Ms Lorna A Smith

BA(Bristol), PGCE (Cantab), MA(Bath Spa)

Senior Lecturer in Education (PGCE English), School of Education
Centre for Knowledge, Culture and Society
School of Education
Bristol Doctoral College

EmailLorna.Smith@bristol.ac.uk, ls12876@bristol.ac.uk

BS8 1JA

Research output per year

If you made any changes in Pure these will be visible here soon.

Personal profile

Research interests

Lorna's main research interest, and the field for her doctoral studies, is the impact of the latest national curriculum (2014) on creativity in the English classroom. Using a hermeneutic paradigm, the thesis involves a review of English policy documents from 1905 to the present and interviews (colloquies) with practitioners in the field. She is further interested in the history of the subject English in schools.

Lorna launched a successful local Teachers as Writers group in 2013 as part of the National Writing Project, which seeks to explore the impact of teachers' writing on their work with children in the classroom, and is co-investigator in a comparative project with colleagues in universities in Australia and Israel. She is also evaluating the new Apprentice of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the perspective of teachers and students who experienced the first two years teaching and learning the qualification.

Lorna is the Vice Chair of the Initial Teacher Education committee of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). Together with local ITE colleagues, she is currently involved in two projects: one explores the beliefs and practices of new teachers of English in terms of creativity (reprising a 2012 publication, Celebrating Creativity Collaboratively), and the second is a UKLA-funded project on the texts commonly used in KS3 classrooms.

She is also interested in technology enhanced learning, particularly the contribution that ICT can make to an English classroom. She was Chair of the NATE ICT committee (Sept 2006 - Sept 2009), during which time the Entitlement to ICT in Secondary English was updated, and has worked with NATE and BECTA to produce advisory policy papers. She contributed to the development of Teachit's 'The Training Ground' as a resource for student and newly-qualified English teachers.