Homerton College has an active academic community which regularly produces significant academic achievements. Some of the more recent highlights in the academic life at Homerton College are described in this section.
Within the University, the Faculty of Education conducts world class research and provides an outstanding research environment for staff and students. In Homerton, the research tradition was consolidated in the early 90s, in the early years of Kate Pretty's principalship, when Professors Jean Rudduck and John Gray were appointed to develop a coherent research strategy. The tradition they established, of practice-based research which informs policy, teaching and learning, is alive and well in the Faculty of Education today, where Homerton Fellows are making significant contributions.
Ros McLellan is involved in a number of research projects relating to her core research interests in the areas of student motivation and creativity in schools. She is particularly excited to have been commissioned recently by Creativity, Culture and Education, the charitable organisation behind the government-funded Creative Partnerships Programme, to look at the impact of Creative Partnership work on student wellbeing, as this brings together her different interests. This project, which she is conducting with her colleague in the Faculty, Professor Maurice Galton, is underway and the final report is due in December 2011.
The first phase of their research involves a survey of 40 schools (half of whom have been involved in Creative Partnerships and including an equal number of primary and secondary schools), to assess student motivation and wellbeing and determine the types of involvements these schools have had in Creative Partnerships and other creative initiatives. The second phase will comprise extended visits to a small number of these schools to find out more about the work they do through observing creative initiatives and talking to the students, staff and the creative agents involved. Through this we hope to build a better understanding of how creative initiatives, including Creative Partnerships, might influence student wellbeing.
In the last UK government's Chief Inspector's report where subjects are mentioned in detail, it was noted that art and design ranks as the best taught National Curriculum subject overall in secondary schools. Richard Hickman’s research has examined the notion that successful teachers of art and design have much to offer outside their discipline in terms of pedagogy, focusing on what factors, specifically in teachers' lives, might contribute to effective teaching across the curriculum. He has been looking at the life-stories of ten artist/teachers, using several qualitative research methods - self-portraiture, autoethnography and autobiography. The questions that underpin his current research are: How do individual life experiences inform art teachers’ teaching? How in turn might others benefit from their pedagogical practices? Richard has recently completed a book based on this work which advances the notion of "practical sagacity" - that wise teachers create congenial learning environments through facilitating practical engagement with materials, and this leads to meaningful learning.
As part of Elaine Wilson’s core work at the Faculty of Education she been researching the process of becoming a teacher and has analysed the changes that new graduates and career changers go through as they change identity and become science teachers. The work is supported by generous funding from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which has been used in two ways. Elaine writes: “We have established a support network of novices which extends beyond Initial Teacher Education, particularly into the high risk early years of teaching, and have then set up a research programme focussing on better understanding the process of becoming a teacher with a view to reducing drop out rates during ITE and helping new science teachers to remain in post.” Together with three research associates, Elaine has published work relating to teachers' emotions, self efficacy, self determination and the support networks novices form. The on-going research has extended to include perfectionism in new teachers and the role of strong faith in helping novices to be resilient. The most recent research has compared the experiences of novices on the Faculty based programmes with similar novices in Canada, Hong Kong and Thailand.
David Whitley is intrigued by a local study of poetry teaching, funded by the British Academy. David writes that “poetry has an odd status within our culture and education system generally now – perhaps the most prestigious of the older literary forms, it is also the form that is least read by most adults and many teachers lack confidence working with it. Schools' practices have also changed quite a bit over the past thirty years or so (pupils used to have to memorise lots of verse, for instance) while many universities, responding to the challenges of theories such as feminism and postcolonialism, have become more attentive to the themes and ideologies, than to the art, of poetry. The project I'm involved in is distinctive, in that it covers poetry teaching from primary school through to university, asking questions such as: What is the relationship between creative writing and analysis in poetry teaching, and does creative writing have to be relegated to a minimalist role after primary school? Does poetry require a different kind of attention from the reader, and might this special attention have a particular value in a fast moving, global, digital age? Does poetry work best when we take it into ourselves in the deepest recesses of our verbal memory? Is it most vital when spoken or sung? The results of early interviews with teachers at all levels have been fascinating and I hope to publish reflections on these later in the year.”
