Introducing PsychBites Podcast
PsychBites is a new podcast for all education professionals that aims to help bridge the gap between educational psychology research and day-to-day practice with children and young people.
Inspired by inspiring research
The idea to start the PsychBites podcast was born during an afternoon session of reading academic articles and theses for the educational psychology doctorate programme. The inspiring research that is conducted as part of the educational psychology doctorate programmes across the UK has immensely valuable contributions to make to the field.
An unfortunate truth is that only a small number of theses are published or have the opportunity to reach a wide audience of educational psychologists (EPs), let alone to share findings more widely and impact educators’ practice ‘on the ground’. This is not news to EPs and the journey to amplify the reach and impact of EP thesis research is helpfully supported by the edpsy thesis directory.
Theses are, by nature, in-depth and lengthy pieces of writing which means they can be time and energy consuming to read. While published academic journal articles are shorter in length, they can use overly complicated language and jargon. We felt these were barriers to research findings reaching education professionals.
A community of sharing
Through our experiences previously working full-time in education, as teachers, youth and support workers, and now as busy trainee EPs, we understood how difficult it can be to access or find the time to read academic research. In this pre-doctorate pursuit, we had previously found inspiration in work by edpsy and others such as Agents of Hope podcast, Conversations about Consultation podcast, The Emotional Curriculum podcast, and EP Reach-Out Youtube series.
We tentatively checked if colleagues working in education felt similarly, and the response was a resounding agreement. Our sense of frustration motivated us to bite the bullet and start a podcast that could check all our boxes. We wanted to create episodes that would be digestible in terms of the language used and the episode length. We imagined they could provide thought-provoking and easy-listening during a commute, or on a dog walk. We settled on the premise that each 30-40 episode would feature a guest EP, or education researcher, to come and discuss what interested them in their research topic area, what research they did, what they found, and what the key take home messages would be for education professionals.
The journey so far
So far, we’ve had the privilege to chat with EPs who have given up their time to come speak with us. The conversations have been truly inspiring and have provoked deep reflections on our own practice. We have been taken aback by the feedback from those who have listened to episodes so far and feel refreshed to be hearing about psychology research in a new way.
We’ve had the privilege to chat with our guests about their research on topics such as:
- the benefits of using animals in schools,
- supporting OCD needs,
- using virtual reality to practise social situations with autistic adolescents,
- the use of reduced timetables in schools,
- pupil perceptions of wellbeing,
- sex, gender and sexuality norms.
We have also released a special episode where we shared our personal experiences applying for EP doctorate programmes. We hope that this episode offers hope and insight for anyone interested in joining us in the field of educational psychology.
What next?
There are some exciting topics and guests lined up for season 2 and 3, but we are keen for anyone with an interesting research topic to get in touch! Alternatively, if there are areas of research that you would like to know more about then please do let us know.
If you would like to keep up to date with PsychBites then follow us on social media or get in touch:
Email – psychbitespod@gmail.com
Twitter/X – @psychbitespod
Instagram – @psychbitespod
Listen to all PsychBites episodes or search ‘PsychBites’ on your podcast streaming app.
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