Jo Tregenza is a Reader in Primary Education at the University of Sussex, and Senior Leader with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Skilled in, Primary Education, Teaching English, E-Learning, Lecturing, Teaching and Higher Education. Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association. Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers. President of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA).  She received several teaching awards, including 2018 Innovative Teaching Award for the whole ITE team, in 2015: USSU Teaching Award 2016 and Outstanding and Innovative Postgraduate teaching award.

What inspired you to frame scholarship as a journey and use the growth metaphor throughout the presentation?

So I just can’t get away from using plants and nature. I think partly because something that’s really in my mind is the organic process. So it’s not never terribly strategic about it. It sort of grows and develops. I first became a teacher because I wanted to teach children how to see daffodils and it’s that sort of theme has threaded through.

So then when I started teaching students, I gave them a seed or a bulb every year, and I’ve planted one for every one of the students I’ve ever trained. I’ve got a lot of bulbs in the garden now – it’s very pretty in spring.

And this just keeps coming back. The model I’m coming to with my PhD is of teaching reading, which is coming from a tree approach where it starts with the roots and soil and grows and so I just think it’s just how my brain works.

And I want it to see that it’s a cycle almost. It keeps going, there’s that cyclical approach to it, but its also the nourishing, I think.  The soil, the sun, the water, everything that comes in to nourish it.

How did you decide which personal experiences to include and what impact do you hope sharing them will have on your audience?

I was trying to aim at the people that I thought maybe were on scholarship and thought they would never ever get promotion or anything. And so showing that you can, because I mean, as I say, I’ve got to this stage without a PhD. Hopefully, I’ll have one soon, but, I wanted to make people feel that there was a root within the university. It might take a long time and in my case it has been a very long time but I think the things that have happened more recently are making quite big substantial differences.

So you can see this sort of slow journey in what I put, and the difference, what the key thing was is putting the policy that we had access to study leave, and that’s a massive change for us. But I’m well aware it’s not going to be consistent across the university and given we’re making faculties, the hope that we could have that sort of thing consistently for everybody would be really good. So it was like a key message.

What impact has this had on student learning, curriculum design, or academic practice more broadly?

So it turned out that we were changing all our modules anyway. My English was merging with maths. So I wasn’t going to rewrite everything because I thought, oh, I’ll just merge it with maths, that’d be fine, but because of the work I’d done and the research I’ve been looking at in reading particularly and the connections I made I ended up completely rewriting everything which I’m regretting today because it’s an awful lot of work to do.

I think I was always aware of what was going on outside, but now I’m deeply involved with what’s going on in the curriculum, in and other pockets, so I’ve become very involved because of my study leave, the anti racism work, I’ve become very involved in play. I became very involved in AI. So all of those I’ve embedded completely into what we’ve been teaching and the disadvantage bit has become a theme right through the modules as well. So it has been completely embedded in everything, so it has affected curriculum design on what we’re teaching the students and they’re loving it.

They’re buzzing which is really nice. You know, I keep meeting them and they want me to teach them every day and it’s lovely so they’re really liking that it’s very current but it’s also very embedded in practice.  

And in terms of academics, more practice, more broadly, That’s where the networks come in because I’ve been feeding all of that into a network of special interest groups of IT providers across the country. So I’ve already led one session with them, and because of the connections I made, I’m bringing in speakers. So I’m trying to affect, for example, the way universities teach writing to primary schools, and I’m doing that by bringing people in from Ireland and just trying to shape things a little bit.

You emphasized collaboration networks. What strategies work best for building those connections during your scholarship leave?

So LinkedIn was life changing for me, and I had it and didn’t really use it. I thought it was just a bit of a pointless thing.  My daughter started nagging me saying, mum, you have to change your LinkedIn profile, and she started to lecture me on how to use it and I had to listen in the end.  And it really did change it, which meant she was right, very annoying.  

I’d started to really build those connections far more succinctly, and LinkedIn led to all the connections in play, all the connections with anti racism, all of that came from that. I’ve now met with the CEO of First News, in fact, this week as a result of that. So all of those have really built.

I had the advantage of having a few very strong networks anyway so, the UK, but I was able to put more time into that so I set aside time in my study leave to plan the conference. I couldn’t have done that without having study leave. I did it the previous year without study leave but I ran the conference here and that was manageable but not in Liverpool. So yeah LinkedIn was the main thing and then just nurturing those connections was probably the most important.

Looking back, which part of your plan was most challenging to achieve, and what would you do differently next time?

Oh, you know it. It’s the National Teaching Fellowship, I still haven’t done it. I’d arranged with Claire from the medical department, who’s going to help me and have a look at it and I’ve got everything arranged, but I just didn’t have time, and that’s so I set myself too many targets in that respect, and something had to give, and it was that.

It’s a huge amount of work and that I suppose is I what I would have done differently, I would have blocked maybe a month of time that was purely for that. I think that’s the way to do it, is block the time, but something else would have had to give, and it would have been the anti racism stuff because that sort of grew and I knew that was an indulgent passion in a way, but I felt that it really needed to be done. And I it’s paid off because that is now going to be something national, so it’s important. We have to do it. It’s organic as I say, we’re going to kind of a branch for the moment.

What do you see as the long-term impact of your scholarship work—on your own career, your institution, and the wider academic community?

It would be nice to be able to apply for professorship, I do feel I’ve got more than enough evidence for that now so I’m hoping that that would work but what it will do, it’s the wider thing for me, is that I’ve already been invited to Dublin as a guest to their Celebration conference. and Norway and Slovenia, and they want me to present my work.

The work I’m doing with my PhD is going to be significant and I know it is even though it’s only three schools  It’s challenging what’s happening in the world at the moment. Everyone’s saying there’s a problem with reading, everyone’s saying we’ve got so many disadvantaged children and our government’s answer is more phonics tests and what I’ve got is challenging that and so I’m really poised.

Hopefully now I’ve got enough that I can get small papers out and I’m able to so I’m going to present in Cyprus hopefully in February, Slovenia and Glasgow in July, so I’m getting things out and I was able to present to the DFE a little while ago, so it pushed me ahead of my PhD timeline I because I knew I needed to swing out the policy. So yes, that’ll be the plan.