Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
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- Honorary Lecturer
- IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy & Assessment
- UCL Institute of Education
I began my career as a secondary school geography teacher, working primarily in London and Singapore. In 2014, I transitioned to working in higher education and took up a post as Lecturer in Geography Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, where I worked for eight years. I joined Moray House School of Education and Sport (University of Edinburgh) as Lecturer in Teacher Education in August 2022, and remain as an Honorary Lecturer at IOE.
At IOE, I have worked in teacher education (including leading the Secondary Geography PGCE), and supervised students at Masters and Doctoral level. I also established and convened an undergraduate module in UCL’s Geography department ‘Geography Education’, which critically examined the complex and multi-faceted relationships between geography, education and everyday life. Finally, I co-chaired IOE’s Early Career Network from 2021-2022. This was a cross departmental role which involved working with a range of colleagues to explore how best to support and empower colleagues in the first stages of the academic careers, and to co-create more just educational spaces.
I completed my PhD part time whilst working full time in schools and latterly in higher education. My thesis was an investigation into children’s geographies and their value to geography education in schools. My research is interdisciplinary, considering the relationships between children, geography and education. I am particularly interested in children’s geographies and children’s rights, and considering how education can empower young people in their lives and futures. I am also interested in geographies of education, particularly in considering how in/justices are (re)produced in, and through, education, and the relationships between education, space and place. I have a significant research interest in geography education, and I am interested in how geography is constructed, represented, taught, experienced and perceived in schools and universities. My focus is mainly on education in urban contexts, and I retain a particular interest in London.


My main research interests lie in the following areas:
Children’s geographies – I am interested in children’s experiences and imaginations of the world, and in exploring how we can best empower young people in, and through, research. I am particularly interested in children’s lives in cities and children’s experiences of educational spaces and systems. I have used a variety of participatory approaches with young people including storytelling and mapping. I am also interested in research ethics with young people and children’s rights, and in considering how, and why, children’s ‘everyday’ lives and geographies matter to education and educators.
Geography education– considering how geography is constructed, represented, experienced and perceived in formal educational spaces including, but not limited to, school sand universities. I have a particular interest in students' experiences of geographical education, including consideration of education as an embodied and affective experience, as students engage with complex debates about the Earth and the future. I am also interested in the relationships between geography as an academic discipline, geography as a school subject and geography as an inherent part of everyday life and our experiences of being in the world.
Geographies of education and educational spaces – I am interested in how education relates to social and spatial in/justices, in a multi-scalar way. I am also interested in how educational spaces are experienced by those who work or study in them and considering how geographical concepts such as space and place can help us to better understand education. For example, I am currently investigating PGCE students' experiences of racialisation in schools and universities in London through walking interviews and mapping.
(Geography) teacher education – in exploring how geography teachers can be best supported and empowered throughout their careers.
Place and time-space – exploring how these concepts can help us to better understand both children’s lives and geographies, and educational spaces, systems, processes and institutions.