Our Mission
In CenTCS, we focus on the power of the teacher as lever for transformative change.
We know that young people from historically and contemporarily underserved backgrounds encounter schooling systems that too often fail to provide adequate opportunities for their holistic growth and development. These experiences are shaped by interacting classroom, school, community, policy and wider societal conditions.
CenTCS investigates how transformative change in schools can be conceptualised, how teachers can be prepared for transformative teaching and praxis, how transformative teaching is enacted in classrooms, and how its relationships with outcomes and contexts can be understood. These questions are represented in the four interrelated themes of our Research Compass.
Teacher professional learning is an important part of this work, alongside research concerned with teaching and praxis, schools and communities, educational relationships and contexts, and the conditions that enable transformative change.
CenTCS is a vibrant and committed research group that fulfils its aims by:
- Fostering a nurturing environment for academic growth within CenTCS and the broader School of Education;
- Developing national and international networks that support knowledge generation and exchange;
- Developing and researching sustainable partnerships;
- Growing our national and international contribution to research and scholarship on transformative change in schools, with particular attention to teachers, teaching and the contexts in which they work.