About Me
and my Current Work in Early Childhood Education

I work with with Early Education as an Associate Consultant leading on a wide variety of professional development projects, speaking engagements and events as well as training projects across the maintained sector, private, voluntary and independent contexts and with international schools too. I also worked with Early Education on Birth to 5 Matters (Expressive Arts and Design). I will shortly be sharing information about a new Early Education funded project with The Mercer’s Company exploring a coaching model of professional development in 2 London Boroughs. This exciting 4 year project will be exploring children’s creativity as a way to activate and enhance their flourishing in Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED); and Communication and Language (CL) through collaborative arts-based learning. 

I also work with CREC the Centre of Research in Early Childhood on the MA Education (Early Years) part-time programme as an expert course tutor specialising in creativity and the arts in early years. I teach and support students in their research informed practice-based research through to completing their dissertation year.

I have recently completed (2020-2023) a 3 year course with Reggio Children to become a Teacher-Educator of the approach. This is a new venture with Reggio Children and the International Network of Reggio Children. For many years I was an advisory member and latterly a Co-Director of Sightlines Initiative who continue to organise study tours to Reggio Emilia to visit the municipal pre-schools and infant toddler centres, and conferences with participation from educators, atelierista’s and pedgogista’s from Reggio Emilia.

I am a researcher on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project Children’s Participation in Schools which is a 4 year project across four universities with a focus on young children’s participation rights in lower primary settings in Wales. The research aims to establish teaching practices that embed young children’s rights in classrooms and schools. based across schools in Wales. There are resources and more information about this research, and details on joining the network on our Children’s Participation in Schools website.

I have long term coaching and consultancy relationships with Ashmore Park Nursery and Phoenix Nursery School Federation in Wolverhampton where I develop and support professional learning in developing projects and inquiry based approaches to learning and development. I also work with Woodlands Primary and Nursery School, Telford & Wrekin and have done for many years working with the early years team on their enquiry based projects and research of their pedagogical approach in relation to children’s outcomes in communication and language. Madeley Nursery School, also in Telford & Wrekin is also a school I have developed a long term relationship with over many years in which we have worked on many Reggio Emilia inspired projects co-researching with children the Language of Photography and children’s relations to the ecology of their setting which we have written about in an upcoming chapter Keyte, D., & Lowings, L. (In Press). “Learning to Live Well Together: Art and Ecological Research with Young Children” in Moula, Z., & Walshe, N. (In Press). Arts in Nature with Children and Young People: A Guide towards Health Equality, Wellbeing, and Sustainability’. London: Routledge. With these settings above we together embarked on two Erasmus+ funded research projects. The first involved pre-schools in Sweden exploring the creative and expressive uses of digital technology within the early years which resulted in this resource rich website called We Think Everywhere detailing our research approach and findings. The second project involved schools in the UK, Romania, Spain and Sweden who together researched transdisciplinary learning, developing methodologies for analysing this type of learning, with resulting benefits for children and educators with evaluation strategies that were commensurate with the values of our approach.