Anniversary accolade for education champion

Education champion Gerry Czerniawski came to teaching as a profession late. Now a professor at the University of East London’s School of Education and Communities, he admits that he only took his qualifying PGCE because he wanted a job while travelling around Spain and further afield. It was, he says, “serendipity” that he found himself as a square peg in a square hole, loving every facet of his new vocation, which led him to a 12-year teaching career in the boroughs of Newham and Hackney.

It is that enthusiasm and his passionate fostering of a love of learning that has seen his re-appointment to a third term on the leadership team of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), the “go-to” authority and learned society on all things related to educational research, which also publishes five of the sector’s leading international journals.

This year sees the 3,000-member charity reach its 50th anniversary, with Professor Czerniawski centrally involved in the organisation’s celebrations. In the autumn, BERA’s annual conference is co-badged with the World Educational Research Association, signalling the scale of the organisation’s ambitions. Also planned is the launch of a book co-edited by Professor Czerniawski and written by leading national and international academics, practitioners and policymakers, about all aspects of the curriculum. 

He is now on his fourth elected term on the council, from which the leadership team is drawn, chairing the organisation’s Engagement Committee among his many roles.

He said, 

I started in 2010 and I knew nothing. My PhD supervisor told me BERA were advertising for council members, and she said, ‘You should put yourself up for that.’ Nobody had ever heard of me. I had no currency whatsoever, but I was lucky enough to be one of a couple of people who was voted onto council that year.”

Professor Czerniawski says he’s a grafter, not an ivory tower thinker, drawing on his experiences in the front line of education, so he’s happy to roll up his sleeves and take on any challenge. One of these was the creation of The BERA Blog, which he co-founded with BERA’s Executive Director Nick Johnson. It started as a small-scale project, publishing just one post a week back in 2015 - a project somewhat dismissed at the time by a variety of colleagues, including some journal editors.

Professor Czerniawski said, “Eight years later, we've published something like 1,600 posts. We publish four posts a week. It's downloaded in over 200 countries. One of the joys is that it’s a vehicle to get educational research out in a form that policymakers, academics, parents, and anybody that's interested in educational research can read.”

His teaching background has also prompted him to shift some of the organisation’s focus away from university academic research towards practitioner-based research and the value that both have in building research capacity.

He cites this approach as a key priority for his next term in office, along with the blog, the book, the funding of local and international research and a long list of to-do items, including his own research and writing. His work also includes the nurturing of early-career researchers and ensuring BERA continues to enhance and develop its commitment to social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in all its many forms.

Key to this is an ongoing ambition to continue to reach beyond the traditional audience for a research charity – an ambition driven, perhaps, by his own unorthodox career journey.

He said, “Research doesn't have to be 5,000-word projects; it can be going into your back garden and studying what’s there. To have a child who sees an opportunity to collect and think about such information is the aim as part of the wider process of nurturing a love of lifelong learning.” To that end, Professor Czerniawski has initiated a BERA grant for secondary schools-based research and wants to expand this into primary schools.

“It’s an award given to a single child in a school and their teacher to carry out a research project on any aspect of life, as long as it's got some connection with education.

“To have, say, a mum and dad supporting their child because their child is working on a project that's being funded by BERA, that’s hugely important to us. I’m all about championing research, but not as something that's only for the great and the good.”

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