Georgia Lin is a DPhil student in Education and a Clarendon Fund Scholar. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on decolonising curriculums, critical research methodologies in higher education and its links to student activism movements for social justice.
Georgia holds an MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies with Distinction from the University of Oxford (Linacre College), also supported by the Clarendon Fund. She earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts with High Distinction degree at the University of Toronto (Diaspora and Transnational Studies and Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity).
Outside of her DPhil work, Georgia is an experienced equity, diversity, and inclusion facilitator and choral scholar in Oxford.
PUBLICATIONS:
Lin, G., Stevenson, K., Adcock, A., Cram, F., & Lawton, B. (Accepted). “Intergenerational resiliencies of young Māori sole mothers: A feminist analysis of Aotearoa New Zealand’s mental health provisions.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples.
Gift Sonkqayi is a doctoral student in the department. He is fully funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and Brasenose college.
He is mainly interested in all things concerning the epistemology of decolonising the university space within and beyond the South African context.
Yushan Xie is a Doctoral student in education and a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford. Her research is fully funded by the Clarendon Fund and Brasenose College.
Her research focuses on the self-formation of students of rural backgrounds in universities in China, against the backdrop of higher education massification, urbanisation and digitalisation.
Prior to Oxford, Yushan worked as a social entrepreneur in rural Hunan Province and educational policy researcher which enabled her to conduct health and education intervention research in the rural west of China, including Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces. She also gained professional experience in working as a youth culture researcher in a leading Chinese consulting firm.
Yushan completed her MPhil in Education from Cambridge University where she was awarded a ‘Best Dissertation Award’ from the Faculty and the ‘Special Commendation Award’ from the British Council ELT Master’s Dissertation Competition. She holds a BA in Translation from Nankai University in China during which she was awarded the National Scholarship from the Ministry of Education.
Publications
Xie, Y. & Liu. Y. (2021). Who do you hand out with? How Chinese students’ social networks relate to perceived oral proficiency gains during study abroad experiences. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 6(1), 59-90.
Manal is a recipient of the Clarendon Scholarship. Her research is funded by a joint award between the Clarendon Fund and Brasenose College
Her research focuses on the links between social and digital exclusion in the learning of young people. Manal was awarded a distinction for her MSc. in Education (Learning and New Technologies) at the University of Oxford (2017) and is currently building on that work for her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Rebecca Eynon and Professor Niall Winters. Manal holds an Honours BA in Global Affairs (Middle East & North Africa Studies) from George Mason University (2011) and has five years of experience working in the U.S. and the MENA region.
Research interests:
- Feminist Studies
- Critical Approaches in Educational Research
Aneyn O’Grady is a first-year DPhil Student supported by the LiFT Project studentship, focused on how an individual’s system of emotion concept representation may underlie interpersonal behaviour.
Her research draws upon her master’s dissertation completed in 2018 as part of the MSc Education (Child Development and Education), also supervised by Dr. Sonali Nag at the University of Oxford Department of Education, that led to the creation of an emotion identification computer game and coding scheme to grasp multi-faceted and multi-modal understanding of emotions in children.
Prior to pursuing graduate studies in education, Aneyn worked in the NYC Department of Education as an Americorps VISTA Program Associate in the Office of Community Schools focused on supporting partnerships between social service agencies and low-performing/underserved state schools to address issues with attendance, access to health/mental health services, and family engagement, as well as developing an asset map of local community resources.
Her research interests centre on the relationship between language and social skill, and how this links to the development of social-emotional learning curricula and interventions. She is particularly focused on exploring individual differences in theory of mind, the influence of multilingualism, and how engaging in digital spaces (e.g., social media) may influence emotion representation and social cognition for today’s developing child.
Title of Thesis
Structuring Mind-Space: The Role of Language in the Multi-Dimensional Representation of Emotion
Publications
Shepard, & O’Grady. (2017). What kinds of alternative possibilities are required of the folk concept(s) of choice? Consciousness and Cognition, 48, 138-148.
Through interviews with headteachers and teachers, Shailen is seeking to tell the story of how the policy of assessing without level descriptors has been interpreted and enacted in six primary schools in Oxfordshire.
