Dr Mark Pulsford

After working as a Primary school teacher, and before that as Research Director in a brand and advertising consultancy, Mark studied for a Master’s degree and then PhD in Education at the University of Sheffield. He is currently the Programme Leader for DMU’s MA in Education Practice and he also teaches on the Undergraduate Education Studies degree. The focus of his teaching is the relationship between education policy, practice and cultures.

Mark is Book Reviews Editor for the journal Power & Education, co-facilitator of the Institute for Education Future’s ‘Neoliberalism and Primary Education’ special interest group, and part of the supervisory team for two PhD students in Education.

• Pulsford, M. (2017) In search of the male SENCo, TeachPrimary: SENCo Special Issue, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp.26-27. Available at http://www.teachwire.net/uploads/special-issues/SENCo2.pdf
• Pulsford, M. (2016) Book Review - Marked Identities: Narrating lives between social labels and individual biographies, Power & Education, 8(1), pp. 103–105
• Pulsford, M. (2014) Constructing men who teach: Research into care and gender as productive of the male Primary teacher. Gender & Education, 26(3), pp.215-231 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540253.2014.901719#abstract)
• Pulsford, M. (2014) Book Review - How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organisation Studies, Power & Education, 6(3), pp.327-329
• Pulsford, M. (2014) Can men be SENCos too? Special Children, 220, p.52

My research interests are around teacher identity, gender and inclusion – for example, the ways in which school practices, masculinities and ableism assemble in and through school communities. I also have a research interest in teaching as a career, in particular young people’s perceptions of teaching, prospective teachers’ experiences of applying for teacher education programmes, and how people who are ‘othered’ navigate this terrain.

• Primary education
• Contemporary educational issues
• Education Policy
• Leadership and Change

• BA (Hons) Social & Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham
• PGCE with QTS, Wandsworth SCITT/Kingston University
• MA Globalising Education Policy & Practice, University of Sheffield
• PhD in Education, University of Sheffield

I teach on modules at all Undergraduate levels, as well as on the MA in Education Practice.

• Pulsford, M. (2017) “Some people feel the need to bring things in”: Objects and ‘homeliness’ in male teachers’ narratives of Primary school office spaces, in Gender and Education Association Conference, 21^st - 23^rd June, 2017, Middlesex University, London
• Pulsford, M. (2014) Rupturing narratives: material-discursive entanglements and the becoming-other of male Primary school teachers, in Troubling Narratives: Identity Matters, 19^th - 20^th June, 2014, University of Huddersfield
• Pulsford, M. (2014) Exploring male Primary school teacher identities through a new material feminist perspective, in Second Research Student Conference, 3^rd June, School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Pulsford, M. (2013) The intra-active becomings of male Primary school SENCOs, in First Research Student Conference, 5^th June 2013, School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Pulsford, M (2013) ‘Becoming’ a Primary School Teacher: Gendered-teacher identities in the making, in Discourse, Power, Resistance (DPR) 13, 9^th -11^th April, 2013, University of Greenwich