My research interests are focused on the relations between teaching-learning and knowledge-curriculum practices in higher education. I am also interested in the relations between these practices and higher education policies as well as the relations between theories and methods in research into higher education. The kinds of questions that I explore in this research include:  What counts as high quality teaching and learning in higher education? How is this positioned in policies and practices? How do we research and theorise these competing notions of quality?

I am interested in receiving PhD proposals in most areas related to knowledge, curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment in higher education, particularly those relating to students' and academics' experiences of higher education.

Before coming to Lancaster, I spent four years researching students' experiences of learning at the Institute for the Advancement of University Learning, University of Oxford and, before that, seven years implementing and researching peer learning at Newham College of Further Education.

My research interests are focused on teaching, learning, and assessment in higher education. My recent book 'Analysing Teaching-Learning Interactions in Higher Education' focuses on ways of conceptualising teaching-learning processes in higher education that support a consideration of both structure and agency. Following on from the work in this book, I am examining the relations between theory and method in research into higher education. I have recently completed an Economic and Social Research Council funded project looking at pedagogic quality and inequality in undergraduate Sociology degrees. This project focused on comparing the quality of teaching, learning and curricula in undergraduate sociology and allied subjects in four universities that have different reputations for the quality of the undergraduate experience that they offer. The study aimed to question the assumptions underlying these reputations through an in-depth exploration of the relations between what students bring to university, their experiences of university education and what they gain it. We investigated what is taught, why and how; and how undergraduate students' and lecturers' experience and evaluate the curriculum and the teaching and learning environment.

I am a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Higher Education. I am a member of the Economic and Social Research Council's Peer Review College.

I currently convene and teach the 'Researching Learning, Teaching and Assessment' module on the Doctoral Programme in Educational Research.