This presentation will focus on menstruation-related prejudices and Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education (RSHE) in primary and secondary schools in England. I will argue that to address the menstruation-related prejudices that young people experience and/or perpetrate, there is a need to explore and understand how menstruation features in young people’s cultures (i.e. their ways of living). I will also explain how findings from existing studies suggest that it is necessary to critically examine the concept of ‘menstrual stigma’ and rethink the positioning of menstruation as a solely biological event. I posit that this will be particularly important for developing and implementing the new RSHE framework in England that instructs all state schools to teach pupils about menstruation in health education and also advises them to reduce the stigma around health issues. In this presentation, I will raise questions about the relationship between menstruation, biology and culture, trouble the concept of ‘menstrual stigma’ and suggest that sociomaterialist theory could help to broaden understandings of how menstruation is part of young people’s cultures.

Neural networks, mathematical algorithms based on highly simplified models of biological neurons in the brain, are now commonplace in a range of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, from driverless cars to diagnosis of dementia. In this paper I reflect on recent experiences of attempting to train a neural network algorithm to recognise young children's arrangements of Cuisenaire rods - colourful wooden blocks from 1cm to 10cm long - on a tabletop via a webcam, as a potential tool for my PhD research into early maths education. In particular I focus on some of the problems the programmer and I encountered in developing and training an algorithm to reliably recognise rods, for example the difficulty of recognising a 1cm cubic 'unit' block compared with longer cuboid blocks, and insights this has given me into some of the possible strengths and weaknesses of training neural networks as a metaphor for teaching mathematics to children.

Traditionally, the orthodox views of leadership are concerned with the qualities and competencies of leaders, and yet the paucity of research on the relationships of language and leadership especially from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective has made me develop an interest in my research. Using distributed leadership as a theoretical framework and using a critical approach to discourse analysis as a method, this research investigates the discourse of course coordinators as leaders to examine how they exercise power through discourse, and also investigates how tutors as followers deal with course coordinators. The focus of this research is therefore on how leadership power emerges through linguistic analysis of power asymmetry between course coordinators as leaders and tutors as followers, employing a multi-disciplinary approach drawing from social science, social theory and linguistics.

The rise and dominance of the English language as a global Lingua Franca has significantly affected instructional education language policy and teaching and learning in higher education contexts around the world, particularly in non-native settings. This study aims to explore the views of maths and science pre-service student teachers enrolled at the Bahrain Teachers College (BTC) regarding English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education and the challenges that they face and how they overcome them. By focusing on the views of pre-service student teachers and allowing them to express themselves, I hope to gain insights into a key stakeholder of the Bahraini public school education system who have been largely ignored by language policy makers. It aims to do that through the collection of data by means of in-depth individual and small focus group interviews with the students currently enrolled in the maths and science specialisation at the BTC. Thematic analysis will then be used to analyse the data with themes drawn from the wide body of literature of research on EMI. I hope that this research will provide useful information to both educators and policy makers that will hopefully improve the academic experiences of future students.