After completing a Masters in the early 1990s, Louise Walter knew she had unfinished business with academia. But a career in teaching, combined with bringing up her three daughters, meant further study had to take a back seat for a while.
“Life took over,” she says now. “But now my children are grown up, so when someone told me about the Doctorate in Education part-time programme, it felt like the right stage of life.”
While continuing her job as a specialist teacher in primary schools, working with children with additional educational needs, Louise has conducted research into the challenges of how parents with low literacy can support their children in learning to read.
“It’s about how schools frame their expectations of parents,” she explains. “If parents have had a difficult experience of schooling themselves, or don’t come from a background where education is valued, it can be very difficult for them to help their children. This means schools need to consider how equitable their home-school practices are, for all parents”.
The freedom to pursue her own research interests was clearly hugely rewarding, though Louise admits she had to be strict with herself in order to limit the number of potential avenues she let herself be drawn down.
“I loved the research and the reading, but I kept following up footnotes and finding myself going down a whole different strand of thought, so I had to maintain the focus. I had what I called my ‘year of living selfishly’ in order to get it completed, when I said no to everything social in order to prioritise my studies.”
Although her research was a largely solo enterprise, Louise benefitted from the sense of community provided by others pursuing their own studies at the Faculty of Education.
“We had group sessions with people at the same stage, as well as ahead of and behind us. The research was generally based on people’s professional life, and there was a really interesting mix of backgrounds.”
Having completed her training in the early 1980s, and worked as a teacher before the implementation of the National Curriculum, Louise’s research provided a fascinating opportunity to look back on the period covered by her career, from a new perspective. She’s now working to implement the results of that research, both in her approach to her own work, and in encouraging a wider consideration of educational research more generally.
“The more research that gets into schools and shows that variety of approaches, the better. There’s not a lot of space in teacher training for looking at research, particularly with the PGCE, and there’s so much valuable work being done that never reaches schools. I hadn’t realised what a chasm research falls into before it has an impact.”
Since completing her doctorate, Louise has presented at conferences and is now planning to write up aspects of her research for publication, as well as pursuing advisory work and training with adult literacy charity Read Easy.
“It’s been a wonderful end-of career choice,” she says of her decision to pursue further study. “It’s opened my eyes. Every day I bring in a different aspect of my research into my day-to-day work. It’s given me more confidence.”
Louise will graduate on Saturday 26th October with a Doctorate in Education.
