The Love to Read project: Co-designing a reading for pleasure programme with children, young people, teachers and other professionals

The Love to Read project: Co-designing a reading for pleasure programme with children, young people, teachers and other professionals

Dr Emily Oxley (University of Edinburgh)

Collaborative research practices, which involve children, young people, teachers and/or stakeholders partnering in research, draws upon the distinct, yet complementary knowledge, expertise and experience of each.  Collaborative research approaches have potential to narrow the gap between educational research and practice (NFER, 2017) and position the needs and experiences of stakeholders at the centre of the research (Calderón López & Theriault, 2017). In this talk, I will describe the Love to Read project, which aims to increase children’s reading motivation and engagement by synthesising relevant theory and research, with children’s ideas and experiences, and teachers' pedagogical expertise (Phase 1 preregistration: https://osf.io/5ztjk). This talk will describe the first phase of the project, in which 59 children from four demographically diverse schools were interviewed about their reading experiences and practices. Co-designing a reading for pleasure programme, with children, teachers and other professionals, creates a unique opportunity to develop interventions which are likely to be engaging and relevant to children, and acceptable and feasible to teachers, maximising the likelihood of uptake, and successful and sustained implementation.

Speaker bio: Dr Emily Oxley is a Research Fellow at Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working on a Nuffield Foundation co-designed intervention Love to Read to motivate and engage child readers. Her research interests are language and literacy education. She completed an ESRC funded PhD for the White Rose Doctoral Training Centre – ‘Understanding and enhancing reading and language skills in children learning English as an additional language’ in 2019. She has since worked as a Research Assistant on the Nuffield Foundation longitudinal project The Dynamic Assessment of Reading Test at the University of Leeds, investigating language disorder diagnosis.

Registration is required (and free) via this form. Please register by midnight the night before the talk. You will receive a Zoom link to the talk about an hour before the event begins.