Research Excellence Awards

We have won the award for outstanding Open Research for the NEW ABC Project. The NEW ABC Project is led by Professor Rachele Antonini at the University of Bologna, and it involves 13 partners from across nine different European countries all coming together to help children and young people from migration and refugee backgrounds feel more included in education.

It's been a great honour to receive this award, especially because at the heart of the NEW ABC Project lies participation and co-creation. So all our team members have been working with young people and children that are often found in vulnerable situations and many times silenced or unheard. So for us to be able to directly engage with them and co-create resources and materials that really matter to them and to have their opinion as part of the dissemination and research processes has been fundamental.

We worked in participatory and co-collaborative ways with young people and with their teachers and other community members to build resources and materials that would help those young people feel more included in their education.

We've been very busy with dissemination activities, including presentations, finalising and disseminating outputs and resources that were co-created with the young people.

Figuring out the kinds of activities that they would really like to do, which were often arts-based activities. So working with digital film, introducing the young people to poetry, just to find different ways to allow them to explore how they felt about being included in education and improving that inclusion in education as well.

Thats including exhibitions as well as guidelines. And the focus will be on making sure that we reach a greater audience for these resources through the website and of course through the work we do. We've also had some exciting news. The same NEW ABC team has won another Horizon Europe bid to focus on a new project which will support young people at risk of poverty and experiencing social exclusion to access arts-based education.

Our fundamental aim as part of this project was to give what are often very vulnerable children and young people living in challenging situations an opportunity to work closely with us to develop activities that they were really proud of and really wanted to take part in. And this was so important partly because these are often an under-researched and under-access group of young people.

We embedded their needs, expectations and interest from the beginning of the project. There was a dialogue that was maintained through the research process up to the end of ensuring that more people can access the data and the resources that were co-produced with the young people.

The children were making the decisions, telling us what they wanted from us, and we were facilitating that and helping them to deliver.

What I do is I look at pictures of planets, mainly Mars, and I try and tease out the geological history of the planet from the pictures.

And my research is about the understanding the landing site that the ExoMars rover will be going to in its 2028 mission.

We've won the award for outstanding collaboration, and this is really for a decade long collaboration with European Space Agency and the team of the ExoMars, Rosalind Franklin Mars rover.

The ExoMars project connects scientists from across Europe. We all came together and mapped different little parts of the rover landing site. And then my job has been to connect all these little, small maps together to make one big map. So wherever the rover lands within this area, we'll be able to use it on day one to look at where we want to go.

We've done an awful lot of the background geological research on that landing site.

So this is creating a map that will guide the rover to where it will go to find the rocks with which it'll ultimately be looking for evidence of life.

What we expect to find is not what other rovers have done before. They've been looking for what we would call habitability. So that's the environments or the evidence that there were past environments that life could live in. This mission is looking for signs of life. It's actually looking for the traces of ancient life. It's got a huge amount of instruments within the rover. It's got instruments on top of the rover that's going to look for the best place to go. And then when we get to that place, we've got a drill that will drill down to two metres depth and we get this nice pristine rock sample from down below. Take it up into the rover, and inside the rover all these amazing instruments will be able to look for signs of ancient life, what we call biomarkers.

My work is going to be connecting the rocks the rover will look at to the whole geological history of Mars.

Peter has put three or four years of his time into making this map. You know, over the last 10 years we've done so many different things across Europe with so many different people.

This research award is an incredible validation of the hard work that we've put in over all of these years. It's also great credit to the many scientists we've worked with across Europe.

The future for our team is to remain working with the ExoMars, Rosalind Franklin rover team. There's a launch scheduled for 2028. After that launch, we'll be landing in 2029. So that's the point where we get into the training, we get into the really in-depth mission simulations. And then when it lands on the day, our team will be there.

We've worked on selecting the landing site, characterising it so we know what's there. But what we're going to do next is working together to be prepared for when we are there in terms of understanding what the rocks the rover will look at really mean.

This award means a huge amount to me and to the members of my team. We've put so much work into this over such a long time. And sometimes you sort of feel like no one notices that you do this stuff, and so it's so nice to have this recognition.

Now that we've selected and characterised the landing site, our research over the next few years is going to be really studying in depth what the rocks in the landing site mean for the whole geological history of Mars.

So yeah, that's the really exciting thing that we're all looking forward to.

Citizens' Voices, People's News: Making the Media Work for Wales is a collaboration between The Open University and the Institute of Welsh Affairs, who work together with citizens from across Wales to explore how access to and understanding of the media, news, and information in Wales can be improved.

