Tania: 2023 Centre for Doctoral Education Student Poster Conference transcript

In March 2023, postgraduate students shared their doctoral research to colleagues and academics.

A photo of Tania in front of her research poster. Image credit: IOE Social Media.

Tania: Hi, I'm Tania Douek, and my research focuses on developing a theoretical understanding of the plurilingual learning strategies of adults who have learned orally all their lives and are connecting with print for the first time and in a new language.

I'm trying to work together with these adults who are refugees in London. They're experiencing continual marginalisation from formal education, and I'm trying to co-construct insights with these adults to understand how their plurilingual oral expertise affects their learning strategies, so that this can be used to inform classroom teaching.

I've been a teacher for several years and I was teaching adults in London for about 10 years and I specialised in working with adults who were new to print and that's what got me so interested in this whole area. Having worked with, with these adults for such a long time, I realised that the pedagogy that we have is based on theory of reading and writing that was developed for children rather than adults, and also for people learning primarily in their most fluent language.

That's what led me to the IOE because I had studied here previously. So I did a PGCE here originally and I was teaching children, then several years later I did a postgraduate certificate teaching adult ESOL and that led to my Masters in adult literacy, language and numeracy. So I've come back here several times, and in between, I've then gone back to the teaching.

So I love being at the IOE because it really enables people to connect the theory and practice in a really genuine way. So following the Masters, I then continued to teach adults in London, and at this point I was looking in more detail at their learning strategies and trying to understand how these courses could be improved.

I feel like the IOE is the perfect place to do this because, you know, I'm surrounded by people who are passionate about making change in the world and really want to make a real difference in society. So I feel like the IOE is the perfect place to be. To learn from the people around me and have that opportunity to continually learn on a daily basis is really wonderful.