Governing Council

Jill Jameson MA (Cantab), MA (Goldsmith's), MA, PhD (KCL), FRSA, FCMI, FIfL, is the Director of the Centre for Leadership and Enterprise, a Reader in Education Research and Principal Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Greenwich.

She is Lead Guest Editor for the 2013 British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) Special Edition on e-Leadership and Guest Editor, with Professor Sara de Freitas, of the BJET Special Edition (2006) on Collaborative e-Support for Lifelong Learning. Jill was Director of Research and Enterprise at the University of Greenwich during 2004-11 and senior management university Director of Lifelong Learning in 2000-2004. Her research, management and teaching background covers 38 years of experience across all sectors of education, with a particular focus on post-compulsory, higher education and lifelong learning. Jill has 25 years experience as a senior manager and governor in seven different institutions.

An ESRC education research reviewer, she is an invited Member of the Expert Group advising the National Commission for Adult Education and Vocational Pedagogy, and an International Expert Group Adviser to the Open and Distance Learning Reference group led by UNISA and the University of Cambridge. Jill was Series Editor of Continuum’s 24 volume book series on further education and has published five books, including the e-Learning Reader with Sara de Freitas (2012) and Research in Post-Compulsory Education with Professor Yvonne Hillier.

New works include a scholarly research companion on higher education and a research report funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education with Professor Ian McNay. The Centre for Leadership and Enterprise (CLE) Jill leads at Greenwich houses Doctoral and Masters’ Postgraduate Programmes for 200+ students and she is the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Co-Convenor for the international Special Interest Group on Post-Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning Research with Kevin Orr. Her research interests include leadership, e-learning, post-compulsory and higher education, lifelong learning, trust, and communities of practice. .

SRHE Committees:
Chair of the Governing Council
(All Committees)

Yvonne Hillier is Professor of Education in the Education Research Centre at the University of Brighton.

She is a founder member of the national Learning and Skills Research Network. Her teaching background covers working with children with learning difficulties, working with adult basic skills learners and tutors, training trainers. She has researched issues of teaching and learning in post-compulsory education including basic skills practice, national vocational qualifications, initial teacher training, and work based learning. She published three books in 2006, one on FE policy (All you ever wanted to know about FE Policy, Continuum, 2006), Adult Basic Skills – Changing Faces of Adult Literacy, Language and Numeracy: A Critical History with Mary Hamilton, (Trentham, 2006) and Adult Literacy, Numeracy and Language:  policy, practice and research (edited with Mary Hamilton and Lyn Tett) (Open University Press – McGraw Hill, 2006). She undertook an ESRC funded project with Professor Mary Hamilton, Lancaster University on the history of adult basic skills policy since 1970.  She has published a second edition of Reflective teaching for adult and further education with Continuum in 2005 along with Empowering Researchers in Further Education (Trentham Books) with Jill Jameson in 2003.


SRHE Committees:
Past Chair of the Governing Council (2009-2012)
Network Convenor, Post-Compulsory and Higher Education

David Palfreyman, MA MBA LLB, FRSA, Bursar and Fellow, New College, Oxford, has previously worked at the Universities of Liverpool and Warwick, and has written numerous articles on university management.

He has co-edited a book for the Open University Press entitled Higher Education Management: the key elements (1996), and other books include Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition (2000) and The State of UK Higher Education (2001). Two further books: Higher Education and the Law and How to Manage a Merger or Avoid One were published in 1998; the second edition of the former is entitled Higher Education Law (2002, Jordans). David Palfreyman and David Warner are the General Editors for the fifteen-volume Open University Press-McGraw Hill series: Managing Universities and Colleges (within which they contribute a volume on Managing Crisis) – this Series is now being translated for publication in China. With Ted Tapper, in 2005 David has co-edited a book on the politics of access to higher education in major OECD countries (Understanding Mass Higher Education: Comparative Perspectives on Access). He has also edited a book on The Oxford Tutorial (2001 & 2008 – the second edition will be available as a Chinese translation from Peking University Press) and written The Economics of Higher Education (2004). His latest work is (with Dennis Farrington) The Law of Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2006); and his next academic project is a comparative study of elite universities as the first of a dozen volumes in a new series on comparative international higher education (2008 onwards, Series Editors: Palfreyman/Tapper/Thomas, Taylor & Francis).

