After completing my PGCE in secondary science education at KCL, I have worked as a teacher for almost 20 years in inner-London state secondary schools and post-16 colleges. My professional journey has connected me closely to the needs of young Londoners, and to the awareness of what continues to be lacking in their educational experiences in school. I am particularly interested in the difficulties of education systems to address the greater socio-ecological crises that impact on these young people and the ways in which schooling struggles to provide them with the knowledge and skills to challenge these issues and to rise above the limits they impose. I completed an MA at the UCL Institute of Education, where I studied the impacts of marginalised identities - migrant, minority, refugee, transgender, queer sexuality – on educational experience. My MA thesis explored the marginalisation of young inner-city Londoners from environmental education and mainstream environmentalism, and investigated where their values lie with respect to their environment. This thesis led to the development of my PhD. I will be completing my PhD full time, while remaining as a teacher of Biology and Environmental Science on a very part time basis in a large 6th Form College in Central London.

Thesis title

Building methodologies of storying: Exploring urban diasporic youth relationships with, and behaviours towards, the environment

Principal supervisor: Melissa Glackin

Secondary supervisor: John Owens

Abstract

This project seeks to develop a methodological approach that supports the exploration of the relationship between urban young people, the urban environment and environmentalism. To meet this, the aims are: To create space for urban diasporic young people to develop and share affective outcomes of engagement with more-than-human entities. Exploring becoming-with through storying, in engagement with the more-than-human urban subjects with whom young Londoners share lived experiences. Exploring the affective outcomes of building and sharing new hybrid stories in spaces where multicultural and multi-species urban communities come together. Generating knowledge of the affective outcomes of this storytelling which can feed back into urban schooling, and support in constructing reconfigured worlds for future urban citizens.