The Faculty of Social Sciences and Warwick Ventures celebrated the conclusion of the first-ever ESRC funded VIBE (Venture Into Business Engagement) programme; developed especially for Social Scientists to equip researchers with skills and support to explore partnerships with and engage with business. A number of our MGS students took part in the programme.

The MGS is delighted that one of our current collaborative studentship partners, onebillion, has been shortlisted (https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning/teams/onebillion) as one of the five finalists for the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

The $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open-source, scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months.

Professor Nicola Pitchford from the University of Nottingham who is lead supervisor on the collaborative studentship with onebillion will be attending the awards ceremony of the Global Learning XPRIZE in Los Angeles in May.

We wish them best of luck in the final!

The Midlands Graduate School is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Jon Coaffee from the University of Warwick as the new Midlands Graduate School DTP Director. Jon Coaffee is Professor in Urban Geography based in the Politics and International Studies department at Warwick and has been deputy-director of the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities (WISC), which home to the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Urban Science and Progress. Professor Coaffee takes up the post from 1 May 2019 and will succeed Professor Nicholas Gane.

Professor Gane is standing down from his role as Director of the MGS DTP at the end of April 2019. After working with the Warwick Doctoral Training Centre for 3 years and directing the MGS DTP from its inception in 2016, he will return to his home department – Sociology – at the University of Warwick. Through a period of study leave that he has been awarded for the next academic year, he plans to complete his research on the history of concept of competition and to start a new project on private, corporate, and sovereign debt. He will also serve as a member of the REF 2021 sub-panel for Sociology. We bid a fond farewell to Professor Gane and are grateful for all of his hard work with the MGS.

Midlands Graduate School DTP student Jason Anderson (University of Warwick) reporting back after his ESRC-funded Overseas Institution Visit to Ambedkar University Delhi, India.

As part of his visit Jason delivered 2 talks for lecturers and students, and also led a half day seminar ‘Translanguaging in Indian Classrooms: Now and In Future’ on 30 January 2019 with a researcher from the University of Delhi. The seminar dealt with several crucial aspects of language teaching-and-learning such as the significance of translanguaging in Indian multilingual contexts in general and ELT classrooms in particular, teachers’ beliefs and opinions about using multilingual resources, teacher education for teaching English in multilingual contexts to mention a few.

Jason also led a workshop on ‘Teaching Grammar: Exploring Different Lesson Structures’ for teacher education students. The workshop focused on the structure of grammar lesson, connect between lesson structure and prevalent frameworks of language teaching, and a critical examination of frameworks. Participating students found it extremely useful in clarifying and consolidating their training. Both the talk and the seminar were well received, generating much lively discussion and interest in a topic of great importance to language teaching around the world today.

In addition to time spent within the University, Jason undertook further activities connected with the visit which have had a positive impact upon his PhD work:

“I visited the offices of British Council (BC) Delhi on 25 January, where I had a long meeting with the Head of Teacher Education. It was extremely productive, and she was very enthusiastic about my research, particularly the plan for the participants to contribute to a co-authored publication. She is keen for BC to support this work, and with this in mind, she is interested in helping to organise an opportunity for the participants in the project to come together towards the end of it to enable them to produce the publication that is planned.

I paid 3 visits to (National Council of Educational Research and Training) NCERT Delhi offices (on 25, 26 and 29 January), meeting with 3 different experts (2 researchers and 1 teacher education specialist) where I was able to discuss the project and get insights and input from these experts, who all were willing to allow me to audio record the interviews. One of them was instrumental in helping me get permission to carry out the pilot study that followed in early February in Telangana. He also introduced me to a number of important educators in the English language teaching community in Delhi on a Saturday afternoon social event. This led to an additional meeting with an experienced academic and coursebook writer in English language teaching, who gave me useful advice for data collection in challenging contexts when we met. So the visits to NCERT were extremely useful for my research.”