CERS Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

Childhood, Families and Society SIG

The Childhood, Families and Society Special Interest Group (CF&S SIG) aims to promote debate on practices and theories shaping environments, interactions, relationships, care, education, welfare and lives-lived by children and families in contemporary societies. The SIG brings together colleagues from across the Health, Social Work and Education Faculty and also welcomes colleagues from other departments and campuses to create interprofessional connections.

We’re led by Dr Angela Scollan, and made up of pedagogues, researchers, professionals and educators working across a broad spectrum of topics, including:

• theories of childhood, theories from childhood;
• children’s lived realities;
• children’s rights, with a focus on the right of self-determination;
• play, art, digital technology, environments and the transitions between them;
• education for, with and from children;
• research methods working with children, children as researchers;
• social work;
• nursing.

The CF&S SIG holds a firm commitment to critical research that recognises the complexities of contemporary childhoods, multidisciplinary services and explores them through theoretically driven intellectual projects, empirical research and evaluation projects.

Creative Methodologies SIG

The Creative Methodologies SIG (CMS) draws upon arts-based methods to foreground non-conventional ways in which to generate data and to think about what counts as valid knowledge. It takes a philosophically informed approach to research that emphasises the “feltness” of research by turning attention to the entanglement of matter, meaning, and affect throughout research processes.

Rather than positioning the researcher as a detached, dispassionate, objective observer, these approaches emphasise co-creation, embodiment, and relationality: where human and non-human actors, materials, and atmospheric forces participate in the generation of knowledge. Drawing from arts-based practices such as performance, movement, and storytelling, creative methodologies privilege sensory, affective, and material ways of knowing, challenging traditional hierarchies between intellect and emotion, subject and object, theory and practice.

CMS will explore a variety of philosophical foundations that understand creativity to emerge through the coming together of bodies, spaces, and discourses which allow research to emerge in unpredictable and dynamic ways. This orientation invites experimentation, reflexivity, and responsiveness, positioning research as a generative and ethical practice that attends to the vitality and agency of the more-than-human world.

The SIG convenes a small number of in-person workshops throughout the academic year and is open to all researchers (PGRs, ECRs, the curious and the sceptical). This SIG is located in the education department, but is intended to be a transdisciplinary space that invites researchers from across the University to reimagine what else research methodologies might be and come in the generation of new knowledge. The group is led by Professor Jayne Osgood and Dr Nic Fryer.

Pedagogic Research SIG

University staff are expected to teach, conduct research and engage with their wider professional communities. This SIG brings these roles together to promote and celebrate research into pedagogic practice. Our work focuses on how university staff (and their colleagues in partner organisations) use research to explore, and ultimately improve, the quality of learning for their students.

The SIG provides a forum for the following kinds of work:

• Case studies of pedagogic research, which strive to better understand how students learn – through improved planning, assessment, teaching and student activities;
• Evaluations of university frameworks and initiatives, especially focusing on student experiences and learning outcomes;
• Methodologies for combining teaching and research, e.g. action research, co-construction, appreciative inquiry, evaluations, case studies etc;
• Staff development initiatives based on research evidence.

The SIG aims to support colleagues to bring their teaching, research and outreach activities together into coherent projects so that excellence in teaching is supported by, and supports, high quality educational research. The SIG is led by Professor Lee Jerome.