About the Department of Education
The Department of Education is one of the six founding departments of the University of York and, like the University, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013.
The Department offers an international, diverse and supportive environment for staff and students with collegiality, inclusion and equality at the heart of its core values. The department provides a supportive environment for staff and students. With a core staff of 53 academic staff plus numerous research fellows and visiting tutors, the Department has an extensive research portfolio and teaching programme. The Department has core team of 14 Professional Support staff including a Research Support Officer.
The Department is one of the leading Education Departments for research in the UK, with research funding from multiple UK and international sources. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the Department was ranked in the top ten of Education departments in the country for the proportion of 4* world leading research and was also in the top ten for the impact of its research.
The Department is widely recognized in the UK and beyond as a leading department in the field of education and have one of the largest graduate schools of education in the UK.
In 2014 the Department became the first Education department in the UK to have achieved Bronze level in the Athena SWAN gender equality charter mark, designed to address gender imbalance and underrepresentation in the arts, humanities and social sciences in higher education. This has been followed by the award of an Athena SWAN Bronze award in 2018.
Further information about the Department can be found at: http://www.york.ac.uk/education/
Research in the Department
Incorporating a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological approaches, the vision for research in the Department is to build a fundamental and applied understanding about education and to make an impact on educational policy and practice. The Department strives to build on its position as a national and international leader in educational research. The Department provides a generous range of support to researchers, including Departmental research funding, research leave, and a workload allocation model that provides dedicated research time, including additional support for externally funded research.
The Department’s research is focused around a number of research centres:
- Centre for Research on Education and Social Justice (CRESJ)
- Centre for Research in Language Learning and Use (CReLLU)
- Psychology in Education Research Centre (PERC)
- University of York Science Education Group (UYSEG)
The Department hosts the Department for Education funded National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy, led by Professor Emma Marsden, which aims to engage a network of teachers with research-informed professional development and teaching resources. The work of the Centre draws on research into the learning of grammar, vocabulary, sound-spelling correspondences, and the role of different types of practice.
The Psychology in Education Research Centre (PERC)
The Psychology in Education Research Centre (PERC) conducts innovative basic and applied psychological research relevant to educational contexts. The research of PERC members spans a wide range of topics (teaching and learning, language, motivation, behavioural genetics, mental health and well-being), from infancy to adulthood, using a range of methodologies. The goal of PERC is to conduct research that is both scientifically rigorous and broadly accessible to the psychology and education communities.
Centre for Research on Education and Social Justice (CRESJ)
The Centre for Research on Education and Social Justice undertakes multi-method research that explores social justice in education. Staff in CRESJ pursue research regarding social justice and education in the UK and internationally. We investigate perceptions of fairness; differential rates of access and achievement that apply across individuals and social groups; and, explore learning and teaching in areas such as citizenship, English language and literature.
Centre for Research in Language Learning and Use (CReLLU)
The aim of the Centre for Research in Language Learning and Use (CReLLU) is to lead cutting-edge interdisciplinary research relating to language learning, language use, and language in education. Research encompasses foreign, second, multilingual and first language acquisition and the relations between them.
Researchers work on projects focusing on a wide range of topics. These include many aspects of second language acquisition, such as bilingualism, biliteracy, classroom-based language learning and teaching, cognition, computer-assisted language learning, individual differences, language (education) policies, motivation, reading and writing.
CReLLU researchers work with a wide range of traditional and cutting-edge methodologies, offering expertise in many data collection and analysis techniques for applied linguistics research, such as experimental research design, discourse and corpus analysis, language elicitation tests, research synthesis. The Centre also has a psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics laboratory, allowing for research into real-time language processing (e.g., self-paced reading and listening; eye-tracking; and ERP recording). The Centre houses two large, international resources: The IRIS repository of materials and data for second language research and the OASIS database of accessible summaries of peer-reviewed published research.
University of York Science Education
Group
The University of York Science Education Group (UYSEG) aims to make a sustained positive impact on the outcomes of both formal and informal science education through undertaking high quality research that has an impact on policy and practice, through the development and evaluation of evidence-informed curricula that illustrate the importance of science, and through the training and support of practitioners.
UYSEG is interested in a wide range of aspects of teaching and learning of science. Research areas of interest include formal and informal learning in science, learning of science ideas, engagement and participation in science, the development of scientific literacy, systematic reviews (research syntheses) of research evidence in science education, evidence-informed practice, and the evaluation of interventions in science education. UYSEG attracts funding from a wide range of external groups for its research.
One of the unique aspects of UYSEG's work is its evidence-informed curriculum development. UYSEG draws on its own research, and the work of others, to develop science curriculum materials that are used in the UK and that have been adapted for use in many other countries. UYSEG’s current major evidence-informed development project is called Best Evidence Science Teaching (BEST) - https://www.stem.org.uk/best-evidence-science-teaching. The group maintains links with the National STEM Learning Centre on campus.
Teaching and learning
The Department is committed to providing a research-led, high quality experience to our students. Over 750 students per annum register on our undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes.
There are four undergraduate programmes offered by the Department:
- BA Education
- BA English in Education
- BSc Psychology in Education
- BA Sociology and Education (offered jointly with the Department of Sociology).
The Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) initial teacher training programme is offered in both core and school direct routes with specialism including English, History, Mathematics, Modern Foreign Languages and Science. The PGCE team work across the whole of the Yorkshire and Humberside region, and in around 50-60 school a year. In addition, there is a range of taught masters programmes:
- MA Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching
- MA Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching
- MA Education
- MA Global and International Citizenship Education
- MA Social Justice and Education
- MA Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
- MSc Psychology in Education
Within its undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes, the Department interprets the study of education widely, to include not only matters to do with schools, teaching and children, but also educational policy, the organization of education, access to education and aspects of personal development and well-being within educational settings. The BSc and MSc programmes in Psychology in Education focus on the application of psychology to education and are both BPS accredited.
Further detail of the Department’s teaching programmes can be found at http://www.york.ac.uk/education/
Doctoral Programme
Education has a large and vibrant research postgraduate community who are provided with excellent facilities and are aligned with one of the four research centres for the duration of their studies. Research students who join the Education Department can study on PhD programmes in Education, Applied Linguistics or TESOL.
The Department is part of the White Rose ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership, collaboration between the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. The Research Centre for the Social Sciences (RCeSS) at York is also a focal point for postgraduate activity.