The Institute of Education’s annual Postgraduate Research (PGR) Conference took place virtually on Wednesday 30th June 2021, and was a great success. The conference theme was Educational research and resilience in the face of adversity.
In the opening keynote presentation, Prof. Alan Floyd (IoE’s Education, Language and Learning Research Division Lead), inspired our doctoral students by highlighting the importance of resilience in achieving success not only in educational research, but for those working in education and reminded the conference attendees that out of adversity often comes creativity, innovation and new possibilities.
The day then continued with research presentations by staff and students with insightful question and answer sessions after the presentations. The presentations reflected a wide range of fascinating educational research topics being investigated here at the IoE.
This year for the first time, the IoE 3–Minute Thesis (3MT) competition was held, with a number of high quality entries, from doctoral students across all stages of their doctoral journey. The presentations were judged based on communication style, comprehension and engagement and the winner was: Fay Al Sawaha, a first-year PhD student, with her enthralling 3MT presentation, titled ‘The lines beneath the veil: investigating female Bedouin aged students identity construction in Kuwait’. Runners up were Lauren Vincent with her presentation titled: ‘A proposed study into academic identity in UK based dance lecturers’ and Helen Gormley with her presentation titled: ‘Building mathematicians of the future: developing mathematical proficiency through play in early years classrooms’. Links to the 3MT entries and research presentations can be found here.
The conference concluded with Dr. Natthapoj Vincent Trakulphadetkrai (Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and Co-Deputy Director of the IoE’s Postgraduate Research Studies programme) leading the celebration of achievements of our doctoral students and announcing the winner and runners up of the 3MT competition.
The day was a great opportunity to learn about some of the outstanding research taking place here at the IoE and to create a sense of community within our research students and staff.
Well done to the Conference Organising Committee (Aniqa Leena, Chengcheng Guo, Fei Lian, Tiantian Zhou, and Ugochi Uzo) for helping to ensure that this was a successful conference. The full programme of the conference can be found here, with links to recording of the presentations embedded, and conversations relating to this conference can be found on Twitter here using the #UoRIoEPGRConference hashtag.