Education

Curriculum and curriculum making has been an important strand of educational research at Stirling since 2007, when ESRC funding was secured for a project on curriculum making in schools and FE colleges.

Subsequent funded research into the development of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Government, 2010-11) and Teacher Agency (ESRC, 2011-12), and associated publications (including the seminal work on teacher agency) have cemented Stirling’s reputation internationally as a leading centre for curriculum studies.

The establishment of the Stirling Curriculum Centre has consolidated further Stirling’s position as a world leading hub for curriculum studies.

Our network brings together international curriculum scholars from Europe, North America and Australasia, including formal partnerships with Western University (Canada), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Karlstad University (Sweden). Activity has included hosting the European Conference on Curriculum Studies in 2017, taking on the editorship of the influential Curriculum Journal between 2018 and 2024, and significant input to national curriculum policy and capacity-building work with schools and teachers in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Our curriculum research has generated new knowledge about complex patterns of curriculum making, including identification of barriers, drivers, and unintended consequences of policy.

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Dr Joseph Smith, Dr Stella Mouroutsou or Professor Mark Priestley.

Now more than ever, young people, parents, educators and policy-makers are asking, what is learning and what makes it happen?

Our interdisciplinary work draws upon theories and methods to explore these questions in exciting ways. We are academics with real-world teaching, leadership and governance experience who are committed to professional learning research that empowers critique and change.

We have expertise in practice-based learning theories and cutting edge sociomaterial analyses; and in digital and art-based research methods. We often work closely with colleagues in other thematic areas and, together with our impressive doctoral students we continue to advance the field of professional education and leadership in exciting and powerful ways.

Our research aims to promote social improvement and reduce inequalities. We’ve achieved significant impacts on policy and practice in professional learning in Scotland and Wales. Our research on governance in further education colleges contributes to understanding governance and how this enables colleges to meet the needs of learners, employers and labour markets.

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Dr Romina Madrid or Dr Aileen Ireland.

Our research explores how children and young people learn about their rights, and participate in decision-making about matters that affect their education and other services.

Our research here has situated intergenerational dialogue approach to data collection, change, learning and impact. Many of our research projects - funded within Scotland and internationally - have reshaped the practices of educators, communities and the policies of key actors.

We’ve also worked on inclusion for children with additional needs for educational support, with a particular emphasis on those with language and behavioural difficulties.

Impacts have been realised through new guidelines, toolkits, and training for professionals in children’s services. The goals of the realisation of children’s participatory rights, improved relations between generations, greater efficacy in professional practice and support for children’s educational and wider development are addressed in connected ways.

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Dr Andrea Priestley or Dr Stella Mouroutsou.

Educational Linguistics, an interdisciplinary research area, has become an area of world-leading scholarship at the University of Stirling since 2014.

It is a field of study which focuses on varied domains of education. It approaches ‘education’ as a process and investigates both formal sites of teaching and learning as well as other social settings in which people interact to learn, engage, and understand.

Educational linguistics seeks to comprehend how texts shape people’s lives, how interactions open up and close down social possibilities and how social structures are reproduced and challenged through language and other forms of meaning-making.

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Dr Viola Wiegand or Dr Adnan Yilmaz.

Learning for Complex Futures is an interdisciplinary theme that focuses on decision-making, judgement, expertise and accountability in increasingly complex, often highly-technological and rapidly changing local and international environments.

Our work spans contexts from schools and universities, through work and workplaces, to informal learning and public pedagogy. It is characterised by a combination of significant theoretical development and community-engaged empirical research that innovates digital and blended research methods.

The philosophy of technology is a key focus as are critical pedagogies of the digital. Projects address issues such as:

• The ethical and political agency of digital systems and their impact on professional work and re-distribution of labour, as work and learning is increasingly delegated to the digital, including AI-Data systems.
• How to make Open Data a common good.
• How workers are learning to attune to complex human-digital interactions and new critical digital fluencies that impact professionalism.
• The development of complex professional competences such as professionalism and critical thinking.
• The development of capacity and agency in response to environmental issues such as waste and climate change.

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Dr Terrie Lynn Thompson and Dr Viola Wiegand.

The world faces numerous eco-social issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, intersecting with challenges such as poverty, war, exclusion, and extremism. Multi-faceted and intersectional injustices (e.g. intergenerational, racial, economic) persist in relation to the extent to which different communities have contributed to the current challenges and have access to resources to enable effective mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of environmental crises. Education (including formal, non-formal and informal education) has been widely recognised has having a key role to play in enabling and embodying a more eco-socially just and sustainable way of life.

Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is a theme which has informed education research, practice and policy engagement at Stirling for over two decades and is aligned with and informs many of the other research themes.

Our research has been funded by organisations including the Economic and Social Research Council, the Royal Society of Arts, Leverhulme and the British Educational Research Association. Our work continues to be achieved through partnership with a range of national and international organisations including British Council, Learning for Sustainability Scotland, Learning through Landscapes, Scottish Natural Heritage and Scottish Government.

Through research focused on Environmental and Sustainability education, we seek to explore, explain and support educators to co-design adaptive, reciprocal responses at a time when environmental and sustainability concerns such as biodiversity loss and climate change demand new forms of relational curriculum making with/in place. Through our research and policy engagement we aim to better understand and enable policy making, which is intergenerational, justice-oriented and responsive to place.

Find out more about ESE

• Research projects
• Publications and outputs
• Research commissioning
• Impact
• Study Education at Stirling

Get in touch

For enquiries, including those related to doctoral supervision, please contact Professor Greg Mannion and Professor Lizzie Rushton.