The genesis of the project came from some work we've been doing around the topic of fake news. So what we looked at for this particular project was how trust in the media gave people confidence in the information that they felt they needed to take part in the political process, in terms of voting, in terms of participating actively in the communities in which they lived.

Especially in an era of fake news, the motivation for the research was the belief that reliable sources of news and information are vital for a flourishing democracy, as they allow people to make informed choices about the issues that matter to them.

And so it had a collaborative aspect, both in terms of the different colleagues we worked with, but also very much working with the participants we had in the project in creating the ideas, the opinions, and the data that we got from the research.

Our citizens' panel decided to focus on three broad areas for intervention: media regulation, democracy and citizenship education, and recognising Welshness. Citizen participants came together online to discuss, debate and learn together, and then put forward recommendations on these issues. So the research was collaborative, both in terms of working with the Institute of Welsh Affairs, but also with the citizens who participated in the creation of the recommendations.

The relationships that we were able to make through this project I think will be very useful in future projects, both specific ones that we've got ongoing at the moment, but also hopefully to expand the work that we've done.

We're also really pleased with the impact on Welsh policy, something OU Wales is building on. The work has had a policy impact in shaping aspects of the Senedd’s[L1]  work going forward, particularly on the media funding landscape in Wales, and has also influenced work being conducted by the Welsh government in the areas of broadcasting and media regulation, educational provision, and the strengthening of the Welsh language and culture.

The OU in Wales has had a long-standing relationship with the Institute for Welsh Affairs. And again, the award recognises an aspect of that and allows both institutions to further build that relationship.

We were also assisted by the Sortition Foundation, who recruited the citizen participants, ensuring that the selection reflected wider society and mutual gain who helped the design and deliver the work.

It recognises ongoing work that we've been doing in collaboration.

We'd like to say a huge thank you to the citizen participants who took part in the project.

[Dr. Seargeant] And particularly with Michelle and Cerith (OU in Wales

[Dr. Smith] Everyone who attended the Citizens' Assembly sessions.

[Dr. Seargeant] And Dylan Moore (Institute of Welsh Affairs.

[Dr. Smith] So thank you to all of those people.

I'm Professor Teresa Cremin from the School of Education, Childhood, Youth, & Sport within WELS.

I'm delighted to be leading the team who have won The Open University's Research Excellence Award for Impact.

We've been working with the teaching profession to try to support in developing young people as readers. We've worked in different ways with different groups, with teachers in Teacher Reading Groups right across the country, and have roughly 100 volunteer teachers every year who run a reading group in their local area, supporting teachers developing their knowledge and their practice that will enable more young people to become readers tomorrow and that links to the research. We've also worked with schools and we run a Reading Schools Programme, which support schools in developing a culture of reading that encompasses staff and students enjoying reading. And then we also work with Initial Teacher Education and we have partnerships with 45 universities right across the country and we work with their Reading for Pleasure Student Ambassadors, who support their peers in developing their pleasure in reading, their knowledge of children's texts, and their rich reading for pleasure pedagogy, which will make more of a difference in the classroom.

It's a matter of celebration and affirmation really, I think, to receive this award. Since 2017, when The Open University launched the reading for pleasure website based around my research, we've widened the team of people involved, both in new research studies, but also in the work to develop pathways to impact- to impact upon the young people through working with practitioners, with student teachers, and with policy makers in schools more widely. And so I see this and I know the team do as  a matter of celebration and affirmation of that work and also an encouragement to keep sustaining the commitment and time taken to work in diverse ways with diverse groups, to listen to their needs and to respond to those. What underpins our commitment to reading for pleasure as a team is an understanding from the research evidence, mainly PISA and PIRLS large-scale research evidence, that shows that reading for pleasure is associated with wider academic attainment and enriched psychological wellbeing. And so we know that this is a matter of social justice. If we can support the young people to become the readers of tomorrow, we're supporting them on life's journeys as they travel. And we're committed to that agenda for that very reason.

I'm Jennifer Agbaire. I'm a Lecturer in Education at the School of Education, Childhood, Youth & Sports. I've won the Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher.

My research is about inclusion, and how we can make research processes more inclusive.