Shailen has worked for many years in children and young people services for local authorities, charities and also his own social enterprise. He tries to create educational programmes and environments which nurture the whole person and build self-esteem.
Title of Thesis
How have primary schools interpreted and enacted Assessment without Levels
Publications
Ethnicity and Education in England: How Lammy has distracted us. Oxford Forum Journal, January 2018 Popat, S., Lenkeit, J., Hopfenbeck, T. N. (2017)
PIRLS for Teachers – A review of practitioner engagement with international large-scale assessment results. Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment Report OUCEA/17/1)
Rachel is a Doctoral student in the Department of Education, Oxford. Her research focuses on improving children’s literacy, through interventions which target early spoken language skills.
Before studying that the University of Oxford, Rachel completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Language Sciences specialising in Sign Language Studies at University College London. Between studying, Rachel was employed as a Learning Support Assistant in a secondary school, particularly with KS4 students who struggled with reading, and also as a British Sign Language Communication Support Worker with D/deaf students in further education colleges in London. Prior to beginning doctoral training, she worked at University College London, developing and trialling a parent-delivered early language intervention (PACT; Parents and Children Together), which aimed to improve the oral language and literacy skills of nursery aged children, particularly focussing on those living in areas of higher deprivation.
In addition to working on her own research, Rachel was involved in the organisation of the student-led postgraduate STORIES (Student’s Ongoing Research in Education) conference 2018, and has also contributed to the development of the ATLAS app (Automated Test of Language AbilitieS), designed to assess the verbal language skills of young children.
Research interests
- Early language and literacy development
- Language intervention in the early years
- Use of Randomised Control Trials in educational research
Fiona Jelley is a DPhil student in the Child Development and Learning (CDL) research group. Her doctoral work focuses on children’s early numeracy development and is funded by a LiFT project studentship.
The aim of Fiona’s doctoral research is to investigate the possible causal relationships between core numeracy skills (e.g. number knowledge) and arithmetic. Her broader research interests include evaluations of interventions designed to enhance young children’s development, parental involvement in children’s education, and investigating the way technology can be used in supporting children’s learning.
Before joining the Department, Fiona gained a first-class honours degree in Psychology from The University of Bath. Since then, she has worked in a variety of research roles at the Department, most recently as a senior researcher on the LiFT project, exploring the potential of digital technology in parental engagement. She has been involved in various other parental engagement projects, often involving evaluations through randomised controlled trials. She was also part of a team working with Oxford University Press on new and innovative ways that technology can support young children’s reading.
Dr Yasmine El Masri is Associate Director for Research at England’s Office for The Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education.
Yasmine held various positions as a Research Fellow at Ofqual, OUCEA and Brasenose College. She has also an experience in research management at one of England’s examination boards (AQA) and acted as an Assessment Expert Advisor for the qualifications’ regulator in Wales, Qualification Wales.
Yasmine completed her DPhil in Education at OUCEA in 2015. Her doctoral thesis examined the impact of language on the difficulty of PISA science tests across UK, France and Jordan using different psychometric and statistical techniques including Rasch modelling and differential item functioning (DIF). In 2014, Yasmine received Kathleen Tattersall New Researcher Award from the Association for Education Assessment- Europe (AEA-Europe).
Before coming to Oxford, Yasmine was a science teacher in secondary schools in Beirut and Abu Dhabi. In addition to her DPhil degree from Oxford, Yasmine holds a Master of Arts in Science Education, a Teaching Diploma for teaching science in secondary schools and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Yasmine led various externally funded projects, including a one-year ESRC GCRF Fellowship in 2017, during which she collaborated with a local NGO in Lebanon producing open-source interactive science tasks in multiple languages for underprivileged students in the country, including Syrian refugees. She also led a study within Project Calibrate, a three-year project funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Gatsby Foundation aiming to enhance summative assessments of practical science in England. Moreover, she was a co-investigator on various projects funded by external organizations (e.g., Critical Thinking in the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme and the impact of translation in the Diploma Programme science assessments).
Research Interests
Language in assessment, science assessments, international large-scale assessments, critical thinking, comparability of assessments across cultures, digitisation of assessments, onscreen (computer-based) assessments