Dr Rebecca Wood
- Senior Lecturer (School of Education)
telephone:
07803012321
email:
Rebecca.Wood@glasgow.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8160-6212Biography
Rebecca is a former teacher and autism education practitioner who joined the at the School of Education as part of the research and teaching group Culture, Literacies, Inclusion and Pedagogy in May 2022. She is Principal Investigator of the Autistic School Staff Project, funded by the John and Lorna Wing Foundation.
Having studied for her first degrees at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, Rebecca completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham with the support of a full-time scholarship from the School of Education. During this time, she was also appointed as a Research Fellow in order to project manage the Transform Autism Education project, a tri-national teacher training programme funded by the European Commission. This was followed by an ESRC postdoctoral Fellowship at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre of King’s College London and then a senior lectureship in Special Education at the University of East London.
Rebecca is often invited to speak at national and international conferences and has a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, edited books and online media. She has had two books published: ‘Inclusive Education for Autistic Children: Helping Children to Learn and Flourish in the Classroom’ and an edited volume, ‘Learning From Autistic Teachers: How to be a Neurodiversity-Inclusive School’. Rebecca regularly provides consultancy and training for charities and government organisations and is a reviewer for a number of well-ranked academic journals. She is a visiting researcher at King’s College London where she is also a member of the Respect Research Lab.
Research interests
Rebecca’s predominantly qualitative research focuses on autism, education and inclusion. Her principal interests are in valuing and supporting multi-modal forms of communication in the context of autism and of promoting strengths-based approaches in schools. Her work also shows that educational inclusion can only be achieved by supporting acceptance and diversity across the whole school community, for adults as well as children. Her research has been based in the UK, but has also expanded to include Greece, Italy, Poland and the US. To date, Rebecca’s research has concerned:
- The experiences of autistic children in primary schools
- The perspectives of autistic children, autistic adults, parents and school staff on educational inclusion (a multi-modal approach)
- The communication of autistic children in schools: how this can be supported and validated, or ignored and denied
- The role of strong interests (monotropism) in facilitating educational inclusion
- The experiences, needs and strengths of autistic school staff in the UK and beyond
- The multifarious meanings of educational inclusion
- Critical disability and neurodiversity perspectives
- The value of autistic/disability perspectives and participatory approaches in research
Grants
2020 – 2022: Principal Investigator, Autistic School Staff Project, funded by the John and Lorna Wing Foundation (£57,139 and £40,739). In collaboration with Professor Francesca Happé (King’s College London), Dr Laura Crane (University College London), Alan Morrison (Autism Rights Group Highland), Dr Ruth Moyse (University of East London). Additional Phase 3 collaborators: Dr Damian Milton (University of Kent), Dr Anna Gagat-Matula (Pedagogical University of Krakow), Dr Kristen Bottema-Beutel (Boston College, Massachusetts).
2019 – 2020: Postdoctoral Fellowship, ‘The Inclusion of Autistic Children in the Curriculum and Assessment in Mainstream Primary Schools.’ King’s College London, funded by the ESRC.
2015 – 2017: Research Fellowship, Transform Autism Education project. Project manager, University of Birmingham, funded by the European Commission. Principal Investigator, Professor Karen Guldberg. In collaboration with the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation (Greece); the Ministero dell’Istruzione - Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Lombardia (Italy); the Ufficio Scolastico Territoriale di Monza e Brianza (Italy) and the Autism Education Trust (UK).
Supervision
Rebecca welcomes students interested in the following areas:
- Autism and education
- Autism and multimodal communication
- Autism and intense interests (monotropism)
- Educational inclusion (critical national and international perspectives)
- Experiences and perspectives of children with disabilities
- Teachers with disabilities
- Neurodiversity
Teaching
Rebecca currently lectures on the M.Ed in Inclusive Education programme and leads the Inclusive Education, Inclusive Pedagogies course.
Additional information
Peer reviewing includes European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research; Educational Review; Journal of Early Childhood Research; Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, Autism, Jessica Kingsley Publishers; Routledge books.
Rebecca’s online publications can be found, inter alia, in The Conversation, the Times Education Supplement, The Psychologist and the BERA blog.
