Susan is an Honorary Research Fellow and former Deputy Director of the department.
Susan completed a B.Ed at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, and read for a MSc in Comparative and International Education and a DPhil in Education at the University of Oxford. Susan’s entire career has been in education in various forms: she taught in secondary schools in Australia and England before starting her academic career.
Susan’s research interests are in the following areas:
- Technical and vocational education and training policy
- Vocational excellence
- Apprenticeship
- Work based and professional learning
- Quality and esteem in FE
- Territory landscape
- Skills economy
Ariel is an Associate Professor and Research Lecturer in the Department of Education, and is the Course Director for the MSc in Education.
She also leads the Research Design and Methodology pathway of the MSc in Education, supervises MSc and DPhil students, and acts as an assessor across a range of postgraduate programmes in the Department.
Ariel leads and contributes to projects related to educational effectiveness, improvement, and equity, largely in pre-school, primary and secondary phases of education. Methodologically, she has expertise in advanced statistical methods and mixed methods, and an interest in appropriately contextualised approaches to evaluation.
Ariel completed her DPhil in the Oxford University Department of Education. She holds Qualified Teacher Status in the UK, and prior to becoming a researcher she was a secondary mathematics teacher in the USA since 2006. She is also a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society, with a Masters in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Hunter College, City University of New York.
Velda Elliott is Associate Professor of English and Literacy Education. She is a curriculum tutor for the English PGCE and MSc in Learning and Teaching.
She is also Director of Doctoral Research, in which role she leads doctoral training in the department. She is co-convenor of the Qualitative Methods Hub.
Velda was an English teacher in state schools in Yorkshire before undertaking doctoral research in OUCEA, gaining her doctorate in 2011. She has previously led the PGCE in English with Drama at the University of Warwick and been a Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York.
Velda researches in the fields of English in Education and Educational Assessment. Within the field of English, her work considers both what it means to be ‘good’ at English and what English, media and drama education are ‘good for’. Some of her work considers the ways in which English education relates to political priorities and desires. She is particularly interested in what knowledge looks like in the subject of English.
She contributes regularly to professional publications such as NATE’s Teaching English magazine. Velda also researches at the intersection of English literature and education, looking in particular at Shakespeare and ways in which his work is refigured in educational contexts. She works on the ways in which literary criticism is available to and used by teachers and students in secondary schools; she created the Twitter hashtag #LitCritForTeachers and regularly blogs about research articles on A level texts, making critical material available to schools who do not have access to academic journals. In assessment Velda is particularly interested in the way in which markers, especially examiners, make decisions, and the values and identities they espouse in doing so. She led the EEF review of the literature on written marking A Marked Improvement?
Velda was awarded the National Association for the Teaching of English Research Award in 2017 for her contribution to the field of English in Education.