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Pat Sikes
For a good few years I’d had the notion that I would retire once my husband died, or when I was 65, whichever came first. In the event David died, aged 72, after 17 years of living with young onset dementia on May 13th, 2020. This was just under 4 months before my 65th birthday on September 3rd, so I decided I might as well stay on till then.
I’d often wondered how I would feel about leaving academia after a career which formally began in September 1978 when, straight after getting my degree (a BEd, from Sheffield), I went to work as a research assistant for Lawrence Stenhouse at the University of East Anglia. As it turned out it was remarkably easy to go due to the exigencies of working under Covid conditions but more especially because, for many years, I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile my beliefs and values with what seemed to be happening in HE and to education across the board.
I’d been blessed to be born in Leicestershire in 1955 and, therefore, to experience the comprehensive system developed by Stewart Mason and Andrew Fairbairn, visionary directors of education for that county. I wasn’t the only working-class child to benefit from the glory years and from the rich cultural life, the commitments to community engagement, equalitarianism, innovative curricula, pedagogies and approaches to assessment, and the questioning of traditional hierarchies that were all features of Leicestershire schools through the 1960s and 70s and even into the 80s, until Margaret Thatcher’s longstanding opposition to comprehensive education really began to bite. Anyway, my timing was lucky and my experiences at school were fundamental to me being able to go on to have a career as an academic.
After the year as Stenhouse’s RA I went to the University of Leeds on a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) PhD scholarship. In 1982, the year after my studentship ended, the SSRC became the Economic and Social Research Council. Maggie had her hand in this change too, being at best suspicious and at worst, downright hostile, to the social sciences.
Between 1982 and 1988 I had a number of research assistant, research fellow, and project officer posts at the Open University and the University of Leeds. One of these jobs was working as an evaluator (as so many educational researchers did) on Thatcher’s, Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI). TVEI was the first major curriculum intervention to be run, not by the Ministry of Education, but by a government agency – the Manpower Services Commission - responsible for workforce planning. You get the drift?
In 1988 I got a lectureship in the Social Aspects of Education at the University of Warwick. I stayed there for 12 years, developing my interests in qualitative research with my passion being for narrative, auto/biographical approaches that supported my commitment to C. Wright Mill’s exhortation to make personal troubles public concerns, with a view to prompting transformational change. The research I did during those years included studies of the perceptions and experiences of: parents who are also educators; male PE teachers; becoming a teacher of Religious Education; and teachers and their ex-students involved in enduring, committed and entirely legal romantic relationships. I was also becoming interested in research ethics across the board and increasingly with a focus on the ethical implications of the ‘new’ autoethnographic approaches.
I moved to Sheffield in 2000 and continued to follow and develop my methodological and ideological commitments through my teaching, supervision, and research. I worked on, and directed the Sheffield, and then the Caribbean, EdD programmes. I consider myself beyond fortunate to have worked with students and colleagues in Trinidad, St Lucia, and Jamaica. What I took from my experiences challenged and changed practically all my taken for granteds around teaching, learning and research, and about my place in the world.
In 2014 my substantive research focus moved away from aspects of teachers lives and careers when I received funding from the Alzheimer’s Society for a project which took a narrative auto/biographical approach to explore The perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with dementia. This study came out of my family’s experiences and is, perhaps, the most significant and ‘impactful’ work I’ve ever done.
I started this piece by saying that I felt myself in tension with the direction in which HE seems to be going. I am referring here, of course, to the neo-liberal agenda which I personally find antithetical to what I believe I set out to do. On the whole though, I am grateful for the life I’ve had as an academic. It has led to many great relationships and collaborations with colleagues and students and to more ‘good’ experiences than ‘bad’. Particular highlights are: midwifing (aka supervising) 63 doctorates; a great outcome for Sheffield following my direction of the 2014 REF; and, being awarded, by the British Educational Research Association, the 2018 John Nisbet Fellowship for an ‘outstanding contribution to educational research and its application for the improvement of practice and public benefit’.
Into the future I am intending to do a lot of grandma-ing but I’m keeping my hand in academia wise. Since retiring I’ve co-authored a book on qualitative research writing, written a couple of papers, and am about to start a project with a colleague from the City University of New York – Caroline Gelman - and Mel Hall at MMU who worked with me on the Alzheimer’s funded project. We’re looking at how young people at risk of inherited dementias make decisions about genetic testing. Free from the constraints of the institution I can do a lot more of what I want and what I believe to be important. It’s well worth being a wrinklie to be in this position!
Pat Sikes
Professor Emeritus of Qualitative Inquiry
Tom Billington
Where did that 20 years go?