David is a (Joint) Director of the UUK Management Development Course for Higher Education Administrators. He is also a Member of the Editorial Board of the AUA’s journal Perspectives, and is the Joint Editor of the journal Education and the Law. He is a non-executive Director of OXIP (the Oxford Investment Partnership) that manages c£200m of funds, and a Trustee of the Bedford Charity.

With David Warner, David established OxCHEPS (The Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies), details of which can be seen at its web-site on http://oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk. OxCHEPS offers a ‘HE Mediation Service’, ‘UCELNET’ as a legal awareness service for HEIs/FEIs, and an online ‘HE Law Updating Service’ for the HE Law text along with an online ‘HE Law Casebook’ linking to the HE Law textbook.

SRHE Comittees – Ex Officio
Member of the Membership Committee
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Management and Finance Committee
Member of the R&D Committee

Paul Ashwin is Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University.
He has previously worked at the Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford researching students’ experiences of learning and before that he spent seven years implementing and researching peer learning at Newham College of Further Education.

His research focuses on examining different aspects of teaching, learning and assessment in higher education including the recent ESRC-funded ‘Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees’ project, which examined the quality of teaching, learning and curricula in undergraduate sociology and allied subjects in universities that have different reputations for the quality of the undergraduate experience that they offer.

His recent book Analysing Teaching-Learning Interactions in Higher Education: Accounting for Structure and Agency (Continuum, 2009) critically examined different approaches to conceptualising the ways in which teaching-learning interactions in higher education are shaped by a range of personal, pedagogic, disciplinary, and institutional processes.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Paul Blackmore joined King’s College London in November 2007 as Professor of Higher Education and Director of King's Learning Institute and is currently Deputy Vice-Principal (Education) at the College.  Before this he established and directed a Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Warwick from 1995 for over ten years before becoming Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Coventry University.  Paul is co-convenor of the SRHE’s Academic Practice Network and is also co-convenor of the Standing Conference on Academic Practice.

Paul’s research is in the conceptualisation and exploration of professional expertise, including its social dimensions, particularly leadership roles in academic settings. He has published widely in the field. In 2003 he co-edited “Towards Strategic Staff Development”, exploring ways in which development in all its forms could be strategically effective. He has recently completed funded studies on interdisciplinary leadership, approaches to development in UK institutions and the professional learning of course and module leaders in Higher Education.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Rebecca Bunting is Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Portsmouth.  She has responsibility for a number of areas with significant policy and research implications, including strategic and academic planning, internationalization, widening access, the skills and employability agenda and research degrees.

Rebecca holds a number of Director positions including the Higher Education Academy, where she is also a member of the Academic Council and the Audit Committee.  She is also a member of the Leadership Foundation’s advisory panel and the Higher Education Funding Council’s Widening Participation Strategic Advisory Board.

SRHE Committees:
Vice Chair of the Governing Council
Member of the Management & Finance Committee
Member of the Governance & Appointments Committee

Penny Jane Burke is Professor of Education and Director of the Paulo Feire Institute-UK in the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex. Her previous post was as Professor of Education at Roehampton University, London, where she is Director of the Centre for Educational Research in Equalities, Policy and Pedagogy (CEREPP) and Founder and Director of the London Paulo Freire Institute (LPFI). Previously she was Reader of Education; Head of School, Educational Foundations and Policy Studies; Chair of the Widening Participation Committee and Course Leader of the MA in Higher and Professional Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

As a sociologist of gender and education, she is particularly dedicated to the development of methodological and pedagogical frameworks that support critical levels of understanding of issues of access, equity and social justice in the field of higher education. She was awarded a full-time ESRC doctoral studentship from 1998-2001, which resulted in the publication of her book Accessing Education effectively widening participation (2002). Routledge has just published her most recent sole-authored book The Right to Higher Education: Beyond widening participation (2012). Her book Reconceptualising Lifelong Learning: Feminist Interventions (Burke and Jackson, 2007) was nominated for the 2008 Cyril O. Houle World Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education.

