Interdisciplinary educational research: Reflections from the BERA Annual Conference 2026
Muhammad Zulfadhli Kamarudin, member of the ICC, reflects on his experience attending the BERA Annual Conference 2026 from 8 to 10 September at the University of Manchester.
As a PhD researcher working across climate change curriculum development, children’s participation, creative methods, and educational technology, I found attending a large educational research conference an opportunity to engage with perspectives beyond the immediate boundaries of my research.
I also presented preliminary findings from my PhD and received valuable feedback that made me rethink my conceptual framework. Throughout the conference, several presentations particularly resonated with questions raised by my own research. Here are four highlights.
Curriculum Making through Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry
The keynote panel on Curriculum Making through Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry, presented by Valerie Drew, Mark Priestley, Elizabeth Rushton and Emma Smith, with Haira Gandolfi as discussant, offered an interesting way of thinking about curriculum development as an ongoing and collaborative process.
This resonated with my PhD, as my research treats curriculum development as an iterative process. Working with children has shown me that curriculum development does not necessarily follow a straightforward path from planning to implementation. Experiences during one activity can raise questions, reveal difficulties, or generate new possibilities that influence what happens next.
Participation and voice in educational research
Questions about participation were also central to Maria Dacre’s presentation, Listening to Learn: Embedding Children’s Rights in Curriculum Decision-Making through Participatory Action Research.
Her research positioned children not merely as participants who provide data, but as contributors whose perspectives can inform curriculum and pedagogical decisions. A particularly interesting feature was the use of a Children’s Research Advisory Group alongside child-friendly approaches, such as LEGO Serious Play and photo-elicitation.
This is closely connected with questions I have encountered in my own participatory action research with children: What does it actually mean for children to participate in curriculum development? How can researchers demonstrate that children’s contributions have influenced decisions? And how should we understand the researcher’s own interpretive and decision-making role? Dacre’s presentation offered another valuable perspective on these questions through the lens of children’s rights.
Presenting my preliminary PhD findings
I also presented my work at the session “Mathematics, Science, and Play in Primary Years,” sharing preliminary findings from my PhD research on co-developing a climate-change play curriculum with children using spatial computing tools.
One particularly useful conversation was with Thomas Sean Weatherby, who introduced me to Andrea diSessa’s work, Knowledge in Pieces. This was particularly interesting for my analysis of children’s developing mental models of climate change. I have been working with conceptual change perspectives to examine changes across the beginning, middle, and end of the curriculum development process. The conversation encouraged me to consider more critically how context and prior knowledge might shape the ideas children express during different activities.
Rethinking what we mean by agency
My final highlight was the workshop Understanding Agency: Why Agency Matters in Education, led by Sophie Cathcart, Andrea Priestley, Mark Priestley and Elizabeth Rushton.
Agency is a term that appears frequently in educational research, yet the workshop challenged the assumption that everyone necessarily means the same thing when using the term. The presenters distinguished different ways in which agency has been conceptualised, including psychological, sociological and emergent perspectives. Of particular interest to me was the idea that agency need not be understood merely as an individual capacity or characteristic. It can instead emerge through relationships, contexts, environments and the resources available to people.
This distinction has important implications for how I think about children’s participation in my own research. Rather than only asking whether a child has agency, it may be more useful to consider the conditions they are able to exercise agency: the activities they encounter, the technologies and materials available to them, and the opportunities available for their contributions to influence what happens next.
Connecting ideas across disciplinary boundaries
Looking back on these sessions, what stood out to me was not a single theory or methodology, but the connections between them. Curriculum making raised questions about how educational practices develop through enquiry and reflection. Participatory research raised questions about whose voices influence those developments. Discussions of conceptual change challenged me to think about how children’s knowledge develops and varies across contexts. The workshop on agency, meanwhile, encouraged me to examine more carefully what we mean by describing children as having agency.
These ideas come from different areas of educational research, yet they intersect with many of the questions I am encountering in my PhD. Conducting interdisciplinary educational research is not simply about combining several topics within a single project. It also involves being open to different theoretical perspectives, recognising tensions between them, and considering what each might reveal about the research we are already doing.
