CREMCYA has a distinct focus on the education of children and young adults who are not well-served, and often treated as deficit by existing formal and traditional forms of education, locally, in the UK, and globally.
CREMCYA aims to facilitate critical, creative, co-produced, and theoretically-informed praxis to develop real-life, inter-disciplinary, and intersectional improvements to marginalised people’s lives. This aim informs all the activities of the centre. We conduct research across the spectrum of people’s educational experiences, taking an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach in our themes, theoretical orientations, and methodology, but with an orientation to articulating the depth and nuance of people’s experience. We strive for our research to be impactful on the lives of people directly, on policies concerning them, and on the practitioners who work with them. This necessitates developing ongoing relationships with stakeholders.
We are proud pracademics – We are from and close to practice, with developed mature ongoing links to it spanning decades. We are concurrently committed to academic rigour and developing theory and praxis.
We are committed pedagogues, committed to interrogating, innovating, and enacting our own, and others', pedagogic practice and professional identities.
We are genuinely collaborative in a way HE research is often not. We are committed to developing a Community of Practice (CoP) of academics, support and professional staff, children, young people, community members, charities, governments, NGOs, and the enterprise sector.
We are committed to co-production and valuing lived experience, particularly marginalised voices, but not in deficit voyeuristic way, but seeing Those with Lived Experience (TWLE) as ongoing equal partners. We are committed to social justice and impact, through our reach and influence with local and national policy makers.
We are intersectional and interdisciplinary in our approach, in terms of themes, equality, diversity, adn inclusion, disciplines, theoretical orientations and methodology, but with an orientation to articulating the depth and nuance of people’s experience.
Centre director
For further details, please contact Professor Mike Seal at mike.seal@stmarys.ac.uk.