Penny was recipient of the Higher Education Academy’s prestigious National Teaching Fellowship award in 2008 and is the Access and Widening Participation Network Convenor for the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE). She is on the Executive Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education and on the editorial boards of Gender and Education and Women’s Studies International Forum.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Publications Committee

Helen Carasso brings the perspectives of a newer researcher and experienced university administrator to the SRHE Council. Since completing her doctorate in 2010, she conducts research into questions of higher education policy (particularly undergraduate fees and funding) and acts as a consultant to universities, specialising in issues of communications, marketing and admissions. Helen’s professional experience in higher education was gained in as Head of PR at Brighton, Director of Public Relations at Oxford, and then as Acting Director of the Oxford Colleges’ Admissions Office during a period of major restructuring.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Governance & Appointments Committee

Sue Clegg is Professor of Higher Educational Research and Heads the Centre for Research into Higher Education, and is Director of Research Students. The research centre is a pan-university centre that supports the work of colleagues in the disciplines and professions and acts as a focus for higher educational research. Her personal research includes close-to-practice research, often in collaboration with practitioners, and theoretical work for example in her work on the social and pedagogical significance of the gendering of information technology, her analyses of information technologies in learning and teaching, and her critique of the debate about the nature of ‘evidence-based’ practice. She has written about the importance of critical distance and work which scrutinises higher education as well as serving it. In her recent work she has taken seemingly mundane pedagogical practices, such as those involved in personal development planning, and explored how these are understood by staff and students and the ways in which they are reframed in policy discourse. She has also taken a critical look at institutional practices designed to improve teaching, analysing the rhetorical repertoire of learning and teaching strategies and exploring how these strategies are mediated in practice. She is Editor of Teaching in Higher Education and serves on theBoards of Studies in Higher Education and Higher Education Quarterly.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Chair of the Publications Committee
Member of the Finance & Management Committee

Kelly Coate is a lecturer in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the National University of Ireland, Galway.  She co-ordinates the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and the Postgraduate Diploma/MA in Academic Practice. Kelly’s research interests are focused on changes within higher education systems, particularly around such issues as teaching and learning, policy, internationalization and gender. She previously worked at the Institute of Education, University of London, as a researcher and lecturer, where she taught on the MBA in Higher Education Management programme and on the research training programme in the doctoral school. She has published on a wide range of topics, including her research on the history of women’s studies, and on international student recruitment. In 2005 she co-authored (with Ronald Barnett) Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (Routledge) and in 2009 she contributed a chapter on curriculum to the Routledge International Handbook of Higher Education.  She is on the International Advisory Board of the journal Gender and Education and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Education Policy

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (Jan 2010)

Linda Evans is professor of leadership and professional learning at the University of Leeds. She has previously worked at the University of Warwick and before that had an earlier career as a primary school teacher. She is the convenor of the SRHE’s International Research and Researchers’ Network, set up in 2009. A former student of modern foreign languages, she is particularly interested in European issues in HE and is a member of the European Educational Research Association’s Higher Education Network. She enjoys European travel and still speaks fluent French and reasonably fluent German. During 2011 she spent several months in France as a visiting professor.A displaced Mancunian, she is a passionate, lifelong, Manchester United supporter.

Linda’s research interests lie in the broad field of working life in education contexts, and incorporate the compulsory education sector as well as HE. She is interested in academic practice, professionalism, professional development (including researcher development) and work-related attitudes, including morale, job satisfaction and motivation. Much of her recent work is theoretical, involving conceptual analyses and theoretical models, but she has undertaken several empirical studies. She is also a published qualitative research methodologist. She is the editor in chief of the International Journal for Researcher Development.

Linda is the author of around 50 articles and five books including: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (1998); Teacher Morale, Job Satisfaction and Motivation (1998); and Reflective Practice in Educational Research: developing advanced skills (2002).

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (Jan 2010)

George Gordon is the founding Director of the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement at the University of Strathclyde and a former Dean of Arts and Social Sciences and Head of the Department of Geography.

Primary research interests
George's primary research interests are: higher education policy and development; developing researchers and managers; quality assurance and enhancement; staff and student wellbeing. Recent projects include Developing Researchers over the Career Lifecycle, Enhancing and Embedding the Development of Contract Research Staff and their Managers, Capacity Building for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and various Quality Enhancement projects for QAAHE (Scotland). He has contributed to initiatives and development programmes in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Sweden, South Africa and the USA.

