Professor Lizzie Rushton

Professor of Education

Education Stirling

Professor Lizzie Rushton

Contact details

About me

Elizabeth Rushton is Professor in Education and Head of the Education Division, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, where she teaches on a range of Postgraduate taught programmes and supervises doctoral and post-doctoral research.

Her research expertise is interdisciplinary, drawing on the disciplines of education and geography. This includes the education and professional development of teachers, student participation in research and decision making and, human and environment interactions over time. These areas of expertise intersect with a range of fields including geography and science education, climate change and environmental education, and decolonisation and anti-racism in education.

Her research seeks to enable and develop meaningful and reciprocal partnerships between scholarship and practice in education and geography. This includes developing pathways, such as co-authorship, so that the knowledge and understanding of teachers and young people can inform education and environmental scholarship and policy making.

Recent work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Educational Research Association, Leverhulme and the Royal Society of Arts. Consultancy projects include working with the British Council to develop school-based climate change education in Iraq.

She serves on the Editorial Boards of The Curriculum Journal, the Journal of Geography in Higher Education, the BERA Blog and is co-convenor of BERA's Education for Environmental Sustainability Special Interest Group.

Previously, she was Head of Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, Institute of Education, University College London where she also held roles as Research Director of UCL’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education and Programme Director of the MA Education.

Prior to joining UCL she was the inaugural Programme Director of the secondary geography postgraduate certificate in education programme at King’s College London having worked as a secondary school geography teacher in south-east England. Her doctoral research focused on the Environmental History of Belize, Central America, funded by the AHRC and was completed in 2014.

Research centres/groups