H&SS Grant Capture Fund AY 2022/23: ESRC grant development and stakeholder mapping with a non-academic partner.

The purpose of this GCF application is to enable a research team to gather for a week to carry out two activities (grant writing and stakeholder mapping) that will serve as a stepping stone towards submitting an ESRC New Investigator Grant. The proposed project would support the early career PI to become an independent researcher, build on existing research previously conducted in the Department of Education, collaborate and engage in knowledge exchange with an experienced researcher and with a non-academic partner as Co-Is, address SDG 4 (quality education), and produce high-impact policy and pedagogical outputs that would directly influence the non-academic partner’s international institutions.
The research aims to explore the role of ‘student voice’ in transformative education for 16–18-year-olds. Whilst the last decade has seen a growth in attentiveness to ‘student voice’, the extent to which it has successfully been embedded as a hallmark of ‘quality education’ (SDG4) is contested (Pearce & Wood, 2019). This is significant because education whose central remit is to be transformative, or to enact social change, requires a focus on ‘student voice’. Not doing so results in a form of social injustice that Fraser (2008) terms ‘misrepresentation’, which in turn – according to Tickly and Barrett (2011) – contravenes a core aspect of how they define ‘quality education’.
The project will use the United World Colleges (UWCs) as a case-study. The UWCs are formed of 18 colleges spread across the globe, whose unique model (established in 1962) aims to deliver transformative education (social action and change) by bringing together a diverse student body from a broad range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Despite the advances the UWCs have made, a recent five-year Harvard Impact Report on the Colleges (Clark et al., 2022) echoes a problem our non-academic partner (as Head of one of the Colleges) has identified: a series of ‘missed opportunities’ whereby the UWCs do not appear to maximise ‘student voice’ and diversity as part of their transformative education.
Given the UWCs’ commitment to diversity and social action, they are a fertile context to address the following preliminary research questions: How do students develop a critical appreciation of diverse social, cultural and identity backgrounds? How is this critical appreciation conducive to social change? How is ‘student voice’ integrated across the different types of learning (formal, non-formal, and informal) within the UWCs?