Dr Lucy Henning

Professional biography

My research interests combine my extensive professional experience working in and around diverse, multilingual primary schools in West London and my commitment to understand Literacy as a Social Practice, which involves exploring people’s lived experience of language and literacy. A focus has been young children’s encounters with formal literacy curricula in schools and the ways in which they interpret and manage that encounter, both within their in-school peer cultures and as individuals. My work takes an ethnographically principled approach to explore lived experience and understand how it relates to policy, research and pedagogical practice. It contributes to knowledge about the ways in which people engage agentively and creatively with language and literacy in their social worlds, working within the constraints and opportunities offered by the contexts in which they find themselves. It has application to the fields of education and literacy studies as well as contributing to professional practice in learning and teaching.

My book Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom: Literacy as a Social Practice draws on my PhD research into young children, literacy and schooling in a London Primary School. My most recent project has been a long-term participatory ethnography working with a group of children in their first years of formal education in a multilingual London Primary School. The publication Remixing literacy: Young children producing literacy practices for research participation explores the children’s early engagement with this project, using the metaphor of ‘remixing’ to capture the complexity of children’s negotiations of fixities and flows in their literacy practices.

As well as publishing books and journal articles I have contributed to conferences including the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL), The British Education Research Association (BERA), and the Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF). I have also presented on my research at the Open University’s Children’s Research Centre, of which I am a member, the South London NALDIC (the EAL subject association for the UK) group, and the Lancaster Literacy research centre. 

My teaching interests are in Literacy and English Language Studies, Primary Education pedagogy, particularly in literacy and language teaching, and Peace Education. In both my teaching and teaching about teaching I focus on supporting students to achieve their aspirations for study through activities such as embedding academic literacies in course materials and developing assessments which allow students to develop their own critical approaches to course materials.

I am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. At the Open University I have made substantial contributions to the undergraduate module L301, Language Literature and Childhood and the forthcoming MA module L805 Applied Linguistics in Society. I currently chair L301 in presentation. I have also authored the forthcoming OpenLearn course Principles and Practices of Peace Education in collaboration with Quakers in Britain.

Prior to the Open University I worked at Roehampton University and St. Mary’s University, Twickenham. At Roehampton I supported the redevelopment of  BA undergraduate primary literacy modules and taught on the BA and PGCE Primary Education programmes.  I contributed to the development of  the first iteration of the BA Primary Education Dissertation module and led it in its first year of teaching. I also designed and taught a successful  undergraduate Peace Education module strand with Quakers in Britain and taught an Education MA module on research methods  At St. Mary’s I worked on the PGCE and BA primary literacy programmes.

I have a SEDA certificate in supervising research degrees and have been on the supervisory teams of two successful PhD students.

I have extensive experience of primary and early years teaching, working as a class teacher (most recently 2013 – 2016), providing literacy CPD for practising teachers and contributing to literacy curriculum development in two London Education authorities. I have also worked in university-based teacher training with under- and post- graduate primary teaching students at two London universities.