Dr Ellen Bishop

In October 2022, I started as a Postdoctoral Innovation Associate at the University of Leicester, funded by the ESRC IAA. The aim of the fellowship is to develop impact from my PhD research. This involves creating and delivering training within the education sector on supporting learners who speak English as an additional language (EAL). I will be engaging with teachers, schools, teacher training providers, and other educational institutions to disseminate the findings from my PhD research on best practice for supporting the learning and pastoral needs of EAL pupils.

I submitted my PhD thesis in September 2022. My PhD was funded by the ESRC MGS and was based within the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at the University of Leicester. My research examined the policies, practices, spatialities, and geographies in schools which impact the classroom education of EAL pupils. This project has a unique contribution to geography by addressing a gap in the literature on EAL and aims to raise real-life awareness of the challenges facing EAL pupils in schools. EAL is used to describe pupils who use another language besides English at home, referring to children who may have migrated to the UK as well as bilingual children born in the UK. 16.6% of pupils in state secondary schools are considered to be EAL, with this percentage and linguistic diversity growing, highlighting the importance of this research area.

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a secondary school working as a Teaching Assistant one day a week for a year to become immersed in the classroom, alongside 37 interviews with teachers on their experiences teaching EAL pupils. Findings from the research concern the educational policies, spatialities, multiculturalism, and emotional geographies which shape the classroom experiences of EAL pupils and the way the category is understood. In addition, it considers the wider implications their experiences may have on geographical understandings of the negotiation of language and multiculture in schools. It also examined how the learning and pastoral needs of EAL pupils can be best supported by staff, as well as the methodological challenges of balancing the responsibilities of being a teaching assistant and a researcher.

Outside of my research, I organise and facilitate the Critical and Creative Geographies research group meetings based within the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at University of Leicester. I have also taught on a number of Undergraduate modules within the School. I was also involved in a peer observation project, run through the University’s Leicester Learning Institute, as a participant and co-researcher. This involved being observed by and observing the teaching of fellow PhD researchers, and reflecting on the experience together through learning conversations. A co-written paper on this project was published in Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching in 2021. I was also a co-researcher in the interdisciplinary Migration, Health and Education Tiger Team at University of Leicester. This project involved researching how recent migrants navigate the UK’s health system and their awareness of certain health conditions.