Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham, UK)
Professor Pat Thomson PSM PhD FAcSS FRSA is Convenor of the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacy (CRACL). Pat is known for her interdisciplinary engagement with questions of creative and socially just learning and change. Much of this work has been in collaboration with Professor Christine Hall. Pat has had a long term research partnership with Professor Barbara Kamler with whom she writes about academic writing (see publications). Her academic writing and research education blog 'patter' is archived by the British Library and posts are frequently republished elsewhere. She tweets as @ThomsonPat and has an academic writing 'patter' facebook page. Her research activities can be seen on a range of websites - the TALE project, the Signature Pedagogies project, I worked at Raleigh, the Get Wet project, Performing Impact, Cultural Value and Live Art, and Quality in Alternative Education. She is an Editor of the international peer refereed journal, Educational Action Research (Taylor and Francis). Her current research focuses on creativity, the arts and change in schools and communities, and postgraduate writing pedagogies. She is currently devoting more time to exploring, reading and thinking about imaginative and inclusive pedagogies which sit at the heart of change. She is also looking at the ways in which innovative approaches to schooling are spread with /against policy agendas - and within and between countries. She maintains an interest in the changing work of school administrators and in children and young people who do not get the full benefits of education. All of her research is underpinned by a commitment to social justice and an interest in questions of power, identity, place and agency.She has had extensive involvement in school, family and community programmes and works closely with practitioners and pupils as co-researchers. She has expertise in policy, sociology and cultural geography and has a particular interest in text-based and arts informed research methods. She frequently uses visual research methods in her work.
Download Thomson Presentation at SUSEES 2017
Educational researchers generally want their research to make a difference to policy, practice and/or teaching. ‘The difference’ is understood multiple ways – the provision of new empirical evidence, innovative argument, penetrating problematisation, insightful analysis and so on. Regardless of what is understood as ‘making the difference’, the research has to be communicated to communities that want, need or would simply like to know about it. Enter academic publication.
Academic publication is not a neutral activity, not simply a matter of putting words on a page, meeting disciplinary conventions and then seeing the resulting papers and books in print. Academic publication is now irrevocably about geopolitics and political economies – who publishes what, where, in what language, in what medium and on what platform at what cost, and who has access to it. Furthermore, academic publishing is now the stuff of institutional audit and national league tables, performance management and promotion systems. Academic identities and their institutions are made in and through publication. Academic publication is a high stakes social practice.
The lecture examines how early career researchers, now often members of an academic precariat, can engage with this publication topography.
Readings
Hubert Ertl, Klaus Zierer, David Phillips & Rudolf Tippelt (2015) Disciplinary traditions and the dissemination of knowledge. An international comparison of publication patterns in journals of education, Oxford Review of Education, 41:1, 64-88. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic publishing and the myth of linguistic injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing, 31, 58-69. Thomson, P. (2016). Text work/identity work online. In Sugrue, C., & Mertkan, S. (Eds.). (2016). Publishing and the Academic World: Passion, Purpose and Possible Futures. London: Routledge.