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Psychology of Education Section

By Lynne Rogers (Chair, Psychology of Education Section)

The section has continued to promote the role of psychology in teacher education. Further meetings have been held with Escalate and the Committee is planning to hold a second seminar in London during 2007-08. Discussions have continued with the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and other Learned Societies to consider how we might work together in order to have a wider influence. Representatives from Learned Societies joined together for a workshop presentation at the BERA conference in September 2007. The title of the workshop was Putting discipline back into educational research and the aim of the workshop was to address the following questions:

• what now is the role of underpinning theory in educational research?
• how does foundational and disciplinary theory address broad questions about the historical, sociological and philosophical definitions of schooling?

Learned Societies included British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society, Philosophy of Education and History of Education.

Two excellent editions of Psychology of Education Review (PER) have been produced this year one with a collection of individual papers that focused on ‘Looking in Classrooms’. The other edition contained a thought provoking Open Dialogue ‘Over-protection, Over-protection, Over-protection! Young people in Modern Britain that tackled concerns about young people’s lives and the various pressures they face.

The section successfully nominated Susan Carey as a keynote speaker for the Society's Annual Conference in Dublin, 2008. Penny Munn and Karl Warl are leading on a symposium that will take account of Susan’s work.

The conference Literacies held this year at Staffordshire University was extremely successful. The venue was ideal for our needs and there was an interesting range of papers. The Vernon Wall lecture given by Professor Peter Bryant: Spelling rules exist, but do people use them? provoked much interesting discussion and debate. Symposia included: Understanding and evaluating children’s art and artistic experience from different educational perspectives and methodologies; Musical literacies, and Reading and spelling processes. As in 2006 the conference closed with a plenary debate which provided an opportunity for all delegates to consider and question research methodology. This year Mark Tarrant from Keele University gave the opening paper: Participants' responses to research questionnaires: Lessons from social psychology.

The conference in 2008 will be at Kents Hill Park Conference Centre, Milton Keynes since this venue proved so attractive during 2006. The theme will be Evidence-based education. Further details about the conference can be obtained from Andrea Creech (e-mail: a.creech@ioe.ac.uk).

As Chair I would like to express my thanks to Pamela Qualter who has stepped down as Treasurer for the Section: she has done an excellent job. Pamela will remain on the committee.