For several years since finishing my PhD, I have led on major funded research and stakeholder engagement activities with impact within and beyond the academia in the UK and internationally, working with young people, teachers, school leaders, teacher educators, and policymakers in England, Nigeria, Zambia, South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya. I currently lead and co-lead various research projects, but broadly, the core element that links them all is a commitment to understanding what inclusion might look like in different spaces, to the most marginalised and vulnerable individuals and groups in our global community, and how research processes themselves can be more inclusive. My research has involved using and further developing innovative, participatory and co-creative, arts-based methods, such as storytelling and Photovoice, and also advancing how we use interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary partnerships to tackle educational challenges. My research findings have provided critiques, provocations, and solutions around the concept of inclusion and anti-colonial themes in international education and development. I'm grateful for this recognition. It has added to my enthusiasm for my upcoming projects, which are both action research that aim to advance our understanding of how multiple and complex identities may intersect with gender to cause the persistent exclusion of girls and young women in education in the most marginalised and under-resourced settings, and how youth-led spaces for advancing inclusion in education might be developed, are much more effectively supported

I've won the award for Early Career Researcher, which is fantastic. I've won the award for a big project of work that is looking at maternity journeys for women in policing.

It's kind of started as a passion project for me and a colleague that did the work. We both had very difficult experiences upon returning back from maternity whilst we worked within policing. And since then, we established a programme of work around looking at those maternity experiences within women in policing. It's a profession that has had a long history of stigmatisation around mental health and opening up about how people are feeling and emotional silencing within those organisations. So looking at women when they're going through such a significant period of their life, and how we can best support them to come back into an organisation.

Policing obviously has its own unique challenges, but a lot of the findings that we've had from the research are not just unique to policing. They're across all different sectors. Certainly in the protective services I think it's applicable, where those kind of roles have been previously very dominated by masculine culture.

Future plans-wise, we as a team would really like to look at the research across different protective services, expand out to kind of different organisations like the military, prison service. So there's lots of different parts of the work that I want to build on, certainly still within policing, but also look to expand it across protective services and those different intersectionalities, looking at ethnicity, parental journeys, and also the difference between kind of full-time workers and part-time workers as well and how that might influence their perceptions or support. It's really great to be nominated for this award, but I really would like to say thank you very much to also my team that have helped support this research.

We've done some knowledge exchange events. We've done these things called evidence cafes with a number of police forces, which is where as academics, we go in and do a little bit of talking around our own research, but actually they're there to get everyone in the organisation to talk about what they might want to prioritise from the back of the recommendations, how they can actually get the findings that we've found into their actual practise. 'Cause for me, that's what research is all about. It's not just about doing the research, it's about how it can actually influence change within an organisation. So we've just got some small internal funding at the minute to do work with a national women of colour organisation across policing to kind of get their lived experiences as well and make sure we're capturing that. A lot of the police forces are really on board with this research. They really value it. They've got lots of evidence now to kind of get the recommendations into their own practise, to change policies, to change training, to change attitudes and biases around the way we view maternity and women going through those experiences.

Really grateful to have been awarded the title of outstanding Early Career Researcher.

Over the last few years I've been doing a lot of work with communities across England, lots of interviews and focus groups, trying to drill into what are the issues that really matter to people. And I do it around keywords like growth, or care, or borders. What does that mean for individuals, where they live, and what ultimately can policy makers do to make our country a fairer and more just place to live?

And for the last year and a half, I've been working a lot with unpaid carers and carers organisations to put together a rapport, a film, and to set up a community research network where unpaid carers are producing and participating and commissioning research themselves, getting to know and working with different partner organisations, advice organisations, policy makers, writers, artists, and whoever, and really getting under the skin of the places that I'm working with and that I'm doing long term work, and on a fundamental level, to get people to trust, and to get their collaboration so that when we produce research together, it can be actually something that's sort of driven and pushed by the communities as well as by my own hopes to improve the issues that I'm working on.

So there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation around, and a lot of people feel very disengaged and angry on different levels. A lot of younger people, whether it's in Barking in Dagenham, whether it's in Gateshead, whether it's in Peterborough, or Boston, or Wisbech, where I've been working, a lot of young people feel locked out of the political system. They don't feel like politicians really speak for them. And I think what you have on top of that, as well as insecure workers, and the housing crisis that many young people are in, you know, not feeling like they've kind of got a foot or kind of roots in where they live. And that's where I think in some way the research that I'm trying to do is aiming to speak to politics and to policy makers, because there's a real issue, if we have young people feeling locked out now, what's that going to lead to in 20, 30 years? So we have an opportunity here, I think, to kind of rethink how our kind of political and social structures work. And I think that what I'm trying to do is work with communities, understand the kind of priorities for different people in communities, and try and put research in the service of making communities across the country more powerful. For me, I'm so humbled, and so grateful. I don't think my route into becoming academic is a particularly conventional one. You know, I didn't do particularly well at school. I spent a lot of years working in community charities.

