Hello

I came to education through lived experience long before I came to it through theory.

I am a Lecturer in Education Studies (Primary) at the Open University, but my understanding of education has been shaped as much by classrooms, kitchens, and care meetings as by academic texts. Before joining the Open University, I worked across early years, primary education, youth work, and specialist provision, including supporting children excluded from mainstream schooling through multi-agency collaboration. These experiences taught me early on that education systems rarely operate neutrally, and that who is recognised, supported, or marginalised is shaped by race, class, disability, and power.

Alongside my academic career, I am a Black British mother raising autistic children in the UK. Motherhood did not pause my scholarship; it reorganised it. Navigating education, health, and social care systems on behalf of my children made visible the everyday workings of racism and disablism in ways that policy rhetoric often obscures. It also clarified for me that educational advocacy is not an abstract concern, but a form of labour that sits at the intersection of love, survival, and resistance.

My research reflects this positioning. I work on anti-racist and inclusive assessment, educator identity in online distance education, and racial and educational inequities. A central strand of my scholarship examines Black British mothering and educational advocacy, including the experiences of Black mothers raising autistic children. Across this work, I am interested in how institutions define “good” students, “good” parents, and “good” educators, and whose ways of knowing are treated as legitimate.

I joined the Open University in 2017 as an Associate Lecturer and now chair E209, where I lead assessment redesign and support professional learning in inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy. I am completing an EdD that uses critical ethnography to explore how online distance educators construct and negotiate identity within institutional constraints.

This website sits at the meeting point of my academic work and my life beyond the university. It is a space where I think publicly about education, care, motherhood, and justice, and about what it means to do scholarly work while being deeply entangled in the systems we critique.