A lecturer from Solihull College & University Centre has written a chapter in a book published in collaboration with educators from across the further education (FE) sector.
Kerry Scattergood, Family Learning Co-ordinator and Adult Literacy specialist, has contributed a chapter to a book entitled ‘Great FE Teaching: Sharing good practice’.
With 21 years of experience teaching, Kerry has developed a specialism in research and sharing good practice. A founder member of the College’s Research Steering Group, Kerry has been organising events since 2019, providing educators with the space to disseminate their expertise and learn from others’ good practice.
The steering group was formed after Kerry connected with the founding chair of #FEResearchmeet, Samantha Jones, on Twitter. Kerry explains: “I use Twitter as a professional development tool by engaging with educators and finding great examples of teaching methods and research. I saw that Sam had started the #FEResearchmeet movement and I tagged a colleague and said, ‘we need this at our college’.”
#FEResearch meet is described as ‘a free and democratic movement building and supporting engagement with research in FE, led by practitioners, for practitioners.’ (https://www.feresearchmeet.org/)
The book came about out of conversations on how to best share teaching practices, Kerry says: “The core principle of the book is about disseminating the good practice that is happening in FE in real teaching with real students and real learning. Sam asked different teachers across the sector to contribute chapters to the book to get a broad selection of best practice.”
Kerry’s chapter is entitled: “Everyday writing practices for adult literacy learners”. The concept of this chapter is something that Kerry first thought about many years ago when working in the community on a probation project: “As part of an Open University course I was completing, I did a project on engaging adult learners. However, there wasn’t a way of disseminating my research at the time. As I developed in my career, I started to realise how much that experience really shaped me and my teaching practice, it was real and belonged to me and gave me my own autonomy within my classroom and my own practices.”
The experience that Kerry has often reflected on formed an integral part of her teaching practice, some of which she has now shared in the book.
Kerry adds: “A lot of FE teachers don’t necessarily identify as teachers but more so industry professionals who teach. That is the core and beauty of FE.”
You can order a copy of the book now: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/great-fe-teaching/book279504#contents
