Dr Nicole Brown

Imagine! Different in academia. is the recording of a talk presented at the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry in Cape Town in May 2022.

This is an extract from a guest post on the Supervising PhDs Community Blog, where I explore the experience of "atypical" students, and what research supervisors can do to better support those "atypical" students. 

This paper considers the use of identity boxes as a data collection method to elicit experiences.

This paper seeks to exemplify a reflexive approach to data analysis that accounts for the researcher’s positionality as well as the increasingly untraditional, unconventional data stemming from creative data collection methods.

The paper reports on the lived experience of fibromyalgia, which used identity boxes and metaphorical representation to offer a holistic view.

In this post, I explain what ableism in the curriculum is, and what we as teachers can do to counter ableism in the curriculum.

This is my presentation related to a collaborative project at UCL to develop portfolios to become meaningful, external-facing assessments.

Games are often used as motivators in lessons, but games shall not become the main focus. We are teachers and learning needs to be central to lessons.

Many teacher training sessions and professional development courses nowadays link to or culminate in the compilation of portfolios. Portfolios are evidences and resources that are gathered and annotated systematically to provide an overview of the teachers' achievements, career events and areas for development. The process of gathering information for the portfolios is an opportunity to take a step back from everyday work to reposition yourself and reconsider your values, your development and your learning. Here is some help for developing portfolios.

Many teacher training sessions focus on assessment but we do not spend enough time on discussing assessment in the sense of marking student work. We do not discuss the impact marking has on the students' learning and the teachers' workload, nor do we talk about how we could make marking more meaningful for our learners.

Artefacts can be used to get students interested in a lesson, but artefacts can do more than just represent an engaging hook. In this post I am discussing the use of artefacts in lessons based on questions that I have been asked in teacher training sessions.

Alison Clark and Peter Moss developed their own way of carrying out research with children – the Mosaic approach. The idea behind the Mosaic approach is that researchers collect data through a wide range of means. These are what Clark and Moss consider "individual tiles". It is then the researcher's task to put these individual pieces together to form one big picture, just like many little tiles are formed into one big mosaic.

One of the most daunting aspects for new teachers is to manage behaviour in lessons. The dynamics of the classroom and the teacher's personality are probably key to how much classroom management you will need to do and which strategies you can use. However, there are some basic rules that you should consider and that will help you manage behaviour in your lesson.