Ms Portia Dery

Portia Dery is a doctoral researcher at the Open University within the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS). Focusing on the use of qualitative, creative art-based and participatory methods, her current research seeks to explore and recontextualise Reading for pleasure (RfP) within low resource contexts. Portia is also interested in improving the diversity of children's storybooks, joyful learning in early childhood education and the promotion of mother tongue language in improving the reading skills of children with English as a second language.  

Before her PhD journey, Portia was working as a social development worker in Ghana within the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development where she collaborated with stakeholders to implement, monitor, and evaluate community programs. 

 In Ghana, Portia runs bespoke reading clinics called the funky readwrite clinics  in Ghana for children from low-resource communities to improve their reading skills.  Portia is also a writer with a focus on children's books. Her debut book 'Grandma's List' has won the 2014 Golden Baobab Picture Book Prize, the 2018 Children's Africana Book Award and the 2019 Ghana Association of Writers (GAW) literature prize for children's books. Her book has since been republished in South Africa as 'Gogo's list' in Afrikaans, IsiXhosa and IsiZulu

Portia blogs the portiadery