Like many academics, I get to my office every morning and battle the problem of Too Much To Read. To tell the truth, most days I give up the fight. Under pressure to publish or perish, academics are producing mountains of text every year, even in a tiny sub-specialty like research education.  I don’t […] … learn more→

  Most academics regularly submit papers and compete for grants and promotions. These endeavours are necessary for their success but often end in rejection. Responses to rejection in academia have typically been individually focused. Most discussions of the topic describe what academics themselves can do to cope with rejection. For example, in a watershed tweet […] … learn more→

School closures have left many parents in charge of overseeing their children’s education at home. If you are one of them, you might be struggling with maths in particular – not least due to having to grapple with topics and techniques you are unfamiliar with, such as number bonds, abundant numbers, chunking and more. But this is where a […] … learn more→

The exposure of children under the age of 6 to digital tools, and in particular to screens, worries as much as it questions. Families and professionals and professionals in health and education find themselves confronted with the same problems. Difficulties that were exacerbated in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis: what advice should be given to those […] … learn more→

Nearly half of LGBT+ pupils are bullied in school because of their gender or sexual orientation. In fact, LGBT+ bullying is the most common type of bullying in schools. Just 27% of secondary school pupils believe it would be safe to come out as LGBT+ in their schools. Despite this, a 2020 report shows that only one-fifth of secondary school students report […] … learn more→

  Had someone asked, when I defended my PhD, what my biggest aspiration was, my answer would have been “to get a professorship”. To get there, however, I had to survive my “transitional years” and build a profile. Everyone told me how important it was to show a successful funding track-record and publish well. Accordingly, […] … learn more→

Maybe you are lucky enough to be fluently bilingual or even trilingual and hope to capitalize on these advantages. Or perhaps you just love the challenges of mastering a foreign language and helping people communicate across linguistic borders. Regardless of your motivation, there are best practices, tips and tricks to help you prepare for a […] … learn more→

This is a story, a my story, which leads to eight pointers about writing for publication. I’m currently writing a paper. Well, yes, always writing something. But right now it’s a paper. A paper designed to do some thinking work that will then inform a book. I’m not writing this paper by myself, but I […] … learn more→

The last weeks of January and the first of February are dates that in the university environment are associated with evaluation and exams. This year, in the context of the pandemic, we have observed a debate that has reached confrontation, regarding the adequacy or not of taking face-to-face exams in universities, at the height of the […] … learn more→

My earliest encounters with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are etched into my torn and tattered copy of the The Riverside Chaucer. I have even more indelible memories of my first seminar: sitting around a large table, forcibly holding down the edges of the hefty paperback, and nervously waiting for my turn to read a line of the General Prologue. Out loud. In […] … learn more→