Naughton STEM Education Scholars Programme
DCU Institute of Education has welcomed three Postgraduate/postdoctoral lecturers/teachers to work and research with us in the area of STEM Education for a two month period on the Naughton STEM Education Scholars (NSES) Programme. The Postgraduate/postdoctoral lecturers/teachers will support STEM Education research and development projects at early years/ primary levels, including teacher education. They will work closely with STEM Education academics in early years/ primary STEM Education at DCU and professionals/academics at their home institutions to design and develop an intervention project. Their project will be STEM-education research-led development internationally, with attention to equity, diversity and inclusion. The findings from these projects will be analysed and published with the support of the NSES programme.
Naughton STEM Education Scholars Programme Scholars
Vinay Lautre – in Digital Education from India
Vinay Lautre is a doctoral student at the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education (CETE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, with an M.A. and M.Ed. from RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur, Maharashtra (India). He has 14 years experience as a Teacher Educator in various Bachelor of Education colleges in rural India and as a consultant for training programs organised by the (NCERT) National Council of Education, Research, and Training. Currently, he is a Center's Educational Resource Center (ERC) and Design Lab coordinator at TISS.
Vinay is conducting a project as part of the Naughton Education Scholar program based on his doctoral studies. His focus is on technology-enabled practices adopted during the COVID-19 lockdown period (CLP) by teachers and subsequently sustained in the schools post-CLP. While the literature documents the reasons digital technologies are not used in rural schools in India, little research has been conducted on the use of digital technologies in schools post-CLP. Anecdotally, we know that there is a continuation of technology-enabled practices in some rural schools, but little is known how and why this has occurred. In his study, Vinay will investigate the reasons that the use of digital technologies has been sustained in some schools and what we can learn about sustainability from this use. In particular, he is looking at upper primary-level education in the Bhandara district of rural Maharashtra.
Khemanand (Kavish) Moheeput – in Science Education from Mauritius
Khemanand Moheeput has a PhD in Computational Physics and a Master in Education, and he is a lecturer in the Science Education department at the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE) since 2019. Prior to that, he has been working as a Physics teachers for 14 years in the private and state secondary schools. At the MIE, he works with educators from early childhood to secondary levels and is also involved in curriculum development across these levels. His research mainly focuses on Science, Physics and STEM education.
Khemanand Moheeput is collaborating with colleagues from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education for the STEM and Critical Thinking projects respectively. He is currently participating in the Naughton STEM Education Scholars (NSES) research event at the Dublin City University, Institute of Education. As part of this research event, he will investigate to what extent professional learning can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of science at early childhood level.
Lynn Bowie – in Mathematics education, from South Africa
Dr Lynn Bowie is director of Mathematics at OLICO Maths Education, a NGO working primarily with learners in disadvantaged schools in South Africa. She is also a Visiting Associate at the University of Witwatersrand. She has developed material and designed programmes to support mathematics learning at all levels from pre-primary through to university level. She has been involved in pre-service and in-service teacher training as well as training youth to facilitate after-school maths clubs for primary school learners and after-school classes for high school learners. Her research interests include the preparation of primary mathematics teachers, understanding learning gaps in mathematics and work on the mathematics curriculum. Her main passion is finding ways to ensure that all learners in South Africa have access to high quality, enjoyable and stimulating mathematics teaching and learning.
During her time at DCU, Lynn will be working with Prof Hamsa Venkat on developing and researching a WhatsApp-based course aimed at supporting teachers and youth-facilitators to improve their mathematical knowledge for teaching in order to run effective maths clubs. The developmental aim is to leverage the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of the WhatsApp API to deliver a course at scale to teachers/youth facilitators who are geographically dispersed and often will not have access to sophisticated technology. The research aim is to understand whether such a course can make a meaningful contribution to improving primary teachers’ and youth facilitators’ mathematical knowledge for teaching.
This year's NSES scholar DCU 'host' academics are Dr Margaret Leahy (working with Vinay), Dr Cliona Murphy (working with Kavish) and Professor Hamsa Venkat (working with Lynn).