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June 2019

Faculty alumna wins the Alumni of the Year Award 2019

Jo Williamson (Warnock), a graduate of the CCCU Primary Education programme, has won the Alumni of the Year Award, she says:”I am delighted to have won this years CCCU Alumni award. Having graduated from CCCU in 2001 as a primary school teacher, 11 years later I went on to become the Headteacher of a local primary school, St John’s Church of England. I have been Headteacher since 2012 and during this time the school has worked closely with CCCU. It is such a privilege to support the University, as for me it was a life changing place and holds many special memories.”

Jo is the Headmistress of St John’s Church of England Primary School in Canterbury. She is described by her nominees as “an exceptional alumna, who willingly offers both her own, and her school’s, time to support Christ Church through a wide range of activities.” These have included:

  • regularly assisting in the recruitment interviewing process for prospective students.
  • leading a workshop at the Faculty of Education Newly Qualified Teachers (NQT) conference around teacher wellbeing.
  • contributing to teaching on the BA Year 1 Primary Education module.
  • rethinking teaching, learning and assessment when she was part of a headteachers’ roundtable.
  • serving on the Faculty of Education’s Partnership Executive Committee.
  • being heavily involved with the revalidation of the Primary Education programmes, both BA and PGCE, giving guidance as to the relevant school-based content for the new modules.
  • offering large numbers of student placements at her school, where the Faculty can be confident that students’ progress and development will be expertly mentored and supported. There are currently 14 Christ Church students based at St John’s. Last year, Jo offered three Christ Church NQTs teaching positions in her school. There is strong evidence that indicates that the support and mentoring they are receiving is ensuring a successful NQT year.

Jo Williamson with Harriet Burrowes and Katie Gravenor from St John’s Primary.


Jo has carried this commitment through with great determination, even when her school faced difficult and complex circumstances. During this time, Jo devised a highly creative approach that enabled Christ Church students to volunteer their time to engage with children’s learning through a structured reading mentor programme. This both supported the children’s development and our students’ understanding of the importance of a reading curriculum tailored to individual children’s needs. This enrichment project has now run for four years and continues to be greatly appreciated by the students who take part.

Jo Williamson with Harriet Burrowes and Katie Gravenor from St John’s Primary and CCCU Primary staff Catherine Carden and Tracey Parvin.


Jo remembers her time at Canterbury Christ Church with great fondness having moved from High Wycombe for her university place and remained in the Canterbury area since: “I still remember the first induction and how you felt you were starting out on a new venture. It gave me such a good starting block in my career. I still feel part of of the CCCU community.”

The Faculty of Education is so proud of Jo and thanks her for all she does. Our students thrive during their time at the school and are given so many opportunities to observe and experience enthusiastic and stimulating teaching.

Well done, Jo!

Celebrating our great partnerships

Last night, CCCU hosted the Annual Business Awards which recognised the outstanding contribution that businesses and community partners make to the university. Nominees and guests were invited to the ceremony in Augustine House to receive their awards.

Emily Lau, the Partnership Development Lead, for the Faculty of Education, nominated Support & Action To End Domestic Abuse (SATEDA) which has supported students on the BA Counselling, Coaching and Mentoring to gain practical experience. SATEDA is a domestic abuse charity who counsel and mentor children, teenagers and adults who have suffered domestic violence. Their programmes include domestic abuse support for victims, educational programmes in school and support for families at the Family Courts.

Here is what Emily wrote in her nomination:
“I would like to nominate SATEDA as charity of the year based on the outstanding dedication they have shown to my students on the BA Coaching, Counselling and Mentoring practice. One of the student’s modules is focused on Professional Practice and SATEDA have been an amazing charity, who have taken time away from their busy daily operations, to invest in creating important learning experiences for my students. The charity provided over five students with a placement opportunity that allowed them to see group programmes for parents and young people in action; this has inspired many of the students thinking about future careers and volunteering. Sue, one of their facilitators took time to come into the university a number of times to meet with students one to one to follow up their questions. Carey, Jo and Matt gave up a whole afternoon to run a round table with students providing open and honest realities about how they got into the profession and their work. Experiences reflecting on the realities of practice support Coaching, Counselling and Mentoring students to understand and navigate their way to a job, it is an invaluable learning experience and I thank SATEDA wholeheartedly.”

