Dr Mona Sakr is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood. Her research has explored children's creativity, play and digital engagement, as well as how creative and digital methods of learning are integrated into Higher Education. Her current research is an exploration of pedagogic leadership for social justice in early childhood education. She joined Middlesex in 2014, after working as a research fellow at UCL Institute of Education and completing a PhD in children's art-making with Oxford Brookes University.
Mona leads the following undergraduate modules on BA Education Studies and BA Early Childhood Studies: Insights into Play and Creativity and the Arts in Education. She leads the module Dangerous Ideas: Thinking with Theory as part of the MA Childhood and Education in Diverse Societies.
Doctoral candidates wishing to do research in the following areas are particularly welcome to contact Mona:
Books
Sakr, M. (2019) Digital Play in Early Childhood: What's the Problem? London: Sage.
Sakr, M. & Osgood, J. (2019, Eds.) Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art. London: Bloomsbury.
Sakr, M., Trivedy, B., Hall, N., O’Brien, L. & Federici, R. (2018) Creativity and Making in Early Childhood: Challenging Practitioner Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.
Sakr, M. (2017) Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art: Enabling Playful Experiences. London: Bloomsbury.
Peer-reviewed articles
Sakr, M. & Oscar, A. (in press) Stretchy time or screen time:
How early years practitioners conceptualise time in relation to children’s digital play. Early Years: An International Research Journal.
Sakr, M., & Burghardt, V. (2020). Embedding student feedback in deep pedagogic reflection: the potentials of drawing and Deleuzian analysis. Teaching in Higher Education. Aavailable online prior to print publication: https://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2020.1716712#.XmI6p6j7Q2w
Sakr, M. (2019). ‘It just opened my eyes a bit more’: student engagement with Instagram to develop understanding of complex concepts. Teaching in Higher Education. Available online prior to print publication:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2019.1613356
Sakr, M., & Scollan, A. (2019). The screen and the sand-timer: The integration of the interactive whiteboard into an early years free-flow learning environment. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 17(3), 190-204.
Sakr, M. (2019) Young children drawing together on the iPad versus paper: How collaborative creativity is shaped by different semiotic resources. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 20 (20). Available online: http://www.ijea.org/v20n20/
Sakr, M. (2018). Multimodal participation frameworks during young children’s collaborative drawing on paper and on the iPad. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 29, 1-11.
Sakr, M., Connelly, V., & Wild, M. (2018). Imitative or Iconoclastic? How Young Children use Ready‐Made Images in Digital Art. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 37(1), 41-52.
Elwick, A., Osgood, J., Robertson, L., Sakr, M., & Wilson, D. (2018). In pursuit of quality: early childhood qualifications and training policy. Journal of Education Policy, 33(4), 510-525.
Sakr, M. (2017). ‘We’re just gonna scribble it’: The affective and social work of destruction in children’s art-making with different semiotic resources. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 18(2), 227-239.
Osgood, J., Sakr, M., & De Rijke, V. (2017). Dark play in digital playscapes. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 18 (2), 109-133.
Sakr, M., Connelly, V., & Wild, M. (2016). Narrative in young children's digital art-making. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 16 (3), 289-310.
Sakr, M., Connelly, V., & Wild, M. (2016). “Evil Cats” and “Jelly Floods”: Young Children’s Collective Constructions of Digital Art Making in the Early Years Classroom. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 30(1), 128-141.
Sakr, M., Jewitt, C., & Price, S. (2016). Mobile experiences of historical place: A multimodal analysis of emotional engagement. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(1), 51-92.
Price, S., Sakr, M., & Jewitt, C. (2016). Exploring whole-body interaction and design for museums. Interacting with Computers, 28(5), 569-583.
Kucirkova, N., & Sakr, M. (2015). Child–father creative text-making at home with crayons, iPad collage & PC. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 17, 59-73.
Sakr, M., Price, S. & Jewitt, C. (2014) The semiotic work of the hands in scientific inquiry. Classroom Discourse, 4 (2).
Book chapters
Sakr, M. (2019) Children’s photography as sense-making. In M. Sakr & J. Osgood (Eds.) Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art. London: Bloomsbury.
Sakr, M. (2017) Which comes first: the story or the text? How digital affordances challenge us to re-think children's construction of narrative during art-making. In S. Garvis & N. Pramling (Eds.) Narrative in Early Childhood Education: Communication, sense-making and lived experience. London: Routledge.
Kucirkova, N. & Sakr, M. (2017) Personalised story-making on the iPad: Opportunities for developing the self and building closeness with others. In C. Burnett, G. Merchant, A. Simpson & M. Walsh (Eds.) The Case of the iPad: Mobile Literacies in Education. Berlin: Springer.
Sakr, M., Connelly, V. & Wild, M. (2015) The semiotic work of teachers' writing in displays of young children's drawings. In A. Archer & E. Breuer (Eds.) Multimodality in Writing: The state of the art in theory, methodology and pedagogy. Bingley: Emerald.
Sakr, M. & Kucirkova, N. (2015) Making the 'here' and 'now': Rethinking children's digital photography with Deleuzian concepts. In A. Hackett, L. Proctor & J. Seymour (Eds.) Children's Spatialities: Embodiment, emotions and agency. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Sakr, Mona and Oscar, Amanda (2020) Stretchy time or screen time: how early years practitioners conceptualise time in relation to children's digital play. Early Years: an International Research Journal . ISSN 0957-5146 (Published online first)
Sakr, Mona and Burghardt, Vicky (2020) Embedding student feedback in deep pedagogic reflection: the potentials of drawing and Deleuzian analysis. Teaching in Higher Education . ISSN 1356-2517 (Published online first)
Sakr, Mona (2019) Young children drawing together on the iPad versus paper: How collaborative creativity is shaped by different semiotic resources. International Journal of Education and the Arts , 20 (20). pp. 1-26.
Sakr, Mona and Scollan, Angela (2019) The screen and the sand-timer: the integration the interactive whiteboard into an early years free-flow learning environment. Journal of Early Childhood Research , 17 (3). pp. 190-204. ISSN 1476-718X
Sakr, Mona (2019) 'It just opened my eyes a bit more': student engagement with Instagram to develop understanding of complex concepts. Teaching in Higher Education . ISSN 1356-2517 (Published online first)
Mona works with practitioners and organisations in early childhood education in order to develop pedagogy and pedagogic leadership. She is currently working with the London Early Years Foundation on a project exploring Social Leadership in early childhood education.
She previously managed the project ‘Apps for Children: Practitioner Perspectives’ which involved workshops with practitioners involving explorations and discussions around the latest apps for children. The book ‘Creativity and Making in Early Childhood: Challenging Practitioner Perspectives’ was written with practitioners, following from another series of workshops focused on the use of video observations in order to reconceptualise children’s creativity and the role of the adult in facilitating it.
