This blog post is written by the Institute of Education’s (IoE) 2022 Postgraduate Research Conference Organising Committee which is made up of IoE doctoral students (Xiaobo Li, Hongyan Zhang and Xingrong Chen) and supported by Dr. Billy Wong (Deputy Director of the IoE’s Postgraduate Research Studies).
The IoE’s annual Postgraduate Research (PGR) Conference was successfully held on 29th June 2022. This year, the conference was held virtually in the morning and in-person in the afternoon. It was very well attended. The theme of this year’s conference was Doing Research during and after the Pandemic: Challenges, Opportunities.
In the opening keynote presentation, Dr. Naomi Flynn (Research Impact Lead, University of Reading’s Institute of Education) made her keynote speech, titled Research in a global pandemic: Challenges and opportunities. She talked about the ways in which researchers have had to be agile and creative in their response to research during the global pandemic. Drawing on her own experiences, and those of her current doctoral students, she explored the explicit and implicit ways in which the pandemic has affected the research journey. Her reflections highlighted not just the challenges but also the unexpected opportunities of conducting real-world research in a crisis.
At this year’s conference, 16 research presentations were delivered across three different research presentation formats i.e., the 10-minutes on-line presentation format, the 3-minutes pre-recorded presentation format, and the 10-minutes in-person presentation format. All the presentations were judged based on the creativity, organisation of content and the quality of the oral presentation. The winner of the 10-minutes on-line presentation was Lauren Vincent, for her presentation, titled “But you’re not an academic, are you?” A study exploring the development of academic identity in dance lecturers. The winner of the 3-minute pre-recorded presentation was Fei Lian for her presentation, titled The Moon and Sixpence: A qualitative study of the professional identity development of highly-educated female teachers at primary/secondary schools in Beijing. Lastly, the winner of the 10-minutes in-person presentations was Aniqa Leena for her presentation, titled Assessing the impact of changes to teaching on multilingual pupils’ English language proficiency.
The conference was concluded by Dr. Billy Wong leading the celebration of achievements of our doctoral students and announcing the winners of the three presentation formats.
This conference provides a great opportunity for both staff and doctoral students to communicate their research to others.
This IoE PGR conference was organised by IoE doctoral students (Xiaobo Li, Hongyan Zhang and Xingrong Chen) and supported by Dr. Billy Wong (Deputy Director of the IoE’s Postgraduate Research Studies).