National Teaching Fellows

The NTF Community of Practice meets once a term at lunchtime. The agenda for each meeting is agreed in advance. The Community of Practice will be co-chaired by Professor Yelena Kalyuzhnova and Dr Yota Dimitriadi in 2021/22. 

CQSD co-ordinates this network and maintains the ‘National Teaching Fellows’ mailing list, which is used to continue discussions, follow up any actions arising from meetings and for Fellows to offer one another support, e.g. for T&L funding applications. If you have any suggestions for future meetings, please contact Eileen Hyder: e.m.hyder@reading.ac.uk

Please book all community of practice lunches through UoRLearn.

• Vicki specialises in digital learning and innovation.  At both institutional and national level, she has brought about sustained and significant change in student learning and assessment, teaching practice and organisational approaches.
• Vicki has led a rapid transformation in digital learning at the University, establishing the TEL and Online Courses teams.   As well as instigating improvements to institutional technologies, she has introduced professional development activities to support use of technology in teaching practice and curriculum design.  Vicki has also been a driving force in introducing and implementing online assessment and feedback, and in maturing the University’s early MOOC FutureLearn activity into a sustained innovation.
• As a University Teaching Fellow, Principal Fellow of the HEA and SEDA Fellow, Vicki is committed to enabling and inspiring staff to extend and develop their own practice.  She has a particular interest in the staff and student experience, and the changing role and impact of technology in education.

Associate Professor in TEL & Computing in Education

Email: y.dimitriadi@reading.ac.uk

• Yota specialises in the field of digital technologies and computer science education. She is committed to championing equality, diversity and inclusion in her work, with a focus on disability studies and female engagement in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). As a qualified teacher she worked in Greece and in the UK to support young people with special educational needs and disabilities. A trained Amnesty International Speaker, Yota is passionate about promoting Human Rights Education within school curricula. She was awarded her NTF in 2019.
• Yota is a member of regional, national and international committees that influence policy and practice around women’s leadership skills and engagement in STEAM. She was the Lead Academic in a pioneering Knowledge Transfer Project between the University of Reading and the World Association for Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which provided thousands of young women around the world with opportunities to develop their leadership skills.
• Areas of particular interest and research include Computing Education, digital mindfulness, inclusive self-care practices for caring professions as well as Death Studies in Education. In addition to working with the next generation of Computer Science teachers, Dr Dimitriadi helps students across Education programmes at the Institute of Education (IoE) to reflect on the use of digital technologies to enhance classroom teaching, learning and self-care practices.

Director of the Centre for Euro-Asian Studies

Email: y.kalyuzhnova@henley.ac.uk

• Yelena is a strong advocate of the impact of higher education teaching, learning and research on learners.
• Yelena is committed to Continuous Professional Development (CPD) which helps her to support the development of her colleagues.
• Yelena is interested in spreading the agenda of embedding internationalisation across the University of Reading.

Professor of Phonetics

Email: j.e.setter@reading.ac.uk

• Jane is internationally acknowledged as an excellent university educator in phonetics. Her expertise has resulted in invitations to collaborate with overseas colleagues, such as her Newton Travel Partnership grant, allowing her to train university teachers in Malaysia in the teaching and learning of intonation.

• She is a passionate advocate of students as change-agents and has held competitive funding to work on student partnership projects. Her influence instigated institutional culture change at Reading, with student involvement embedded at all levels of the curriculum.

• Jane is particularly interested in Continued Professional Development (CPD) that in turn helps her to support the development of others. Committed to widening participation, her future plans include working to improve representation and retention among students from underrepresented groups, such as BAME, LGBTQ+ and low participation backgrounds.

Professor of Classics

Email: m.c.nicholls@reading.ac.uk

• Matthew is enthusiastic about using the latest technology to bring ancient places to life for students.

• He has created a huge digital model of Rome and used it in many contexts, from award-winning undergraduate modules to field trips, publications, outreach, and work with computer games firms and broadcasters.

• Matthew is also an advocate of public-facing online learning. As Reading’s Director of Online Courses he helped bring dozens of courses, including his own MOOC on ancient Rome, to over a million learners worldwide. 

Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education)

Email: e.m.mccrum@reading.ac.uk

• Elizabeth is currently a Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education. She has previously held a number of leadership roles in teaching and learning, including Teaching and Learning Dean and Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning for the Faculty of Science. Her academic discipline is Education. A former secondary school history teacher she started her career leading the History PGCE course at Kingston University. She has been Programme Director for a number of large programmes including secondary teacher training programmes and the Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice.
• Elizabeth has had a career long interest in authentic and accessible curricula and pedagogy. She has led a number of projects to improve the academic experience of students form BAME backgrounds and for students with special educational needs and/or disabilities. She has recently led an institution wide review of the undergraduate curriculum. She has particular expertise in assessment and feedback and in the incorporation of research and enquiry into undergraduate curricula. She has a particular interest in professional development in teaching and learning and has been actively involved with FLAIR since its inception. She is a University Teaching Fellow and a Principal Fellow of the HEA.
• Her research and publications are in a range of areas in Education, most recently in HE. Going forward she plans to further develop and disseminate her work on curriculum development in higher education, particularly the leadership of changes in this area, and to continue her work on developing undergraduate students’ experiences of research.

Director of Student Services

Email: p.e.woodman@reading.ac.uk

Professor of Chemical Education

• Elizabeth is recently retired from the University of Reading where she was Professor in Chemical Education with a specific interest in the secondary-tertiary transition. She worked closely with chemistry teachers on several major projects to enhance widening participation and undergraduate support in the initial years. One of Elizabeth’s prime aims is to encourage more talented chemists into teaching to ensure the supply of excellent and enthusiastic chemistry teachers for future generations.

• Identifying the need for flexible and transferable academic and professional skills within graduates, Elizabeth developed a series of successful modules that embed development of graduate skills within a chemical context.

• Elizabeth has a strong interest in transnational education and travels widely to advise on quality assurance and lecture in her subject area of inorganic chemistry. She is particularly interested in contextual understanding of chemical concepts.

• Although recently retired from the University, Elizabeth continues to be active in the field of chemistry education.

Professor of Chemistry

Email: m.j.almond@reading.ac.uk

• Matthew is a highly experienced teacher of analytical and inorganic chemistry who believes that a wide variety of teaching methods – including the traditional lecture – gives the students the most interesting and rewarding experience.

• Matthew believes strongly in integrating skills training into the academic syllabus and is a strong supporter of the “Graduate Attributes” concept.

• Matthew believes strongly in the synergy between teaching and research and that this should include teaching-led research alongside research-led teaching; he believes strongly in the concept of “Students as Partners” especially when working at the teaching/research interface.

Professor of Outdoor Learning

Email: h.o.bilton@reading.ac.uk

• Helen is a trained teacher and an international expert on the outdoor teaching and learning environment, and in particular for young children.

• She has campaigned, researched and written extensively for the last 39 years on the how the outdoor environment supports children’s learning. Her books are sold world-wide and now translated into Mandarin, Portuguese and Farsi. She has been invited to speak all over the world and also work alongside schools and settings to develop practice here and abroad. 

• Helen has always believed that everyone should have access to education and equality of opportunity. To this end she is now involved with creating online courses with the team at the University of Reading in partnership with FutureLearn.

Director of Student Experience

Email: r.j.mccrindle@reading.ac.uk

Head of the Department of Archaeology

Email: j.d.creighton@reading.ac.uk

• John is passionate about research-based learning, coming from an archaeological background where fieldwork has always bonded students into a team-based process of enquiry.  He went on to run a HEFCE funded centre for excellence developing undergraduate research skills across the University and working with others.

• He is interested in how student engagement is fostered and measured, having run the first UK NSSE-style survey of students at the University of Reading in 2008. This style of survey has now been adopted by many Universities in the UK as the UKES.

• John is passionate about promoting additional research opportunities, and launched the University’s UROP scheme (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme). John has conducted quantitative and qualitative pedagogic research, with Joanna John, on investigating its impact on the student experience.

Dean of Teaching and Learning for Student Experience

Email: c.l.furneaux@reading.ac.uk

• Clare Furneaux’s academic background is in English language teaching and academic literacy.
• One of the University’s first Uni Teaching Fellows, she was awarded her NTF in 2009.
• she is a Teaching and Learning Dean, responsible for the student experience, and with a particular interest in international and PGT students.

Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education)

Email: j.r.park@reading.ac.uk

• Julian was awarded his NTF in 2008, became a PFHEA in 2013 and was part of the team that won a HEA Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence [CATE] in 2018

• Julian is a strong advocate of the transformational power of Higher Education and the importance of theory underpinning educational practice

• Julian has pedagogic research interests in relation to technology enhanced learning, assessment and feedback, and teaching-research nexus. Julian has authored a range of publications in these areas.