Ms Kimberly Safford

Professional biography

I am an Honorary Associate of the Open University, formerly Senior Lecturer in Education.

I support the OU’s mission to promote adult learning across all ages and stages in the UK and internationally, through research, learning design, course authoring, and Open Educational Resource creation.

I am a Climate Ambassador for the OU, and educational advisor to Climate Change All Change, an exciting cross-curricular creative programme where primary school children and designers co-create solutions to the climate crisis.   

I am a member of the research project ‘EMGen’: a British Council / Open University partnership exploring the role of English as an enabler or a barrier to gender equality in low and middle-income countries.

I work with TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South whose goal is to contribute to achieving SDG 4 through sustainable, ICT-mediated, large-scale teacher professional development.  In OpenLearnCreate we published a suite of courses on scaling teacher professional development that has been studied by 14 country teams across the Global South in a GPE-KIX learning cycle.

I am a Climate Ambassador for the OU, and educational advisor to Climate Change All Change, an exciting cross-curricular creative programme where primary school children and designers co-create solutions to the climate crisis.   

In the OU Primary Education Studies team, I co-authored the course 'Comparative and international studies in primary education' and the textbook 'Learning and Teaching Around the World: Comparative and International Studies in Primary Education' (Routledge). You can see my other publications in Open Research Online.

I co-developed the highly-regarded OU International Development and Teacher Education programmes: the Sierra Leone Learning Assistant Programme and TESS India.

Before coming to the OU, I was Senior Lecturer in Primary English Education at Roehampton University, and research officer for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).  I was a primary school teacher in London. In a previous career, I worked for 20 years as a radio and television journalist in San Francisco, New York and London. 

Research interests

Climate literacy, teacher education, multilingual learners, English language learning.