Presenter: Professor Judith Sixsmith

Judith Sixsmith is Professor of Health Research and Director of TCELT at the University of Dundee, UK. Her research interests lie in the areas of health and wellbeing where she explores the ways in which people, particularly older people and those living in disadvantaged communities, experience processes of marginalisation within existing health, social and cultural systems. Her current research includes projects on placemaking with older people, including issues of age friendly cities and communities, ageing and technology, intergenerational design, housing for cultural and religious minorities and ageing-well-in-the-right-place. An expert in qualitative methodologies, Judith prioritises the involvement of participants in the design, implementation, interpretation and dissemination phases of her research, including co-researchers from highly marginalised groups such as asylum seekers, refugees and older frail people within qualitative frameworks.

An increasingly ageing population presents new challenges to designing urban environments that support and promote everyday engagement, health and wellbeing for older adults. The World Health Organisation’s Global Age-Friendly Cities movement and associated guidelines have identified the need to develop cities and communities that optimise opportunities for health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age. Ensuring that age-friendly urban environments create opportunities for healthy ageing require cities and communities that embed citizen rights to access and move around the city and be actively involved in the making and re-making of the city. These initiatives raise important questions – what are older adults’ everyday experiences and reflections on exercising their rights to the city they live in? What are the challenges and opportunities in supporting older adults’ rights to the city as they transition through they become older? What more can be done to support healthy, active ageing through different life transitions? Two international ESRC funded PLACEAGE projects conducted from 2016-21 (www.placeage.org) address these questions by exploring the lived experiences of older adults as they negotiate their local communities and cities. Using the UK data and drawing on qualitative data (90 semi-structured interviews, 60 walking interviews, 30 photo diaries, 9 knowledge cafés and 9 community mapping workshops) collected in three cities (Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester) across nine neighbourhoods in the UK, several key themes were generated. The themes unpack a rights-based approach to age-friendly communities and cities which centre on mobility and access, respect, (in)visibility and involvement in decision-making. The findings offer pathways towards supportive age-friendly design, policy and practice which recognise that cities constitute complex historical, psycho-social and cultural webs of interconnectedness across people, organisations and places where choices made and actions performed have wide repercussions on older adults everyday lives, their relationships, transitions through the life course and on societal values that position individual older people and older people in general as ‘the invisible’ on our streets and communities.

For this conversation we will be hearing from Sarah Hulme who is an Educational Psychologist and lecturer at the University of Dundee. Sarah will be talking about her experience of transition during lockdown through the lens of bereavement.  During the second lockdown in November 2020, Sarah’s sister died suddenly which has had a profound and identity changing effect as she navigates grief.  The interaction of this grief story in the context of a global pandemic leads to reflections on transitions at personal, community and global levels. 

Sarah has been an Educational Psychologist for 18 years and has worked with bereavement and loss during this time.  The complex dance of 'knowing' about grief and 'being' with grief is a transition that is challenging to navigate.  She will talk about this and reflect on what this means for an understanding of self during times of trauma.  Sarah is a mother of 3 young children and also aunty to her sister's 2 children. 

This session will be hosted by Dr Beth Hannah (University of Dundee) who undertakes research on transitions and is Director of Transformative Change: Educational and Life Transitions (TCELT) Research Centre.

For this conversation we will be hearing from Dr Marion Burns, Lynn Taylor, Kirsty Smith and Carole Campbell about the opportunities and challenges emerging from the changes made during the pandemic to transitions practices for children starting school. The panel members will use the lens of Multiple and Multi-dimensional Transitions Theory to discuss policy, practice and research in the context of early years. 

Dr Marion Burns is a retired HM Inspector, though after nearly twenty years with Education Scotland she is still working part time for Glasgow City Council as an ELC  Leadership Development officer. She is the non-executive chairperson of Early Years Scotland and co-author of Realising the Ambition: Being me. She will touch on some of the ideas presented in her blog.

Lynn is a Senior Education Officer at Education Scotland in the Curriculum Innovation team and co-author and illustrator of Realising the Ambition: Being me. She is also an EdD student at the University of Strathclyde with an interest in ways children’s voice can impact policy and practices.

Kirsty Smith is an Early Years Senior Practitioner at Banff Nursery/ELC, she has worked with children in Early Years for over 20 years. Kirsty has recently completed her Bachelor of Arts Childhood Practice at University of Aberdeen.

Carole Campbell is the Principal Educational Psychologist at South Ayrshire Council. Carole is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Strathclyde investigating the improvement of effective tailored supports to promote the inclusion of children and young people with autistic spectrum disorder within education. This has included a strong focus on transitions.

