Dr Alison Buckler

I am a Senior Research Fellow in International Education, and a Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD) at the Open University. As well as strategically contributing to the academic direction of the Centre, a key remit of my role is to grow and enrich the doctoral and post-doctoral community.

I lead and co-lead a range of funded projects focusing on education and educator development in low-resource contexts using visual, creative and collaborative methodologies. I lead a core research strand of the SAGE (Supporting Adolescent Girls' Education) Programme - an FCDO-funded collaboration between the OU and Plan International. This includes a longitudinal storytelling-focussed study of adolescent girls' aspirations in Zimbabwe (2019-ongoing). Other recent projects include an exploration of 'learning teams' to support children's learning and well-being in Kenya, Nepal and Ghana (Learning Generation Initiative / LGI-funded), a study of the motivations and identities of community education volunteers in Zimbabwe during Covid-19 lockdown (EdTechHub-funded), a storytelling study of teacher educator professional development in Uganda, a remotely-facilitated participatory video project with teachers in Sierra Leone (Plan International / Waterloo Foundation), piloting online storytelling workshops (Open University), conceptualisations of education for social justice in colleges of education in Ghana (The Spencer Foundation), the impact of different modes of teacher education on the learning outcomes of pupils in rural Malawi (Open University) and the use of participatory video as a research tool in remote communities (Open University and Humana People to People).

My main interest is creative, storytelling research approaches. In August 2017 I was awarded funding from the AHRC to develop and co-lead a network of expert and early career researchers focusing on storytelling approaches for understanding learning exclusions in urban schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. This led to a collective of storytelling researchers, and the development of a proposal for a large-scale empirical and critical study into storytelling research in the UK, South Africa and Nigeria. This was funded by the AHRC in 2021, and is one of my primary areas of work at present. You can read more about the project and its legacy the Ibali/Story Knowledge Hub here.

I was previously a researcher for the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme, which creates and supports the use of open educational resources (OER) for teachers and teacher educators. This work was central to my my PhD, which was awarded in 2012. My PhD was one of the first studies to apply Amartya Sen’s capability approach to the issue of teacher professional development in low income countries. I developed a new model of professional capability for teachers in rural Sub-Saharan African schools, which sits at the heart of the book 'Quality teaching and the capability approach: evaluating the work and governance of women teachers in rural Sub-Saharan Africa' (Routledge, 2015).

Teaching Interests

I supervise PhD and EdD students, with recent studies focusing on teacher reflection in India, community learning hubs in Uganda, teachers and inclusion in northern Nigeria, girls' agency and education in Zimbabwe, co-creation of sexual health learning materials in small island states, and school leadership and motherhood in the UK.

My approach to supervision is inspired by work around pedagogies of care, and I value and centre the lived experience my students bring to their doctoral studies. I welcome expressions of interest from potential students interested in studying education through critical and alternative perspectives, and with an interest in creative research approaches.

While my role is primarily research-focused, I enjoy contributing to teaching when opportunities arise. I have taught capabilities and development on the inter-university Grand Union Doctoral Training Pathway and have taught seminars and written modules on fieldwork and methodology on the University's research methods programme.

My work is also featured in the Open University's Masters’ Level Education for Development module.