The Research Centre of the McMillan Faculty of Social Care and Community Practice

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings peruse in the world, with the world and with each other.

Paulo Freire

The McMillan Faculty of Social Care and Community Practice at Bradford College have inaugurated a new centre for Research called REfLECT: REsearch for Leading & Evolving Community Thinking. This title encompasses many of the themes of the Faculty’s research emphasising the inter-professional and theoretical concepts of the Faculty’s disciplines. The centre’s research themes also enable collaborations through border pedagogies.

The centre for research in the Faculty of Social Care and Community Practice intends to critically explore the concepts and discourses that exist in a contemporary globalised world. The faculty has actively immersed its disciplines with the local communities of Bradford Context, and surrounding areas, in establishing an array of inter-professional collaborations. It has also developed a wide range of regional, national and international collaborations with colleges, universities and professional agencies. This includes students and academic colleagues within the ERASMUS programme and the Internationalisation portfolio.

The faculty embeds a range of approaches such as;

  • person centred,
  • holistic,
  • enabling,
  • emancipatory,
  • inclusive,
  • informing,
  • opportunity creating,

whilst being:

  • comparative,
  • exploratory & enhancing,
  • critical, analytical & questioning,
  • challenging within a safe space
  • equality led, celebrating difference & open-minded…

Research themes

REfLECT Research Themes Diagram

The faculty sees the purpose of the research centre to be:

‘…activities [that] should both engage with the knowledge creation process within subject disciplines and, through the application of research, contribute to the development of professional practice at local, national and international levels.’ (Bradford College, 2015)

It primarily allows for pedagogical research within its scope of methodology along with social research including humanistic, heutagogical, grounded, ethnographic and phenomenological theory. Whilst secondarily it encompasses the positivist methodology in a globalised metric environment in offering a further analytical exploration of the interpretive.

For further details and discussions please contact the Faculty Scholarship & Research Coordinators (SRCs):

Ian Jones and Dr. Trevor Rodgers-Gray

Email: socialcareandcommunity@bradfordcollege.ac.uk

https://www.bradfordcollege.ac.uk/study/university-centre/research/reflect