So it seems, I feel really grateful that, I guess, that I was nominated for this and that I feel like the University are excited and behind the work that I'm trying to do, and I think the work that I'm trying to do is to try and help the communities that I care about, and hopefully leave the world slightly better than how I first encountered it.

For the future, what I'm hoping to do is start writing up all of my findings into a series of books. For the last couple of years I've been running around like a completely headless chicken, doing a lot of interviews, and a lot of field work. And I've now got a lot of material and I think I've got a lot of ideas about how to help the communities I'm working with. But I've now got to just sit down and do it. And I'm hoping that this prize will be a kind of, an encouragement to knuckle down.

My name is Margaret Ebubedike, and I'm a research fellow here at The Open University.

I've won the Outstanding Knowledge Exchange Award across a body of work which covers gender equality and protection, educational development in context of protracted armed conflict and crisis.

What I've been working on is working on the GCRF funded project across four nations in the Lake Chad region. Lake Chad region is a protracted armed conflict and crisis context. Children in that region have been experiencing armed conflict for over 10 years. And so what I've done is work with countries like Nigeria, and Niger, and Chad, where the armed conflict is heavy.

I worked with children and young people in that region doing a Photovoice research, and after which I engaged with stakeholders in that community to look at how we can find sustainable ways of supporting children's education in conflict and crisis contexts.

I also worked in Uganda where I worked with a cross section of parliamentarians to look at ways in which we can support girls who have had experiences of human trafficking. And that project in Uganda led to the formation of a parliamentary forum in Uganda.

Uganda has never had a parliamentary forum of human trafficking. But through our technical support to Uganda, we were able to set up that forum, because research has shown that girls are more susceptible to trafficking, especially girls from marginalised and poor communities.

Makes me feel happy having received this award as a Black woman in  academia, that my work and what I do has been recognised in the University. My work is a critical area. It's a global challenge, a what's what has been termed a wicked problem, and I do not work alone in this space.

I work with a group of other researchers, and I feel really honoured and fulfilled that our work has been recognised.

I also feel happy that my network partners in the Lake Chad region who have worked really hard on this project, that we have all been recognised, 'cause I do not see it as just me being recognised.

In the future, what I plan to do is I'm extending the research in the Lake Chad region, planning to put in an extended network research funding from the GCRF and the academies. I'm also planning to do more work in Uganda with stakeholders in Uganda, with parliamentarians, to extend what we've already started. I also plan to have a symposium here at The Open University where I bring in stakeholders, researchers, and even policy makers in a share knowledge workshop where we can co-creatively begin to think about sustainable solutions to these wicked problems.

So my name is Dr. Simon Penn and I'm a lecturer with the sport and fitness and coaching team at The Open University. And I've won The Open University Outstanding Postgraduate Researcher award for my research that I've been doing as part of my doctorate that I completed early on in the year.

The research has looked into the impact of feedback on written assignments and how well our students understand that feedback. And it's been comparing two different mediums.

So the normal medium that we use is text feedback where we use Microsoft Word comments and we've been comparing that against Screencast feedback, which is where the tutor records their screen.

So it's a combination of video feedback, audio feedback, and little comments. So text feedback as well.

And the research has shown that many of the students and tutors said that Screencast feedback humanise the feedback process. So tutors explained that rather than just marking something anonymously, they felt that they were talking to the student almost face-to-face or in a conversation.

Similarly, the students felt that there were actually finally getting to meet their tutor because sometimes they could see them on the webcam or they could hear them, and it just felt that it was bringing that connection closer together, which is a beneficial impact in distance learning.

So some tutors have now started to use Screencast feedback to increase that connection with their student.

Winning this award means a great deal. Obviously, it's recognition of the hard work that I've put in over the last four to five years in completing all this research. And it's also recognition of the importance of feedback at their distance learning institutions and how much screencast can potentially impact the connection between students and tutors. It's also great to be recognised, not just for myself, but also my supervisors for the work that we put in over the length of the educational doctorate.

I'm working on two papers based on my educational doctorate research that I would like to publish hopefully later on in the year. And then I'm also looking at kind of branching out slightly, looking at feedback literacy within a distance learning setting and how we can improve students' understanding and use of feedback in distance learning.