Ashley Cotton

At Staffordshire, my primary role is Programme Manager and Teaching Excellence Fellow for the Step Up to Higher Education Foundation Certificate programme of study. As an educator, I am passionate and enthused about the transformative role education plays in positively developing people to succeed and flourish in their professional and personal contexts. To support this, through the role as Course Lead, my area of expertise at the University is to work positively with a range of harder-to-reach learners via the delivery of teaching and learning interventions which work to enable students to develop the core academic and required learning skill-set to be successful within a university-level environment. Moreover, providing experiences that enable students to take active ownership for their learning, alongside supporting students to adopt essential practices and techniques which helps them learn more impactfully.

Through my work, my personal, educational ethos and approach is underpinned in more humanist approaches to teaching and learning, enabling students I work with to develop sound levels of confidence and self-efficacy in their own abilities, both in an academic and personal sense. My research interest and approach aim to take a holistic view of students, allowing and supporting discernible personal expansions of positive growth with students, in order to break down any dispositional barriers they experience when engaging with education. I am highly enthused at both facilitating and enabling learners to tap into their potential and find this area of work particularly rewarding. I am also passionate about driving positive social change and the role the University plays in enabling widening participation. I actively research and advocate on this agenda nationally.