A flight to psychology and therapy during the late 80s was the consequence of both a personal history and a social and political turmoil as we watched the histories and hearts of the industrial communities in which we had lived and worked callously ripped apart. Some years later, I was to find a haven in the School of Education at Sheffield.
Outraged by the adversity that can beset young people, I had quickly begun to see my role as a psychologist to be a deceit, as one in which I was expected to circulate epistemologies which were at best misguided and which, at worst, served to legitimize acts of mental violence and oppression. The School of Education was to provide a base from which it became possible to mount a resistance against psychological practices that for over a hundred years have contributed to the subjugation of generations of young people just because they were ‘different’, whether on account of their social class, disability, skin colour, creed, gender or sexual orientation. Psychology has never coped well either with the messiness of people’s lives or with the distress that young people, their families and teachers can actually experience.
My appointment had probably been against the wishes of the small part-time tutor team (led then by the wonderfully avuncular David Thompson), the panel chair gleefully referring to me as an ‘anti-psychology psychologist’. That is not actually true but it would be fair to say that the nature of the team’s enthusiasm for Psychology at the time differed from my own. The job was to teach and supervise on the one-year MSc professional training programme as well as to direct the EdD (Ed Psych) cpd programme for existing practitioners. There had been just one successful graduate on this latter programme prior to my arrival in 2000 but by 2005 there were often 20, 30, even 40 experienced psychologists crowding into the teaching rooms on the 8th floor of the Husband Building. My sense of dismay at Psychology and the profession of Educational Psychology slowly began to turn into an admiration for the commitment, resolve and willingness to change demonstrated by one psychologist after another, often at considerable personal cost. I have great memories of those days.
The tutor team was at the forefront of the national development of three-year professional training (DEdCPsy, 2006) and as it has grown in size and confidence, the team has found ways of disseminating ideas and practices that make the Sheffield programme unique. Based on principles of social justice and a critical stance towards the psychopathologization of individual young people, the programme now attracts huge numbers of applicants and while 20 years ago, student voice, narrative, reflexive and anti-oppressive practices were radical constructs in Psychology, we are now seeing successive cohorts of trainees practising according to those principles: ‘The critical, decolonizing approach to programme design and delivery facilitates the exploration and sharing of the experiences of the cohort in a manner that emphasises the importance of respectful dialogue. The trainees commented that critical psychology has underpinned their practice…the level of engagement and co-production between the programme team, trainees and service users (parents/carers) in supporting the training of educational psychology is exemplary…’ (British Psychological Society Inspection and Re-accreditation, December 2018).
It was difficult to relinquish an identity as a practitioner and there were to be cycles of redundancy (too often primarily affecting professional support staff) and threats of closure, both open and clandestine, but I eventually agreed to become full-time in the School (2010) as there seemed an opportunity to build something of lasting value. The MA was one of the fragile green shoots of recovery as the expansion of Psychology programmes and increased numbers of doctoral students (DEdCPsy, PhD and EdD) helped to ensure the survival, not only of the training programme but of the School itself.
One of the highlights was also a failure, as the attempt to sneak a fully critical MSc ‘conversion’ programme through the BPS was spotted by just one unyielding positivist. Nevertheless, even the eventual first accreditation report recognised the ethos of our approach: ‘The visiting team commends the programme team for the embedded critical ethos of the programme. In particular…impressed by the programme team’s commitment to a critical, reflexive and applied approach, which is much appreciated by the students…’ (BPS, May 2019). Both BPS inspection reports above are highlights of my time at Sheffield, products of the collective efforts and excellence of staff and students. Any personal pride, however, is in our community achievement.
What am I doing now? While there are some papers and other writing projects, some teaching and examining, I’ve actually returned to the day job and am back working full-time with young people, their families and schools. Critical approaches may not appear quite so radical now but they can still be an effective way of exposing the fraud whenever Psychology purports to claim scientific truths at the expense of individual lives. The family courts in which I work seem to ‘get’ this.
It is not an abrogation of responsibility to suggest that my labour over the years has been but a contribution to a succession of team performances, whether as a schoolteacher during the late 70s and 80s, as a local authority educational psychologist in the 90s, in the family courts or here in the School of Education. It would be unfair to mention individuals simply because you are too many but I have fantastic memories of times shared with you as individuals, in groups, both teaching and management, in the School and across the University. I feel privileged to have known and worked with you as friends and colleagues, whether you have been in the professional support team, a member of academic staff, a student or if you happen to have been one of those psychologists who was prepared, not only to tolerate the awkward and discomfiting ideas being proposed, but to embrace them.
Tom Billington
Emeritus Professor of Educational and Child Psychology