MMU Good Practice Exchange

Research-led Teaching

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Project Details

Nina Jolley, Senior Lecturer in Primary Education, and David Heywood, Reader in STEM Primary Education, have a long standing practice of research-led teaching. This film showcases one research-led teaching session organised to explore the relationship between art and science in a primary education setting.

Research led teaching - getting published from practice

It would be an expectation for university taught sessions to be research informed. However, research led teaching (RLT) is essentially different from this. RLT is focussed on synthesising teaching and research with a view to both enhancing student experiences in taught sessions and securing research publication. It is a way of working in which the research process is integral and explicit within the pedagogy. The approach is based on explicitly 'problematising practice'. In this paradigm, teaching is planned specifically to provide opportunity for students to reflect on their own understanding as it emerges within the session through documenting critical incidents in their learning. The purpose is to procure research data on the efficacy of pedagogy from the student perspective. It is designed to promote pedagogical understanding through systematic enquiry into learning. To date, this RLT has resulted in successful REF publications in both art and science education and is currently being used to investigate interdisciplinary learning both in university and schools.