Higher education (HE) has a long association with many professions and industries yet the demand for professional-facing HE provision has never been greater with public services, such as nursing and policing, now requiring mandatory HE qualifications (Bekhradnia and Beech, 2018) in parallel with a rapid growth in degree apprenticeships (Universities UK, 2019). Consequently, there has been an expanding need for experience-rich professionals to transition into full-time academic roles. These practitioner academics (PAs) are not in themselves a homogenous group as they span a range of professions that may not have been traditionally associated with HE. This thesis adopts an ethnographic, narrative, interpretivist approach to capture the experiences of sixteen full-time neophyte and established PAs from multiple UK based higher education institutions (HEIs) from a diversity of professional backgrounds. Through conversational-expository methods – blog posts and comments, semi-structured interviews, and conversatio…
This thesis offers a sustained enquiry into the perceptions and practices of GP nurses in relation to the concepts of spirituality and of spiritual care. This is an under researched constituency in relation to an emerging topic of interest across the healthcare sector. The aim of the thesis is to investigate GP nurses’ perceptions and practices in the provision of spiritual care, to identify how the context of general practice might impact their practices, and the implications of these practices for GP settings. Informed by a review of literature investigating the phenomena of spirituality and spiritual care in healthcare, this thesis employs Bhaskar’s theory of critical realism as the theoretical framework and a mixed methods methodology gathering both quantitative and qualitative data. The study drew on data from an online questionnaire to investigate GP nurses’ underlying perceptions of these concepts, and semi-structured interviews with ten GP nurses to identify their practices and experiences in the prov…
In many health care professions professional identity is considered to be important because it aids recruitment and retention and improves quality of care. Professional identity in nursing has been examined in depth in relation to students joining the profession but it has not been considered in detail in relation to those who change roles in nursing. Professional identity in health visiting is significant because health visiting has a complex history from independent practice to a specialist branch of nursing. Health visitors are qualified nurses who complete a year-long post-qualification course and this thesis explores whether these preparation and transition programmes have a role in their professional identity development. Therefore, this study aims to examine professional identity in an under-researched professional group and to identify implications for educationalists involved in the professional preparation of HVs. This study involved a narrative inquiry wherein five student health visitors took part…
This thesis adopts an anthropological perspective and an ethnographic approach to explore the following research question: ‘What do university graduates aspire to do with their lives, and how are such aspirations produced, negotiated, and revised over time?’. The research examines the aspirations of students and graduates from a prestigious university in New York City. Los Angeles emerged as a popular destination for graduates from this university and so two periods of fieldwork were conducted with graduates there. Data collection lasted 18 months spread over two calendar years (2017-18). The conceptual framework is person-centred and longitudinal, and the prime source of data is semi-structured interviews. The thesis features 16 of the 30 participants involved. Graduates in the study are shown to reckon with the compatibility of finding fulfilment through work and attaining future financial security. There was a tendency to perceive careers in terms of mutually exclusive extremes of either artistic expressio…
The purpose of this study has been to understand the experience of imaginary companionship through the memory narratives of adults. Following a mid-century lull in research on imaginary companions, contemporary studies have focused primarily on childhood populations. Using correlational methods to draw inference between imaginary companionship status and other developmental facets of childhood these large sample studies have sought links for instance to theory of mind, narrative ability, perspective-taking and creativity. However, as less is known about the personal meanings attached to and the lived experiencing of these early relationships, the study has taken a phenomenological approach. For the nine university students who remembered having had an imaginary companion and who volunteered to share their stories, the aim was to understand the meanings attached to these companionships through idiosyncratic, personal accounts. The delineated phenomenon, ‘the remembered as told’, permitted an understanding of b…
In this research, I explored young girls’ (4 – 6 years) perceptions of female identity and role in in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Exploring the ways in which their gender identities were interpreted and manifested in narratives and stories to identify and analyse the influences, apparent ideologies and discourses that affect female gender construction in pre-school children in the KSA. The data was gathered through a multi-method approach using observations, story-telling, picture prompt cards, group interviews, drawings and annotations thus giving children ‘multiple modes of expression’. My research took place in a particular cultural context and I created a book that relates to the prohibition of females to ride a bicycle in public in the KSA. I analysed the data and interesting results emerged that included aspects such as normative gender roles, children’s criteria of permissible and nonpermissible behaviour and attitudes. The results of my research and analysis highlighted the fact that female gen…
Eight publications are presented with this thesis, with the first published in 1996 and the last in 2016. Three of the publications are books and five are peer reviewed journal articles arising from the research underpinning the books. Together, the publications constitute a coherent programme of research seeking to navigate contradictory discourses surrounding the role of early childhood educators in England since the introduction of regulation concerning early childhood education. The publications, which are both empirical and conceptually grounded, highlight increasing tensions for early years educators between an escalation in government prescription of early years curriculum content and an established early years pedagogy espousing child-led, play-based enquiry. The research programme is framed around three action research projects which gave rise to and informed the submitted publications. Whilst the first project focused on the practice of one Reception teacher the other two involved large numbers of e…
This thesis explores the experiences of six young children (four and five years of age) during the flow of unstructured family museum visits. Two of the children visited a museum of art and archaeology, two a museum of natural history and two a museum that is dedicated to children’s literature. Drawing on the field of childhood studies and in order to provide a means to listen closely to the young children’s experiences, a novel methodology called First Person Museum Ethnography (FPME) was developed and successfully trialled. FPME is underpinned by a novel configuration of theory that allows me to conceptualise first person video (FPV) and photographs as the children’s expressions (beyond verbal articulations) of their experiences. I argue that this allows me to apply an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis approach to exploring the children’s lived experiences during the visit and afterwards in interview. Data collection included the use of chest-mounted GoPro™ cameras worn by the children. These reco…
In today’s society, complex issues relating to socio-cultural integration are a key concern for policy makers, with far-reaching implications for domestic and foreign-language policies. In an increasingly globalized world, English continues to be used by many people from diverse linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, who need to communicate daily. The use of the informal register is crucial for developing successful professional and personal relationships, yet it has not received sufficient attention from foreign-language teachers, researchers and policy makers. This exploratory study addressed this research gap through the deployment of a multi-layered study, which focussed on the instruction and perception of the informal register. It is the product of a research project spanning almost five years in which it employed a one-group pretest-posttest intervention. In the intervention study, referred to as Stage One, 15 advanced foreign-language learners completed study materials comprising of listening, …
The thesis presents a study of citizenship education, by examining how it is taught in Israel. Its primary aim is to understand the relation between politics and education as it manifests in interactions between teachers and students. The study includes interviews with Israeli teachers about their practice, alongside a philosophical inquiry into the educational requirements of political life. Political phenomenology is introduced as a methodological basis for a new understanding of citizenship education. The first chapter explores the tenuous relationship between education and politics, and points to the specific dangers it poses in the Israeli case. The second chapter reviews the assumptions concerning pedagogy and politics within different accounts of citizenship education. The third chapter examines how these accounts influence Israeli educational discourse, through analysis of policy documents and educational research into citizenship education. Hannah Arendt’s conception of citizenship as political actio…