Mike Younger is the Director of the Faculty's Centre for Commonwealth Education, the overarching principle of which is to build sustainable partnerships with overseas partners which aim to improve the quality of children's lives, to enrich the quality of learning and teaching, and to improve the well-being of children and youth within and
beyond school. Here there are links with Homerton in the past, through the work of development education pioneers such as David Bridges, Sylvia Williams and Brigid Smith, in countries such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Following extensive research on gender and achievement in the UK (through the Raising Boys' Achievement [RBA] project), Mike is now leading research on a Caribbean-based project, which focuses on raising the achievement of boys and girls within inclusive contexts in their primary schooling. The project aims to identify strategies which have the potential to raise achievement of pupils in government schools in Antigua,
with a particular focus on the lowest performing schools, located amidst communities of greatest socio-economic deprivation.
Examination data suggest that boys do less well than girls in most of the Zone 1 schools, but in many schools, interviews with headteachers suggest that there is an issue not only with disengaged boys but with under-performing girls and with pupils from non-Antiguan backgrounds. Initial interviews with headteachers identified existing strategies and examples of good practice in a selection of primary schools, but - as in the RBA work in the UK - these strategies were being introduced in a fairly unsystematic way, without objective evaluation. These interviews also suggested that establishing a whole school ethos with a focus on leadership, pedagogy and achievement might be a crucial element, since headteachers seemed predominantly concerned with administration and school management, rather than leading learning.
Hence an emerging focus is on establishing communities of practice in practice, supporting headteachers and teachers in working together to share elements of successful practice, and
considering how to promote them effectively in their schools. These communities of practice in practice are being actioned through a focus on classroom dynamics and pedagogies, listening to children's voices, and through a shared reading / shared learning intervention.
Intervention strategies which appear to have the potential to raise achievement of boys and girls will be transferred more widely across Antigua/Barbuda, and into other island states, such as Montserrat, Grenada and Dominica. Sadly, the research to date has not coincided yet with any England cricket tours to the Caribbean!
In another aspect of the work of the Faculty's Centre for Commonwealth Education, 
Molly Warrington has been working on a project in East Africa on Girls and Women Against the Odds. There are long-standing connections, of course, between Homerton and East Africa, going back to Alison Shrubsole's time as Principal of Machakos Trainimg College in the 1950s, and this work is in the same tradition. Molly is working with partners from the Aga Khan University in Dar es Salaam, and from the University of Makerere in Kampala, and with colleagues from FAWE (Forum for African Women Educationalists) and Unicef, in 32 schools in Kenya and Uganda. The focus of the work is on why girls from poor backgrounds, or from families and communities where education for girls is under-valued, remain in school 'against the odds'. The research is tracing the girls' educational histories within the context of family, community and school, and exploring specifically the roles of school practices and policies and of role models and mentors in accounting for girls' retention.
Despite the many challenges these girls face, the research has nevertheless helped to pinpoint the reasons why girls are retained in school against the odds. These reasons include factors such as: a sense of agency, and the capacity to imagine a better life, as reflected in girls' aspirations for tertiary education and professional jobs, and in their resistance to peer pressure and to early marriage; persistence and self-determination, with girls in the study showing a commitment to school and a zest for learning; and a belief in education as a means to an end, with academic achievement perceived as leading to material success and financial independence, giving them the power to change their own lives and to help others. Education was therefore valued for its extrinsic value, giving students what they currently lacked in their lives, and this was a powerful motivator. But schools obviously have a role to play: despite all the challenges of large classes and lack of resources, innovative headteachers and teachers have developed a range of strategies to retain and motivate girls. These include making schools places where children want to be. Important here are making the most of the school's physical environment (particularly ensuring there are adequate clean toilet facilities); co-curricular activities which develop life skills; good teachers who provide knowledge and understanding but also offer practical and sometimes emotional support; proactive headteachers who are strong leaders providing an ethos for learning; a disciplined environment which provides a place of safety for the children; practical support, for example, through feeding programmes and the provision of sanitary towels.
Alongside this is a sub-project targeting adult women in each country who have themselves succeeded 'against the odds', in order to explore the significance of mentors and/or role models in their lives and the extent to which they have played such roles in relation to other females.
Mike Younger
Head of Faculty of Education
Biochemistry Cover Stories. 
Dr Alessio Ciulli, Junior Research Fellow in Chemical Biology at Homerton College, and his coworkers from the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge have had their science highlighted on journal covers recently. First off is an example of fragment-based inhibitor discovery using both fragment growing and linking approaches, which was published in the prestigious Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The cover image (left) features the two small molecular fragments that were used as starting points to design potent inhibitors of the enzyme pantothenate synthetase from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an attractive target for developing new antitubercular drugs. The fragments are shown bound in the enzyme active site as identified from a structure determined using X-ray crystallography by Alessio during one of his trips to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.
