BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...

Teaching as design: New research from technology-rich learning environments

  ‘We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for...

Arresting ‘epistemic violence’: Decolonising the national curriculum for history

A renewed call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum has marked a shift in thinking about education and what should form the canon of curriculum content (le Grange, 2016). It has been amplified...

Can biology A-levels be trusted to look after the future teaching of high quality ecological science?

‘The primary place in which to work at ecology is necessarily in the field’ Tansley (1952/1987) Most contemporary ecologists could not envisage a world without fieldwork....

The challenge of researching dialogic interactions in digital classroom contexts

Language is the most ubiquitous and flexible of the meaning-making tools. As such, it is a teacher’s main pedagogic tool (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). ‘Classroom dialogue’ can be thought of as...

Supporting early-childhood teachers with integrating a humanoid robot to enhance learning

Anthropomorphic robots are increasingly being used as a technology in early childhood settings, and they have been found to enhance social interaction (Tanaka, Cicourel & Movellan, 2007), support...

Drawing a line in the sand: Reflective practice using ‘sandboxing’ with HE students

The future of educational research in Wales

The ability to reflect in and on practice (Schön, 1983; 1991) is an integral professional skill within the field of education. This metacognitive process develops effective practitioners and...

Action research in the classroom: Applying spacing and retrieval practice

The future of educational research in Wales

I have been a classroom teacher for nearly two decades, but have only recently undertaken action research. In this post I describe my experiences with spacing (Bjork & Bjork, 2014; Cepeda et al,...

Aretaic pedagogy: How we can transform the aesthetics of good teaching?

Aretaic pedagogy is suggested as a refreshing paradigm of good teaching, putting at its centre, instead of a knowledge-based perspective, a virtue-based approach to education. Its origins are in...

Using technology for teaching independent-living skills to children with cognitive disabilities

Independent-living skills training is a core service offered by almost every rehabilitation centre for children with cognitive disabilities. The ulti-mate goal is to help children reach a high...

The battle against being educated

I have been publicly exploring the issue of disruption, violence and students’ challenging behaviour in post-school classrooms since 2000 (Lebor, 2000). Susan Wallace has also carried out...

A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers

We began with a sense of mission: to support teachers in making effective use of learning technologies. Educational research has done little so far to help teachers into the digital age; policy...