The Faculty of Education are delighted that SATEDA have been recognised with this award and thank them for their outstanding contribution to supporting our students.

Brave, or plain stupid – the beautiful risk of writing autobiographically

Dr. Paula Stone. Senior Lecturer Primary Education recently gave a talk at our Faculty’s recent Narrative Research Day. Here she reflects on her presentation:

You’re brave, was a constant refrain when I told people I was writing autobiographically for my doctoral thesis. I can’t deny that writing autobiographically for an academically assessed piece of work, was risky. Ignoring accusations of self-indulgency, self-absorption, narcissism or solipsism, in the spirit of feminist epistemology, I decided to tell the story of who I was, to who I am now, during which, I shared not only the facts about the past and the present, but also my feelings as I struggled with my ‘self’ as a middle-aged, middle-class woman who was raised in poverty.

As a young woman, I occupied the position of white, working-class and female, with the related ways of knowing and being. But I have achieved within the education system, I am what Bourdieu and Passeron would call ‘une miraculée’ – an educationally highly successful member of a disadvantaged group, who has survived and thrived in education, despite the unjust distribution of capital in the academic system.

When I started to work at the university, despite my academic success and the concomitant upward mobility, I felt like an academic tourist – a visitor or a stranger in the academic field. But through auto/biography, an approach first established by Liz Stanley, which challenges the divisions between self/other, public/private, immediacy/memory, personal and political, I was able to, for the first time, examine my feelings of illegitimacy. I discovered that my past and present were intimately connected, and I realised that my enduring feelings of illegitimacy were not only psychological and but also sociological.

Finding my voice as a woman from working-class origins, as someone who has embodied feelings of insecurity and inferiority all her life, has been more difficult than I anticipated. And yes, writing my auto/biography has created tremendous emotion and the temptation to hide from it was, on occasion, almost irresistible. But using Pierre Bourdieu and Axel Honneth as psycho-social analytical frameworks I was able to examine, how the complex issues of il/legitimacy and agency continue to impact the formation of self and identity for an individual who has crossed class boundaries.

As Carl Rogers taught, growth and change can only happen when we experience empathetic understanding of our frame of reference, and I have now begun to understand mine. My PhD has provided what Homi Bhabha calls a third space, a space in which I have been able to renegotiate how I see my ‘self’ and create someone new.

My story is an individual story but it could also be what Richardson calls a ‘collective story’ – a story which tells the experience of a sociologically constructed category of people in the context of larger socio-cultural and historical forces.

So rather than being self-indulgent, I would like to suggest that my research was self-knowing, self-respectful, and self-luminous. I know that I have created new meanings for myself through documenting my life story, and my hope is that I have done the same for anyone who reads my thesis. Through sharing my own personal experience of my movement across class categories, I aim to raise awareness of the types of challenges encountered by people who, like me, have occupied both a working-class and a middle-class habitus within the same lifetime.

If you would like to read more, my thesis is called “Confronting Myself: An auto/biographical exploration of the impact of class and education of the formation of self and identity.” Which can be found in CReaTE.

References:
• Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, (2nd edn) (Trans. Richard Nice). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications.
• Honneth, A. (1995) The struggle for recognition: The moral Grammar of social conflict. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Richardson, L. (1997) Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Jersey, Rutgers University Press.
• Rogers, C.R. (1967) On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy: by Carl R. Rogers. London: Constable and Co. Ltd.
• Stanley, L. (1995). The autobiographical I: The theory and practice of feminist auto/biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press.