The Team

Maria Pampaka
maria.pampaka@manchester.ac.uk

I am currently holding a joint position, as a Lecturer at the Institute of Education and the Social Statistics group, at The University of Manchester, UK. I am substantially interested in the association between teaching practices and students’ learning outcomes (www.teleprism.com), focused in STEM related subjects. Methodologically, my expertise and interests lie within evaluation and measurement, and advanced quantitative methods, including complex survey design, longitudinal data analysis, and missing data and imputation techniques.


Jackie Carter, Director for Engagement in Research Methods Training
jackie.carter@manchester.ac.uk

I joined the University in 1996 having previously been a secondary school mathematics teacher, then undertaking a Master’s in computing and a PhD in geostatistics. I am senior lecturer in Social Sciences and lead on research methods training at undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development levels. I am also the employability champion for social statistics, and business development lead for the School of Social Sciences.
Working with external partners in the public, private and voluntary sector, I develop internship experiences to enable undergraduates to apply the knowledge learned in the classroom in the workplace. We are feeding the lessons learned from this back into the undergraduate curriculum.
I co-lead the Data, Skills and Training Research Group and have research interests in statistical literacy, exploratory spatial data analysis and visualisation. I have presented and published widely on teaching with real world data, on sharing open educational resources to develop statistical capacity, and on telling stories with data. I sit on the ESRC-funded Urban Big Data Centre’s Advisory Board, and City University’s Q-Step Centre advisory group.
My substantive research interests are in social mobility, and interventions to support access to the professions for disadvantaged groups.


Paul Hernandez-Martinez
P.A.Hernandez-Martinez@lboro.ac.uk

Paul works in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University. Some of his research focuses on identity and affective issues concerning the teaching and learning of mathematics at university level. He previously worked on the Transmaths projects (www.transmaths.org). He teaches mathematics to engineering students and mathematics education to mathematics students.


Kelly Pickard-Smith
kelly.pickard-smith@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

I research mathematical identity and the relationship between the individual and wider social stories about who and what can be considered mathematical. An Arts Based Research (film and dramatic performance) approach to this subject has illuminated how mathematics anxiety mediates the mathematical identity of the film subjects, where mathematics anxiety is bound up in emotional responses to answering those stories rather than anxiety about the subject itself. In addition, I also perform stand up as a means of research communication, voicing my own experiences of being storied as ‘un-mathematical’ and similar struggles of the ’employability’ students I taught over a 10 year period in vocational Education.


Kevin Ralston
kev.ralston@ed.ac.uk

I am currently involved in a NCRM project researching quantitative methods pedagogy. We are examining how quantitative methods are taught in the social sciences and are undertaking primary data collection and focusing on themes including statistical anxiety and QM ‘understanding’ (see http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/research/WP6/wp6.php). Prior to this I have undertaken work examining health inequalities, with the Medical Research Council, and young people not in education employment and training (NEET), for the Scottish Government. In addition I maintain an ongoing interest in researching ‘family’ and social processes around childbearing and fertility.


David Swanson
david.swanson@manchester.ac.uk

I currently lecture on the PGCE secondary Mathematics course at The University of Manchester, and do much teacher professional development work, mainly around lesson study, with the NW1 Maths Hub. I taught for 15 years in Further Education have worked on many research projects including Teleprism, The Royal Society Vision project, NCETM Multiplicative reasoning project, ESRC IAA Q-Step/Core Maths, and have published on the theory and practice of mathematics pedagogy from a Vygotskian perspective, and on alienation and social issues in education.


Julian Williams
julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk

I am a Professor of Mathematics Education at The University of Manchester, where I led a series of ESRC-funded “Transmaths” (www.transmaths.org) research projects that investigated mathematics education in the post-compulsory transitions from school to university. I have a longstanding interest in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in mathematics and across STEM, in mathematical modelling, and in links with vocational and outside-school mathematics. This work has led to interests in social theory and the political economy of education.


Kevin Woods
kevin.a.woods@manchester.ac.uk

I am director of initial professional training in educational psychology at The Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester.
I work with educational psychology services across the North-West region. I have interests and research experience in the role of educational psychologists, children’s rights, student assessments at KS2 and KS4, use of access arrangements, and in test anxiety.