Education research with context and consequence.
Meet The Education Researcher is a measured interview series on the pressures reshaping education. Recent episodes move from assessment, teacher shortages, uniforms, and international student mobilities to generative AI, journal publishing, mental health education, and precision education governance.
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Meet The Education Researcher is a careful interview series about the research shaping contemporary education. It is academic, but not sealed off from the world. Recent episodes treat schools and universities as places where policy, markets, culture, technology, identity, and labor pressures meet. The show moves patiently. Guests are asked to set the scene, define their terms, and then test the assumptions sitting behind public debates. Assessment is discussed as more than grading, with attention to feedback, evaluative judgment, cheating, and learning design. International student mobilities are treated as political, economic, and personal phenomena, not simply a matter of university recruitment. School uniform and appearance rules become a way to examine youth, power, identity, colonialism, taste, and institutional control. Academic publishing is approached from inside journal work, including desk rejection, peer review, closed publishing, and the idea of a journal as an ongoing scholarly conversation. Teacher shortages are made more precise through the problem of hard-to-staff schools, reputation, leadership, structure, and the emotional realities of teaching. Mental health education is handled with similar caution, balancing immediate support for young people with the longer work of reducing structural inequality. The technology episodes are sharp. Social media is discussed as a working condition for academics, while generative AI is framed as something that could enrich scholarship but may also encourage shallow outsourcing. Policy episodes widen the lens further, especially around precision education governance, markets, data, neuroscience, AI, and international organisations. The tone is reflective and evidence-minded. It avoids quick fixes. Its best moments come when familiar education problems become stranger, larger, and more politically charged than they first appeared. For listeners who want research with context, skepticism, and practical stakes, the show offers a serious map of the field.
Made for: For educators, researchers, students, policy watchers, and academically curious listeners who want calm, evidence-based conversations about schools and universities. It especially suits people interested in how education systems are governed, measured, staffed, technologized, and contested.
What sets it apart: The show lets researchers explain the machinery behind familiar education debates, from grading and uniforms to AI and teacher shortages. Its strength is turning narrow research topics into broader questions about power, institutions, and professional practice.
Emerging issues and the latest ideas from across the world of education research. Hear from a range of academics about their current research in schools, universities and beyond. Hosted by Neil Selwyn from Monash University, Australia.
A school mullet becomes a question about class, if that's your idea of a good rabbit hole.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded discussion of how higher education can make assessment serve learning, not constant judgment.
Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education looks at how educators judge what students can do, what counts as evidence, and how feedback can help students learn.
A measured look at how international student mobility links university strategy with migration politics.
International students sit at the heart of a tricky policy story: universities in places such as the UK and Australia depend more heavily on overseas enrolments, even as governments argue over migration and public pressure.
A focused look at how school appearance rules turn clothing, hair and taste into institutional power.
School uniform policy becomes a study of institutional authority in this episode with Kayla Mildren from Griffith University in Queensland. The conversation follows Australian schools from broad expectations about appropriate clothing into more exacting rules around uniforms,…
A grounded look at how reputation, working conditions and leadership shape hard-to-staff schools.
Teacher shortages receive a steady institutional reading as Meet the Education Researcher looks at schools that struggle to attract and keep staff.
PK-12 research grounded in regional school practice.
Philip Dawson argues that authentic assessment often just means “it’s not a test, it’s not an exam.”
Meet the Education Researcher uses Professor Rachel Brooks of Oxford University to give a reality check on international student mobilities in the UK.
Kayla Mildren from Griffith University in Queensland discusses school uniforms, appearance policies, and her Journal of Sociology paper on hair rules across 50 Queensland schools.
Meet The Education Researcher focuses on teacher recruitment, teacher retention, and the problem of "hard-to-staff schools" in Australia, with Joe Lampert describing 2024 as a "crisis-level teaching shortage." Lampert says 40% of teachers and 50% of school leaders plan to leave within five years, while New South Wales had 87% of schools unable to fill classes in 2023 and Victoria had 2,600 vacancies.
Kristiina Brunila describes precision education governance (PEG) as a convergence of global governance, marketisation and digitalisation, and behavioural and life sciences.
Neil Humphrey of the University of Manchester says UK prevalence of mental health difficulties is just under one in five young people, with internalising problems such as low mood and anxiety rising while behavioural difficulties stay flat.
Sally Power says she would celebrate description, calling good description "an art form in itself," and would throw out the methods textbooks.
Mark Carrigan of the University of Manchester explains how academics used Twitter, Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and generative AI for scholarship and public engagement.
An interview with law professor Frank Pasquale discussing the impact of AI and automation on education, based on his book 'Laws of Robotics'.
An interview with education researcher Mark Warshower discussing his work on digital technology and language learning.
An interview with education researcher Faisal discussing globalisation and education policy from the 1990s to present.
An interview with Carlos Alberto Torres discussing Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its context in education research.