I want to begin with an acknowledgement.
I was able to attend IPDA 2026 because of the bursary. Without it, Dublin would not have been possible. I don’t say that as a footnote. I say it because it matters. Funding access to conferences is not a small thing. It is an act of belief in researchers who are still finding their footing, and I am genuinely grateful for it.
I arrived in Dublin carrying more uncertainty than I let on.
I am a Year 3 doctoral researcher at the University of Wolverhampton, a Head of English in a secondary school, and someone who has spent the last three years trying to build a conceptual framework rigorous enough to hold the complexity of what I see every day in classrooms. I was there to present. I knew why I had been accepted. But knowing something and feeling it are different things, and the gap between them was very present as I collected my conference badge.
What closed that gap, over two days, was the conference itself.
IPDA creates a particular kind of space.
I have attended events where expertise functions as currency, where the implicit hierarchy of the room shapes every conversation before it begins. Dublin felt different. The people I encountered (researchers, professors, school leaders, professional learning facilitators, policymakers) seemed less interested in establishing what they knew than in thinking together about what none of us fully understand yet.
That quality of intellectual generosity is not accidental. It is cultivated. And it is, I think, one of IPDA’s most significant contributions to the field.
The keynote from Dr Romina Madrid Miranda of the University of Stirling introduced the concept that has stayed with me most: wicked problems.
The argument, laid out with both clarity and weight, was that the challenges facing education today cannot be understood as separate issues to be solved in sequence. Teacher recruitment and retention. Growing inequality. Artificial intelligence. Accountability pressures. Student wellbeing. Public trust in the profession. These are not parallel lines. They are an entangled system. Each one exerts pressure on the others. Each attempted solution generates new tensions elsewhere.
For a doctoral researcher in the middle of a literature review, this was clarifying in ways I did not anticipate.
I have been studying disadvantage and English pedagogy through what I call the Prism of Pedagogy — a framework designed to hold multiple dimensions of educational experience simultaneously rather than reducing them to a single variable. What Dr Madrid Miranda’s framing gave me was a way of articulating why that kind of multi-dimensional thinking is not just conceptually interesting but methodologically necessary.
Disadvantage is a wicked problem. It cannot be extracted from the systems it moves through. The moment you try to isolate it, you have already misrepresented it.
That insight will shape the next stages of my research directly.
Lynne Jones and Sheena Bell’s round table — One programme, many pathways: exploring leadership together — offered a different kind of provocation.
The session explored what it means to develop leadership not as a set of individual competencies to be acquired, but as a collective, relational practice. The phrase that lodged itself in my thinking was one that felt almost quietly radical in the context of educational culture: leadership as service.
Not leadership as status. Not leadership as the accumulation of authority. Leadership as something oriented outward, toward the people and communities you serve.
What struck me was that this did not feel like an argument being made in the room. It felt like a shared assumption being explored. As though IPDA had long since settled that question and was now interested in what follows from it.
I left that session thinking not only about leadership but about teaching. About the ways in which the best pedagogy I have witnessed — and tried to practise — operates from exactly that orientation. Not the transmission of knowledge downward, but the creation of conditions in which understanding can emerge.
Service, in that sense, is not a diminishment of the role.
It is the whole point of it.
I presented my lightning talk, Refracted Spaces: Exploring English Pedagogy and Equity Through Scenario-Based Inquiry, on the second day.
I spoke about the Prism of Pedagogy. I introduced my What If? scenario methodology — the use of fictionalised classroom scenarios to help students and teachers examine how different pedagogical approaches feel, who they serve, and who they leave behind. I spoke about equity not as an outcome to be measured but as a practice to be understood.
When I finished, people wanted to talk.
They made connections I hadn’t anticipated. They brought their own experience into conversation in ways that shifted the shape of the thinking in real time.
The last question I was asked was whether the Prism of Pedagogy is a model or a framework.
It is the kind of question that reveals how much is still alive in the work. My supervisor and I are in ongoing conversation about precisely this. My own instinct is that it is a framework; not a structure to be applied, but a way of seeing. A lens rather than a ladder. But I hold that lightly, because the question deserves more than a confident answer in a conference corridor.
It deserves the work.
I came to Dublin uncertain whether I belonged in the room.
I left wondering how many more rooms I had spent years convincing myself I didn’t belong in.
Not because I had proved myself. But because IPDA reminded me of something I had known intellectually but not yet felt fully: that research is not a solitary act of accumulation. It is a conversation. A community. A collective attempt to make sense of problems too complex and too consequential for any one person to hold alone.
I returned with new questions, new contacts, and renewed commitment to the work.
That is precisely what a conference should do.
Perhaps that was the real lesson of Dublin.
Sometimes nothing changes because you show up.
And sometimes everything does.
