers felt that there should be more discussion of online behaviour in the classroom. Daisy Daisy/Shutterstock
In class, this could be as simple as working on how to make informed decisions about technology use – such as being more cautious if online activity involves talking with strangers, or recognising if spending time online is a large time commitment. It could include using social media posts as real-world examples to encourage childrenand young people to be informed, critical and resilient towards content they are likely to see and interact with.
Teachers felt that adding online safety to the curriculum would be valuable, as would providing opportunities for children and young people to talk about their experiences and content of technology. One teacher said:
There are predators out there and we do discuss online safety issues with my students, but some stuff should be part of the curriculum as well, and parents should access it too.
The teachers highlighted that they, too, needed support in their knowledge about technology and suggested this should be more incorporated into teacher training. One teacher said:
We need to keep up with the times and if there is something this pandemic taught us, is that not all of us are keeping up… one-off training is not adequate, schools need to invest in continuous professional development activities related to technology.
Children and young people can get significant benefits from technology, but it has risks, too. More attention to how teachers can address this in school can be an invaluable way to help children and young people understand and balance their time online.
New weight change BU paper
One week to go! | The 16th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference
Geography and Environmental Studies academics – would you like to get more involved in preparing our next REF submission?
Congratulations to three former BU staff
MSCA Staff Exchanges 2024 Call – internal deadline
Applications are now open for 2025 ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships!
Horizon Europe – ERC CoG and MSCA SE webinars
MaGMap: Mass Grave Mapping
ERC grants – series of webinars