Head of School,
School of Education
Author: Professor Bruce Macfarlane, School of Education, University of Bristol
This will be a place where we can share our ideas about education and the work we are all engaged in: from teaching students, carrying out research and connecting with our community partners.
Not only that we will be exploring the process of helping our students through their academic journey with the School of Education, discussing exciting innovations in Seminars, student Open Days and events, guiding and shaping future teachers and educationalists, plus hearing from our dedicated and inspirational students themselves.
We have been involved in teacher education for over 100 years and have a long-standing commitment to developing interdisciplinary understandings of education for social justice.
This is not just about academic research. It also involves commitment to civic engagement and trying to widen the participation of previously under-represented groups within the School and University. Another of our commitments is to provide an excellent student experience at all levels. As a School we have recently experienced a period of rapid growth, especially at Masters level, and have seen the proportion of international students rising on our Masters in Education.
As a School within a highly ranked University we need to make sure that our collective standing as a research community is as high as possible. This year the School, along with others in the sector, will submit its return for the periodic Research Excellence Framework. Previously we have been ranked 5th in the UK and within the top 50 internationally. It is important for the School, and our students, that we maintain this high standing. We are further seeking to deepen our internationalisation in terms of high-quality partnerships with other Schools and Faculties of Education around the world and strengthen global perspectives within the curriculum.
Finally, we are aware that our student population is changing and we need to ensure that we adapt the curriculum to reflect this trend too. This is partly about the need to decolonise the curriculum and ensure that it better reflects knowledge and cultures from around the globe and for us to reflect on the extent to which it has previously been over-represented by largely Western and colonial perspectives.
All of this makes sense, I hope, both for our local students who will need to work in an ever more inter-connected world (despite Brexit!) and for our international students who bring a incredibly rich diversity of knowledge, traditions and cultures with them to study at Bristol.
The School of Education has a mission to do all of these things. It’s a tall order I know but then a vision needs to be something ambitious, I think. I hope this is a vision we are all striving as a community to achieve.
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