The purpose of this interactive event is to help newer researchers to consider how they might develop theories through their research.

The workshop is designed to give early career researchers an insight into the relations between the development of theories, the reviewing of literature and the analysis of  data. It will also highlight that often the development of a theoretical framework is something that is an ongoing, iterative part of the research process rather than something that is settled once-and-for-all at the beginning of projects. 

The workshop will be equally useful to those working on empirical and non-empirical research studies.

Paul Ashwin is Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. He has previously worked at the Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford researching students’ experiences of learning and before that he spent seven years implementing and researching peer learning at Newham College of Further Education.

His research focuses on examining different aspects of teaching, learning and assessment in higher education including the recent ESRC-funded ‘Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees’ project, which examined the quality of teaching, learning and curricula in undergraduate sociology and allied subjects in universities that have different reputations for the quality of the undergraduate experience that they offer.

His recent book Analysing Teaching-Learning Interactions in Higher Education: Accounting for Structure and Agency (Continuum, 2009) critically examined different approaches to conceptualising the ways in which teaching-learning interactions in higher education are shaped by a range of personal, pedagogic, disciplinary, and institutional processes. The purpose of this interactive event is to help newer researchers to consider how they might develop theories through their research.