Dr Christina Tatham
School of Education
Programme Director of the MA in Early Childhood Education
+44 114 222 8145
Full contact details
School of Education
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
- Research interests
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My research is focused on young children’s experiences of, and access to, education in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. I gained my Master’s in Teaching at Griffith University in Australia before returning to Sheffield to work as a primary school teacher in a diverse, inner-city school. My PhD research at the University of Sheffield explored the multimodal communicative practices of young children in a super-diverse, early years educational setting. I am particularly interested in how children create a third space between different discourses they are exposed to.
More recently, I undertook a yearlong project to understand the barriers refugee and asylum-seeking families with young children experienced in accessing education throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The project explored how schools and community organisations helped families to overcome the challenges they faced.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Empowering whose future? A European policy analysis of children in energy poverty. Energy Research & Social Science, 106, 103328-103328.
- Multilingual communication under the radar : how multilingual children challenge the dominant monolingual discourse in a super-diverse, early years educational setting in England. English in Education, 54(1), 93-112.
- A systematic literature review of Third Space theory in research with children (aged 4-12) in multicultural educational settings. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-20.
- Enhancing participatory research with young children through comic-illustrated ethnographic field notes. Qualitative Research, 146879412211101-146879412211101.
- A third space pedagogy: embracing complexity in a super-diverse, early childhood education setting. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-19.
- Teaching activities
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I am Programme Director for the MA in Early Childhood Education and I also teach on the MA in Education, the BA Education, Culture and Childhood and the EdD programmes. Before joining the University of Sheffield in 2022, I was a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University for four years and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Sheffield prior to that.
- Professional activities and memberships
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Reviewer for:
- Journal of Early Childhood Research
- International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
- Literacy
- Language and Education