Cardiff School of Social Sciences

Research Interests

Martin Jephcote’s work is informed by a social constructionist perspective which underpins his understanding of and research into the construction of knowledge, the processes of learning and education and training policies and practices.  He is interested in the contested and evolutionary nature of the construction of pedagogic discourse and the ways in which policies are made and implemented.  In this vein, his work drew on and contributed to the area of school subject histories and was the first to make a substantial contribution in the field of school economics.  In Recontextualising Discourse: Exploring the Workings of the Meso-Level (2004), he pointed to the functions of the under-researched meso-level in mediating policy and, in School Subjects, Subject Communities and Curriculum Change: the Social Construction of Economics in the School Curriculum (2007) further illustrated the interplay of power and control.   With a particular focus on the impacts of policy changes on teachers’ lives and work and students’ learning, he is interested in the social organisation of learning, and both teacher and learner identities: see for example, The International Journal of Learning, 2008, 2009 and Teaching and Teacher Education, 2009, 2010.

He is a new member of the Teacher Education Group and involved in the development of information to for beginning teacher educators.  He was principal investigator in an ESRC/TLRP research project called Learning and Working in Further Education in Wales.  This project followed the real-time learning journeys of teachers and students and provided a contemporary account of further education and understanding of the processes that give rise ‘negotiated regimes of learning’.  He was a co-researcher in the ESRC/TLRP Learning to Teach in Post-Devolution UK project, a comparative study of the processes at work that, since devolution, have given different shape to initial and early years teacher education across the UK.