FERSA University of Cambridge Blog
Faculty of Education Research Students' Association
I’m writing in the arid, breezy shade outside my £10 per night hotel in northeastern Uganda. This weekend I’m taking a break from PhD life. Not really. I’m actually here to interview alumnae from the secondary school where my research is based. Being an ethnographer, everyday and every moment can be a research moment. There is taking a break, but not turning off.
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My research focuses upon how we read on screens, compared to printed pages. It’s a topic I’m profoundly interested in because of how our reading habits are changing right under our fingertips — this is especially so at a time when it seems that printed books are surpassing ebooks in terms of our preferred reading medium.
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Graduate students learn very quickly how to perfect their elevator-pitch, the generally accessible, succinct description of their research. It is employed at conferences, social situations in college, and even family gatherings—Aunt Muriel always seems to ask, “Remind me again what exactly it is you do?”
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My work focuses on four terms with burdened histories: intelligence, genetics, race, and socio-economic status. Broadly, I use mixed-methods and intersectionality theory to examine how genetics research into intelligence and educational attainment might affect the United States education system, where documented racial and socioeconomic disparities prevail and where teacher perceptions of student ability are known to affect student performance and referrals for gifted education programs.
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The young people I research with have been identified as having special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the best way to communicate the purpose of my research to them. I have decided to use my animation skills to make the research, concepts, and ethics explicit.
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In this blog post, Amy Haidi shares a poem which represents the thoughts she had during her first term as a PhD student at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge. Amy also reflects on the joys and challenges of undertaking a PhD, highlighting how Cambridge is a special place for learning.
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As storied and unique as Cambridge is, its collegiate system is perhaps simultaneously the most baffling, interesting, and worthwhile. Particularly as a foreigner, I had little idea how to go about selecting one, or what would come with being a member of a college. I was originally bemused by this system and thought little more of it than an idiosyncrasy of an eight hundred year old university. It was after my arrival that I came to understand its value and appreciate what it had to offer.
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Education is an interdisicplinary field. At the Faulty of Education in Cambridge, you will therefore find sociologists, historians, economists, psychologists, linguists, and literature scholars working side by side. Via Twitter we asked some of these scholars for book recommendations. Which book would they recommend to research students of Education and why? Not surprisingly, we received a wide range of suggestions from across different disciplines!
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The Faculty of Education is an interdisciplinary research environment, with scholars approaching Education from the perspectives of Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Economics and Literature. In this short video, you can learn about why students decided to come to Cambridge for doctoral studies in Education.
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Thanks for visiting the blog of the Faculty of Education Research Students’ Association (FERSA) at the University of Cambridge. This blog was founded in 2017 by Stine Ravnå, Tyler Shores and Danai Giampili, three PhD students at the Faculty of Education.
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