George has been Chairman of the Council of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and a former Vice-President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was Academic Consultant to the Teaching Quality Enhancement Committee, chaired by Sir Ron Cooke, and worked on the business prospectus for the Higher Education Academy. He has been an evaluator for various projects funded by HEFCE and JISC.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (Chair 2006 to 2009)
Chair of the Governance & Appointments Committee
Member of the Finance and Management Committee

Lesley Gourlay is a Senior Lecturer (Department of Culture, Communication & Media) and Director of the Academic Writing Centre, at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Her background is in Applied Linguistics, with her doctoral study focusing on emergent norms in adult language classroom discourse. She has worked at Edinburgh University, Edinburgh Napier University, King's College London, and Coventry University. Lesley continues to pursue interests in Internationalisation, academic literacies, multimodality and digital mediation in higher education. Her research work has focused on aspects of meaning-making, textual practices, digital literacies  and multimodality in higher education. She also works in the area of boundaries, transitions , trajectories and 'liminal spaces' in the academy, looking at issues such as internationalisation, support staff, practitioner-lecturers and 'non-traditional' staff and students.

Recent publications include "I'd landed on the moon": a new lecturer leaves the academy', Teaching in Higher Education 'Leaving the Academy' (Special Issue),'Media systems, multimodality and posthumanism: implications for the dissertation?' In R. Andrews, E. Borg, S. Boyd-Davis, M. Domingo, and J. England (eds), SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, Cyborg literacies? The construction of the hybrid subject in higher education' In S. Warburton and S. Hatzipanagos, Digital Identity and Social Media. London: IGI Global, and 'New lecturers and the myth of communities of practice', Studies in Continuing Education 33(1), 67-77.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Research & Development Committee
Member of the Governing Council

David Hay is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education and Assistant Director (Research) at King's Learning Institute at King’s College London.

He has a first degree in Bioscience from King’s College London (1988) and my D.Phil (concerning the ecology house dust mite populations and the aetiology of childhood allergic disease) was obtained from Linacre College Oxford (1992).

David’s current research focuses on the distinctive pedagogies relevant to the different fields and braches of university science. He is particularly concerned by the ways that only some scientific practices are available in sign mediated conversations, while others occur through the essentially embodied imagination of experimental researchers. His work with students and leading researchers (in Neuroscience and Molecular Biology more generally, Applied Chemistry and Computing Science) concerns the visualisation of researchers’ practice ‘signatures’: the marks of experience that correspond to principles of scientific research and giving figure to hidden phenomenal identities (i.e. the identities of unknown ‘things’ like the development and higher-order functioning of neuron cells). These principles organise the research and inquiry work of others - and in this regards he is particularly interested in the distinctiveness of researcher led teaching including the importance of the socially imaginative relationship that must extend between students and researchers as a means of making more available a relationship towards phenomenon per se.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Publications Committee
Member of the Governing Council

Ian Kinchin is Professor of Higher Education within the Department of Higher Education at the University of Surrey.

Ian taught science in a variety of secondary schools before becoming an Initial Teacher Training tutor at Surrey University and then Brunel University. Ian holds a BSc and MPhil in zoology and a PhD in science education. He has a background in Zoology and is author of The Biology of Tardigrades (Portland Press, 1994)

His current research interests are in the application of knowledge structures in teaching, learning and academic development as revealed through the qualitative analysis of concept maps generated by teachers and students.

Within this work, Ian has been developing the notion of the expert student, and aims to tackle the educational status quo in which he has described traditional universities as ‘centres of non-learning’.

Much of his research has been undertaken into the teaching of various bio-science and clinical disciplines. Ian has published over 100 academic papers in the fields of Zoology, Science Education and Academic Development. .

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Professor Sue Law is formerly Director of Academic Practice at the Higher Education Academy (HEA), where she had strategic responsibility for the Academy’s work in relation to ‘Raising the status of teaching’, ‘Sharing effective practice’ and ‘Institutional strategy and change’.

Before joining the Academy, Sue held various roles in universities, including that of Director of the Centre for Academic Practice (CAP) at the University of Warwick; Head of Research in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at Coventry University;  and Professor of Education and Head of a large Education department at Nottingham Trent University.

