https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32861 2026-10-11T22:26:05Z https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33869 Title: Multi-story building: A montage of STEM success through autobioracy Authors: Salehjee, Saima; Watts, Mike Abstract: This paper presents a montage of STEM success stories, employing phenomenographic narrative research to gather and present people's lived experiences: their ‘STEM (life) stories’. We chart the experiences of members of the general public as they meet issues of STEM in their everyday lives and coin the term autobioracy, moving away from autobiography, to capture, analyse and showcase our participants' oral accounts. We showcase three such accounts—Carys, Philip and Mehr—to explore their adult re-engagement with STEM after a long prior period of disengagement, that is, after their formal school-based science and technology education. We explore the ways in which they construct assemblages in their descriptions and explanations of the STEM they encounter. We resist a ‘template’ method to the interpretation and analysis of participants' STEM stories and adopt instead a montage approach to narrative analysis, presenting oral stories of events and their descriptions logically, not necessarily chronologically, to illuminate the meaning of their complex, often contradictory and unpredictable ways of knowing and understanding STEM. We position ourselves as ‘entre-deux’ in-between first-person and other-person accounts. Employing autobioracy montage validation, our findings analysed the STEM life stories of autonomy, self-direction, self-aspiration and self-time-lined STEM travellers, who engage in informal STEM learning and enter and leave STEM learning as and when they like. We suggest more empirical research that uses both STEM stories and a construction of montage of these different STEM stories, which senses different pictures and portrayals of the same phenomenon, here the ‘late-onset STEM’ re-entry, across different contexts and phases of life. Moreover, this study proposes a motorway system with no single starting or ending point to address the longstanding problematic perceptions of age and formal education limits. Description: Data Availability Statement: All the data presented in the manuscript were obtained with the participants' consent to be published. No further data and materials (e.g., audio recordings) will be available. 2026-09-09T00:00:00Z https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33798 Title: Rewriting professionalism in early childhood education and care: A call to collective agency Authors: Fogarty, Lewis; Hoyes, Samantha Abstract: Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) professionals in England operate within a system that persistently undermines their status, voice, and agency. This conceptual paper, informed by prior empirical research, introduces a new conceptual framework positioning professional confidence as a driver of change from within the sector. Building on Miller’s analysis of system conditions that constrain professional identity and autonomy (2019; 2021), it reframes confidence not as an individual trait but as a relational, collective force. The conceptual framework identifies five interconnected components – awareness, positive action, skilful advocacy, collective action, and purposeful passion – through which practitioners can exercise meritocratic agency and challenge externally imposed definitions of professionalism. By situating confidence within the broader system architecture, the paper highlights how professional self-definition and sector-led leadership can begin to reshape institutional cultures. It concludes with a call to action for leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to co-create an empowered and self-determining profession. Description: Data availability statement: The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. 2026-06-16T00:00:00Z https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33720 Title: School Briefing. Food poverty and primary schools: key principles and recommendations for support Authors: Wainwright, Emma; McHugh, Ellen Abstract: Summary: UK-wide research by the food bank charity Trussell (2025) found that: Deepening poverty across the UK is evidenced by the proportion of people who struggle to access enough nutritious and varied food. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the number of people in the UK who are food insecure has increased by 2.8 million between 2021/22 and 2023/24, which amounts to a 60% increase in two years. Description: The full report: Wainwright, E. and McHugh, E. (2026) Food poverty and primary schools: New understandings of the literature and evidence. Brunel University of London. doi: 10.17633/rd.brunel.32688648 is available in Brunel figshare at https://doi.org/10.17633/rd.brunel.32688648. 2026-08-07T00:00:00Z https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33679 Title: The social role of humour in classroom management: towards a theoretical understanding Authors: Chappell, Anne; Lockyer, Sharon; Sandling, Jonathan; Weaver, Simon Abstract: This theoretically-informed paper brings together the fields of education and humour studies to examine the complexities of humour in social interaction and relationships in school classrooms. We address the lack of understanding of humour in the classroom, and the nuances of education and humour, in examples of contemporary English education policy. We argue that education and humour are theoretically aligned in their social purpose of creating and disrupting social interaction and relationships. We illustrate that examples of English policy discourse that foreground behaviour management rather than classroom management are narrow and fail to consider important aspects of social interaction and humour. Humour’s social role provides a critical lens to examine the complexity of classroom interactions and social relationships that are crucial in classroom management. We conclude that humour is a part of the complexity of classroom management and challenge examples of reductionist regulatory discourses of behaviour management in current policymaking. 2026-08-02T00:00:00Z