EHSC newsletter LOW RES

Centre for Research into Imagination, Curiosity
The Centre for Research into Imagination,
Curiosity, Enquiry and Environment (ICEE)
grew initially from the existing Science Cluster
for Learning and Education (SCICLE), which
has established a successful track record since its
formation two years ago and where members have
shown both commitment to research-informed
teaching and recognition of the close and reciprocal
relationship between research and practice.
The Centre will formally recognise the work of
SCICLE to date, while in addition further facilitate
links with outside bodies and allow for further
development of research activity, with a broad
remit, which reflects the scope of discipline specific
research, interdisciplinary possibilities, and broad
notions of learning and futures education. As such,
the Centre has the capacity to act as a hub for other
extant EHSC Clusters, including those for creativity,
spirituality, arts and narrative, who will be invited
to join to optimise future capabilities.
The Centre will also encompass related areas of
focus such as rights and character education,
education for sustainability, and climate change
education. The Centre will complement the Faculty
research culture and provide opportunities for
integrated, inter-disciplinary and inter-professional
working within EHSC, across the University
and beyond.
The Centre will develop opportunities to
complement other Faculty Centres. Initial
conversations have also identified links to the future
Centre for Climate Change. Thus, the time is right
to launch such a forward thinking group. With a
deliberately broad remit, the Centre will provide
a flexible space in which researchers (university,
schoolbased and other groups) can engage in
creative enquiry and develop shared interests in the
earliest years of development to higher education
and adult lifelong learning. Indeed, the
Centre will provide a vibrant hub for existing
work in creativity, wonder, imagination, wellbeing,
sustainability, climate change, futures thinking,
global citizenship, social and environmental justice,
nature, space and place, and the arts; these are all
lenses through which the research nexus between
complex concepts and education might be explored.
The Centre will place emphasis on participatory
and collaborative research methodologies, which
are critically reflexive and foreground the voices of
learners.
The Centre is established from a range of expertise
and experience, from postdoctoral researchers,
early career researchers engaged in PhD and
professional doctorates and researchers new to
Higher Education. The Centre is therefore well
placed as a hub for mentorship and development.
Members are variously supervisors to Phd and EdD
students, and work alongside Winchester Research
Apprentices and Student Fellows.
20