Sue has also been a QAA Auditor and Subject Reviewer and, more recently, was a Specialist Adviser to MPs in the House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into ‘Students and Universities’, which reported inJuly 2009. She is currently Chair of the national Staff Development Forum (SDF), which comprises 12 regional groupings.

She believes she has benefitted from having a ‘portfolio’ career in education. After teaching in schools and FE/Tertiary colleges as far apart as London, Glasgow, Manchester, Ayrshire and Staffordshire, she went on to work in six very different universities (Keele, Staffordshire, Liverpool, Nottingham Trent, Coventry and Warwick), and in roles which have ranged from part-time lecturing through to senior management.

Sue has co-written three books and numerous articles and her research interests, consultancy and publications have focused predominantly around continuing professional development (CPD) and educational leadership/management, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which effective leadership development can help to create and sustain productive learning environments – for both students and staff.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (January 2010) Member of the Management & Finance Committee
Member of the Governance & Appointments Committee

William Locke is Principal Policy Analyst and Assistant Director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) at The Open University in the U.K. He is directing the U.K. part of the international study of the Changing Academic Profession which is investigating the nature and extent of the changes experienced by the academic profession in recent years in more than twenty countries.  William is co-editor, with Ulrich Teichler, of The Changing Conditions for Academic Work and Careers in Select Countries, and is currently co-editing a book on governance and management to be published by Springer in 2010.  He has published and co-written several journal articles on the academic profession, higher education policy, and institutional management; chapters on the impact of ranking systems on higher education institutions, the marketisation of U.K. higher education and the academic profession; and policy reports on league tables, graduates’ retrospective views of their courses, student engagement, excellence in teaching and learning, and the academic profession.

William has spoken at international conferences in Australia, China, Japan and North America and throughout Europe.  He is also a member of the SRHE Publications Committee, the U.S. Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Report Series Advisory Board, and the Association of University Administrators’ (AUA) Editorial Board of the journal Perspectives: policy and practice in higher education.  He is Academic Advisor to the AUA’s Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Practice (Higher Education Administration and Management).  William was Deputy Director, Policy Development at Universities UK until 2006.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (Jan 2010)

Karen Smith is Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at the University of Greenwich. Originally trained in linguistics (BA in French and Russian; MA in Translation Studies; and a PhD in applied Russian linguistics / Translation Studies), Karen has been working within the field of educational development and higher education research since 2003.
Before joining Greenwich, Karen worked at Sheffield Hallam, Heriot-Watt and Glasgow Caledonian Universities. Karen is an active higher education researcher and in 2009 was awarded the Society for Research into Higher Education’s Newer Researcher prize.

Her research interests include the language of higher education policy and practice; transnational education; and internationalisation. She uses a range of approaches to data collection and analysis including: narrative methods, in-depth interviews, discourse analysis and descriptive statistics.
She sits on the Editorial Boards for Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, Higher Education Teaching and Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, and manages the University of Greenwich’s learning and teaching journal, Compass.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (January 2013)
Member of the Publications Committee Committee

Jacqueline Stevenson is a Reader in Widening Participation at Leeds Metropolitan University. Her research is centred on issues around race, ethnicity, age and social class in relation to access to higher education and educational achievement, and on ethical practice in higher education. Recent work has focussed on the first year experience of religious students, the degree attainment of students from Black and minority ethnic groups, and research into both resilience and students’ future ‘possible selves’.
She has also researched extensively with refugees, offenders and ex-offenders, young people leaving public care, and those who are long-term unemployed or homeless. Her research is primarily qualitative in focus and she has a particular interest in narrative research including story-telling and narrative inquiry. In addition she is the course leader for Leeds Met’s Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD).

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council (Mar 2012)
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Denise Whitelock is a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology working in the field of new technologies for learning at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology. She has expertise in the use of interactive multimedia for teaching, computer supported collaborative learning, virtual reality systems for conceptual learning, electronic assessment and monitoring systems. She is also co-convenor of the Educational Dialogue Research Unit at the Open University and is interested in building electronic feedback systems. One of these is eMentor, which won an Open University Teaching Award for their innovative work on eMentor. This is an electronic system which provides tutors with feedback on the comments they have made on their students' assignments and coursework. Her research has received international recognition since she currently holds a visiting Chair at the Autonoma University, Barcelona and an Honorary Research Fellowship at The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governing Council