Presenter: Tharin Phenwan

Tharin is a lecturer and final year PhD student under the supervision of Prof Judith Sixsmith and Dr Linda McSwiggan at the School of Health Sciences, University of Dundee. His thesis focuses on understanding the initiation and revision of Advance Care Planning amongst people with dementia. His research interests are centred around illness transitions, dementia, palliative and end of life care, quality of life and medical education. Tharin had worked as an assistant professor and GP at the School of Medicine, Walailak University, Thailand, until he joined the University of Dundee in 2021.

In this seminar, Tharin will discuss the use of narrative portrait approach to create a video monologue using verbatim quotes from people with dementia as an alternative method to present the findings. The data was generated from interviews with 13 people with dementia and demonstrated the transitions of their loss of identities and challenges regarding the creation and sustainability of their future plans.

In this seminar, Hamido A. Megahead will discuss the use of interpretive interactionism approach to create biographical narrative accounts using verbatim quotes from the young men who were making a transition from mixed sex into male only residential arrangement. To ensure young person friendly method to listen to, and present their voice, data were generated from story, life interviews with 11 young men. The research highlighted their transitions in terms of switching from female parenting into male parenting (staff), developing their identities and getting through despairing experiences so as to create and sustain their life after the move.

Presenter: Hamido A. Megahead

Hamido A. Megahead is a research scholar who has been working independently in cross-cultural social work research for 25+ years. He has been committed to enhancing the school social work in the Northern Ireland context. He volunteered and encouraged "the informal education for young people in Northern Ireland". He is currently doing a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. The title of study is "Young Men’s Experiences of Residential Childcare Transition from Mixed Sex Residential Accommodation to Single Sex Provision in Egypt" 

Multiple and Multi-dimensional Transitions of 2020 Healthcare Graduates

What happened to medicine, nursing and dentistry graduates, due to move to practice, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic? This longitudinal study explored the impact of the pandemic on their multiple and multi-dimensional transitions. The purpose was to identify how ongoing support can be provided to healthcare graduates for successful transitions and wellbeing in times of unanticipated pressure. In this study interview data were collected at up to 3 time points, and the findings were turned into a comic and infographic.

In this session, we will briefly share the main findings of the study and their implications for research, policy and practice. We will then discuss the rationale for, and the process behind, creating comics and an infographic to share the results.

Research team

Divya Jindal-Snape, Lisi Gordon, Nicola Innes, Joanne Corlett, Jacqui Morris, Sucharita Nanjappa, Tricia Tooman and Waraf Al-Yaseen

Comics and infographic team

Divya Jindal-Snape, Chris Murray, Tricia Tooman, Waraf Al-Yaseen, Nicola Innes, Damon Herd
Artists: Clio Ding, Maria Corrales and Jaina Teo Lewen

The study was funded by Tenovus Scotland.

Dr Charlotte Bagnall

Charlotte is a Lecturer within the Institute of Education at the University of Manchester. She is an applied social psychologist, and her research is focused on supporting children’s emotional well-being and mental health within schools. She is a mixed-methods researcher, with a particular interest in intervention science and co-creation within education. Charlotte is particularly passionate about school transition and how to improve children's emotional well-being during this time. As part of her PhD she designed (see Bagnall, 2020) and evaluated (see Bagnall et al., 2021a) the first universal emotional-centred intervention to improve children’s emotional well-being over primary-secondary school transition. This intervention, called Talking about School Transition, was informed by focus group and case study research conducted in the UK (Bagnall et al., 2019) and USA (Bagnall et al., 2021b) in mainstream and special schools (Bagnall et al., 2021c). Aside from academia, she is also on the BPS Developmental Section Committee, the BPS ECR committee, the BPS Psychology of Education Committee and TCELT-INTR committee.

Liz Stevenson

Liz Stevenson is a Consortium Partner for Birmingham Education Partnership, a new role within the School Improvement Team working with schools across the borough of Birmingham. In her previous role as Transition Manager for a local authority, Liz worked with Charlotte to design and evaluate Transition 5-7, which will be discussed in the presentation. Liz is also the co-founder of TransitionEd.

Primary to secondary school transition is one of the most difficult transitions children face where they experience simultaneous environmental, psychosocial, and academic discontinuity, which can negatively impact their emotional well-being. Interventions that have been developed to counter the negative outcomes children commonly experience are limited in number, sustainability, and reach, and rely on cross-sectional as opposed to longitudinal evaluations. There is an absence of emotional-centred interventions which take an early preventative approach and begin transition support in Year 5 (second last year of primary school in England), despite previous research which has shown gradual support to be the ‘gold-standard’. The current study evaluates a nine-week universal support intervention to develop children’s awareness and ability to cope with the multiple changes experienced over primary-secondary school transition. It targets protective factors at the individual level (coping abilities) and environmental level (ability to seek social support). In this talk, Charlotte, will discuss the process and outcome evaluation findings and their implications for future research, practice and policy.