Initiatives

Current and Continuing Priorities, 2011-2012

The Centre is developing collaborative partnerships in the areas of school leadership, effective pedagogies and initial and continuing teacher education, aiming to explore synergies across these key themes. Within these themes, a number of programmes focus on specific aspects of individual and social learning, on the social and cultural conditions which support or constrain change, and the implicit role of leadership in that process. For more details about individual initiatives see the links below:

	ANTSIT (Appropriate New Technologies to Support Interactive Teaching in Zambian schools The ANTSIT project, funded by DfID, investigates how innovative approaches to using educational technologies in conjunction with interactive pedagogies and learning resources can significantly improve teaching and learning in primary schools in Zambia.
	ASKAIDS (African Sexual Knowledges and HIV/AIDS)
	Building Headteachers' Leadership Capacity for Enhancing Quality Teaching and Learning in Ghanaian Basic schools The three key aims of this programme are to strengthen the leadership capacity of basic school headteachers in Ghana, to improve the quality of learning through school and classroom leadership, and to influence policy making so that school leadership is centred on pupil, professional and organisational learning.
	Caribbean Poetry Project The Caribbean Poetry Project aims to promote achievement through learning and teaching of Caribbean poetry in schools in the Caribbean and UK, to develop a joint research element between the University of West Indies (UWI) and Centre, and to incorporate elements of the national UK Poetry Archive within the project.
	Gender and Education in the Caribbean This project seeks to identify strategies which have the potential to raise achievement of primary age pupils in government schools in Antigua, and to develop school-based communities of practice in order to enable headteachers and senior teacher to engage in dialogue about pedagogy and leadership for learning.
	Gender and Education in Eastern Africa The project aims, in collaboration with FAWE and UNICEF, to develop an understanding of practice in relation to gender and education in East Africa, to develop research and intervention projects that are focused around the needs of girls in Kenya and Uganda, and to impact positively and directly on educational policy and practice.
	ICT in East African schools and teacher education
	OER4Schools (Introducing digital Open Educational Resources into Zambian primary schools through school-based professional development The OER4Schools project aims to help teachers and learners develop activities which use digital technology and resources in effective, interactive ways, and to share their new subject practices and curriculum resources with others.
	Pedagogy and Leadership in a Tanzanian School: A Whole School Perspective This intervention programme has been based initially in a typical urban school in a high density, heterogeneous community with high levels of poverty and unemployment, in Dar es Salaam. The intensive case study research has focused on the teaching of English, with the aim of improving the quality of teaching, learning and leadership throughout the school.
	Youth poverty in the Commonwealth (Jo-Anne Dillabough) This project focuses on aspects of young people’s lives in three urban centres (Capetown, Mumbai, and Vancouver). It will seek to identify and analyse the relationship between 21st century forms of rising social anxiety in large urban centres and excluded low income youth’s perceptions of heightened surveillance regimes at the fringe of the urban core.