The second cover highlights work published in the journal ChemBioChem that reports a new strategy to probing adenosine recognition sites on proteins by using dynamic combinatorial chemistry. The cover picture (right) shows an adenosine-binding protein templating a dynamic combinatorial library of disulfides formed between an anchor adenosine ligand and thiol fragments. The best ligand that probes optimal interactions in the adjacent pockets is identified from the library and is shown bound in the enzyme active site.
Francophone Postcolonial Study Day. 
On Friday 26th June, Dr Louise Hardwick, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at Homerton, organised a UK Postgraduate Study Day in Francophone Postcolonial Studies with the kind support of the Cambridge Francophone Postcolonial Seminar and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.
Louise and her graduate co-organisers brought two of the leading international academics in the field, Professor Charles Forsdick (Liverpool) and Professor Dominic Thomas (University of California Los Angeles) to speak about their current research in Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Dominic was fortunately able to arrive in good time, despite flying in that morning from a postcolonial seminar he had been running in Mali!
The Keynote speeches were complemented by a day of postgraduate papers on Francophone literary and film studies, ranging from Quebec, to the Caribbean, through to North and Sub-Saharan Africa to India, from graduates working throughout the UK. The day brought together 25 young researchers in the field and provided a valuable platform for reflection on the future development of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and was a fitting end to the first year of fortnightly Francophone Postcolonial Seminars in Cambridge French Department, launched and chaired by Louise.
The Ghosts of the Past. 
Twenty years ago on 4 June 1989, a democratic revolution led by the Solidarity trade-union movement signalled the end of communism in Europe. In London, an international conference entitled: The Ghosts of the Past: Twenty Years After the End of Communism was organised to mark this anniversary. It was held at the University of East London on 11-12 June, 2009, and brought together about 100 scholars representing diverse disciplines, including sociology, economics, and literary and cultural studies.
Ironically, at about the same time the UK press was reporting how plans for anniversary celebrations in Gdansk – the home of Solidarity - had been marred by social divisions. In order to avoid potential scenes of conflict between police and workers, part of the festivities had been moved to Kraków. 
Perhaps one of the most visibly contentious aspects of all the momentous changes that have taken place in postsocialist Poland over the last two decades, has been the transformation of health care. The struggle over the privatisation of health services, particularly hospitals, has lasted around ten years, ever since the introduction in 1999 of major health care reform. Opposition to the reforms has been reflected in industrial and court action, in parliamentary debates, in social survey responses, in extensive press reporting and in daily discourse. The reforms have proved to be the stumbling block of successive governments, with health care a burning issue in successive election campaigns.
Peggy Watson was a guest plenary speaker at the London conference and gave a presentation which had the title: Ghosts of the Past or Fighting for Life? Capitalism, Democracy and Health Care. In it, she argued that in postsocialism health care change is not simply a technical issue, but represents an integral aspect of a broader and historically unprecedented process of transformation in the shift to new forms of power and citizenship founded on capitalism. She discussed the broader social and political processes health care transformation had involved in practice, and the ways past and present have been mutually implicated in experiences of change.
Rather than erasing the frictions which have become an integral feature of health care change within Poland, she examined what lay behind them and why they remained relatively invisible to transnational health policy discourse. She discussed the extent to which and how health care change has increased social inequality, and considered the extent to which policy-making in this arena has become privatised. The talk drew on extensive interviews with politicians - including former Health Ministers, nurses’ leaders, and residents of Nowa Huta, Kraków.
Building the Future. 
Peter Cunningham will present a paper on 31 July at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The one-day conference 'Building the Future' will look at how architects designed new university buildings and campuses to meet the growing aspirations of a booming generation of tertiary education students and educationalists in Britain in the 1960s.
It accompanies a major exhibition: The New Monumentality (30 May to 30 August 2009) that explores the attraction of modern post-war buildings for three artists born in the heyday of monumental architecture, as typified by London’s Barbican Centre. Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter are among the most interesting artists working in Europe today. All three use film and script to investigate and animate the architecture of the 1960s and this project brings them together for the first time.
After World War II, architects looked to the abstract language of sculpture as a way of investing their buildings with greater power and significance. These forward-thinking forms, which still seem modern today, frame the exhibition. Both Gerard Byrne and Dorit Margreiter present newly commissioned work filmed on the 1960s campus of the University of Leeds, one of the most ambitious of all European post-war university campuses. Chamberlin Powell and Bon created the celebrated Barbican Centre in the same years, but their monumental campus in Leeds is little known and still unlisted.
Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat. 
'Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat' is the opening line of Lewis Caroll's parody on Jane Taylor's seminal poem, The Star (1806). These two poems are examples from the history of poetry for children which is the background to the exhibition Morag Styles is currently co-curating on with Michael Rosen (Children's Laureate) at the British Library. This involves working with a number of staff at the British Library, including those who deal with exhibitions, historical children's literature, learning and sound archives. I am also liaising with Book Trust who organise the laureateship. The exhibition is due to open on April 1st 2009 and will run for several months. It should appeal to a wide range of audiences from school children, parents and teachers, to poets, scholars and bibliophiles; it will be actively promoted through workshops, readings and an international conference.
The main thrust of the exhibition will be poetry written specifically for children from the 18thC to the present day, arranged thematically. We are concentrating on key poets and collections, using early editions with beautiful illustrations where possible. Works by more recent and contemporary poets will also be well represented. A strong thread will be the oral tradition and nursery verse where we hope to draw on the Opies' sound archive. Humour, including nonsense and nursery rhymes, will be well integrated, but we will also show that children's poetry has always been willing to take on big issues - from anti-slavery poems in children's anthologies of the 18thC to hard-hitting themes of racism, violence, war and the environment today. Poetic language and form in all its variety will be celebrated including the informal vernacular of playground rhymes and dialect poetry from the Scots of Robbie Burns to Caribbean nation language. The voices of women poets will be reclaimed for the nursery and the links between poetry and song (including hymns) will be highlighted.
The conference, Poetry and Childhood (20-21 April 09), features the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and Michael Rosen. The Canadian scholar, Lissa Paul, will give a keynote lecture. The conference is attracting distinguished academics and poets; there will be papers by international scholars on a wide range of topics, workshops on aspects of children's poetry by British Library curators, plus performances by poets and others. There has not been an international conference quite like this before to my knowledge, so it promises to be a huge treat for those who love poetry and are interested in childhood.
Supreme Court Review. 
Prof. David J Garrow published an article about US abortion legislation in the Supreme Court Review ("Significant Risks: Gonzales v. Carhart and the Future of Abortion Law," Supreme Court Review 2007, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 1-50.).
Abortion is a far more politically contentious legal issue in the United States than it is in the UK or most EU countries. That's been the case ever since 1970, when New York state first legalized widespread access to abortion three years before the U. S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide by a vote of 7 to 2 in its famous constitutional ruling in Roe v. Wade.
The Roe decision aspired to resolve most of the political battling by making abortion safely available up until the time of fetal viability while allowing states to prohibit it after that point, so long as an exception permitting doctors to protect a pregnant woman's health always prevailed. Abortion opponents struggled to limit if not overturn Roe throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1992 the U. S. Supreme Court forcefully reaffirmed the most fundamental portions of Roe's holding in a case titled Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
In the aftermath of Casey, anti-abortion activists trained their political fire on one particular and unusual method of performing late-term procedures, which they labeled "partial-birth" abortions. In 2003 they secured congressional passage of a bill making it a federal crime for doctors to use that method, and President George W. Bush signed the ban into law. Abortion rights advocates immediately challenged the law in the federal courts, but in 2007 a new 5 to 4 conservative majority on the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the ban while insisting that it did not significantly contravene any of Roe or Casey's fundamental protections. Much American political commentary sharply criticized that decision, but a careful scholarly analysis of the majority's ruling shows it to be an exceedingly narrow decision of limited import, notwithstanding all of the exaggerated and mostly ill-targeted denunciations that it attracted.
Beyond the Lecture Hall. Peter Cunningham, with colleagues from the Faculty of Education, conceived the major international research conference "Beyond the Lecture Hall: Universities and Community Engagement from the middle ages to the present day" to mark the impending 800th anniversary of Cambridge University, held at Homerton College. We identified the theme of community engagement as a contemporary issue worthy of attention, universities now investing heavily in justifying their usefulness not only to the state at a national level, but also within their local communities. The conference was conducted in collaboration with University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education and the History of Education Society UK.
Four strands were defined, with related keynote speakers. Adult and continuing education is currently confronted by contradictory policies of 'lifelong learning' on the one hand, and restrictive funding on the other. Professor Chris Duke, Chief Executive of the PASCAL International Observatory, drawing on work for the EU, Unesco and the OECD, reflected on why the new mantra of university engagement and third stream funding has bypassed the struggling UK extramural tradition.
Cambridge University Press is an ancient institution, but Oxford and Cambridge university presses now depend on publication aimed at education outside the university community. David McKitterick, Wren Librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge, and author of a comprehensive history of CUP explored this evolution.
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