Summary
Fiona is an Education lecturer with over 16 years’ experience in Higher Education teaching. Her teaching interests surround critical and philosophical questions in education, developing conceptual lenses for the growing field of informal learning, educational inequalities, learner identity and interpretivist and phenomenological research methodologies. Many of these threads derive from her background in the arts, including cultural studies, which complement the study of education in novel ways. Fiona teaches across BA Education studies, BA Early childhood studies, BA Working with children young people and families, MA Education and also supervises at doctoral level. Her teaching is focused on issues of power and knowledge in education, socio-cultural contexts, lifespan development, arts-based pedagogy and participatory research methodologies.
Her research publications have focused on the critique and development of research methodologies that seek to capture the meanings formed by people in marginalized communities. She has also proposed a novel analytical framework for participatory approaches to research, which provides a more practical tool for engagement with young people and children. More recently, she has applied her visual arts background to projects focused on learners’ sense-making and visual interpretation of their environment as a ‘place’. She has both a theoretical (post-humanism) and applied (arts-based pedagogy) interest in finding ways to help learners of all ages attune to their environment.