Viv Ellis

‘So Much More Than Decoding’: Booklet to download

A practitioner guide to working with adolescents with reading difficulties – arising out of my recent Higher Education Academy funded project – is now available to download here.

The guide reviews the current state of research on adolescents with reading difficulties (sometimes known as Adolescent Struggling Readers – ASRs) and provides research-based recommendations for successful interventions at whole-school, subject and classroom levels.

The booklet was written with Henrietta Dombey, Professor Emerita at the University of Brighton, and Hannah Grainger Clemson, a former doctoral student currently a post-doc at Warwick University’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

Maths Talk Grant from London Mayor

Brunel colleagues Valsa Koshy (PI), Deborah Jones and I have been awarded £275,000 by the London Mayor’s Excellence Fund for the research and development project ‘Maths Talk at Key Stage 1’.

Building on Brunel’s strong tradition of practice-developing research associated with Valsa, the project will focus on the development of mathematical language and reasoning among very young children and their parents. Sociocultural approaches to concept development and talk-in-interaction will form the my main contribution to the intervention along with the analysis of language data. With Deborah and project Maths consultants, I am particularly looking forward to planning workshops for parents and carers. Fieldwork for the project will take place in the London Borough of Wandsworth.

For further information on the Mayor’s Excellence Fund, click here.

Learning and Collective Creativity: Activity-theoretical and Sociocultural Studies

New book published by Routledge in New York, co-edited with Annalisa Sannino from CRADLE at Helsinki University. This book is the only one currently available that brings together theories of human activity and studies of human creativity. The book grounds its interest in a variety of settings where people are learning and, specifically, learning to be creative. Creativity is defined, not so much as ‘little c’ creativity but as an integral aspect of learning that enables and promotes the exercise of learners’ agency.