Key details
Dr Ewa Sidorenko
Senior Lecturer in Education
Dr Ewa Sidorenko is a Senior Lecturer in Education within the School of Education at the University of Greenwich.
Ewa's educational background is in sociology and cultural anthropology. She completed her PhD in 1998 which examined the application of sociological theory to account for the transformation of the political space in post-communist Poland. She has pursued her interest in Polish culture and politics, particularly in relation to issues of nationalism, migration, right wing politics and identity and attended conferences and written on the subject.
Ewa joined the university in 2003, initially as a part-time senior lecturer, then full-time to lead on two Year 1 undergraduate courses in education and childhood studies, as well as a course lecturer and project supervisor for Year 3 undergraduates. She is also a research project supervisor on the Doctorate in Education programme.
Whilst at the university, Ewa has developed her interest in the field of education and childhood, extending her research interests further in social/psychology; evolutionary perspective; the learning theory and interdisciplinarity approach as most suitable for exploring education and childhood; as well as research methodology. Her work has been included in submission for Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, the system for assessing the quality of research.
More recently, her research work has explored a historical archive documenting family history focusing on the impact of surviving a Nazi concentration camp on the victim's family members. The study is being developed in relation to themes of memory, childhood, wellbeing and education and is in collaboration with other members of the education & community studies department with a view of organising an exhibition. To date, she has presented two papers on this subject with more planned in the future.
Ewa is also a creative writer and member of Cryptwriters poetry group, reading her poetry in public as well as having been published in The Shuffle Anthology.
Posts held previously:
- Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, Royal Holloway University of London and the Open University
Responsibilities within the university
- Senior Lecturer, School of Education
- Lecturer on Education and Childhood Studies
- Induction coordinator for Education studies
- Supervises EdD research projects
Recognition
- Teaching fellow HEA
Research / Scholarly interests
Ewa has found that in the field of education, taking an interdisciplinary approach is more promising than conventional sociology of education; in particular the inclusion of socio-psychological frame to sociological analysis in patterns of under/achievement can yield an enriched examination of the complex phenomena.
Similarly, the developments within learning theories, which attend to socio-emotional needs of learners and their identity development and contemporary constructivist developmental psychology (of Robert Kegan) has been looked at as extending the field of sociology of education, which in a purely social constructivist paradigm, can be considered reductionist.
By adopting such interdisciplinary approach it may be possible to view certain educational phenomena (underachievement, disaffection, disorder/challenging behaviour) as needing a new paradigm which draws on both educational sociology and contemporary developmental psychology. Ewa draws on complexity theory and argues for a new ecological approach; that post-structuralist analyses fail to capture the dynamic aspects of educational processes and fail to understand the relationship between the educational 'system' and the learner with needs in constructing disorder and failure. The new ecological paradigm also offers fresh insights into the relationship between social class and educational underprivilege.
Recent publications
Article
Sidorenko, Ewa and , (2022), Remembering the war: an autoethnography of survival. SAGE. In: , , , . SAGE, Qualitative Inquiry, 28 (3-4) . pp. 365-377 ISSN: 1077-8004 (Print), 1552-7565 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211066881).
Papadopoulou, Marianna and , Sidorenko, Ewa (2021), Whose ‘voice’ is it anyway? The paradoxes of the participatory narrative. Taylor & Francis - Wiley & British Educational Research Association (BERA). In: , , , . Taylor & Francis - Wiley & British Educational Research Association (BERA), British Educational Research Journal (BERA), 48 (2) . pp. 354-370 ISSN: 0141-1926 (Print), 1469-3518 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3770).
Sidorenko, Ewa and , (2019), ‘A Portrait of Lower Silesia’: Researching identity through collodion photography and memory narratives. SAGE. In: , , , . SAGE, Methodological Innovations, 12 (3) . pp. 1-13 2059-7991 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2059799119890787).
Book section
Sidorenko, Ewa and , Marusinska, Karina (2017), Cultural Intervention in the Public Sphere through HUG: Articulating Social Exclusion. Faculty of Design Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In: , , In: Katarzyna Kasia, Magda Kochanowska (eds.), Fair Book. Aktywnosc/ Activity. Faculty of Design Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Warszawa . pp. 201-208 . ISBN: 9788365455659 (doi: ).
Sidorenko, Ewa and , (2017), Building bridges between Breslau and Wrocław: a case study from the European capital of culture initiative 2016. CEU Press. In: , , In: Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah (eds.), Lviv and Wrocław, Cities in Parallel? Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890-Present. CEU Press, Maryland, USA (1st) . ISBN: 9789633863237 (doi: ) NB Item availability restricted.