University of Cambridge

Dr Fiona Maine is the Project Coordinator and Principal Investigator for DIALLS. Her research expertise focuses on dialogue and multi-literacies, examining in particular the affordance of visual texts to promote high-level thinking and dialogue as children co-construct meaning. She is the author of Dialogic Readers: children thinking and talking together about visual texts. Fiona has taken part in several international projects, most recently a 2-year British Academy/Leverhulme project investigating the role of dialogic a/symmetrical interactions among peers in diverse, multimodal reading situations in primary classrooms in the UK and Mexico. She is a co-convener of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research (CEDiR) group and has worked extensively with teachers to support the development of their dialogic practice, with particular regard to extending literacy practices to include multi-modal text forms. In addition to DIALLS project co-ordination, Dr Maine leads the work package related to the selection and analysis of Cultural Texts (WP2) and leads the Cambridge team as they research in schools. Learn more about her work here.  

Fiona Harrison is the Project Manager for the DIALLS consortium. She is responsible for managing and coordinating the project activities, ensuring that it runs smoothly and effectively and that the terms of the EC Grant Agreement are complied with (WP1 and WP9). She also leads on the project’s communications and dissemination activities (WP8). Fiona has recently managed another three-year EC Horizon 2020 consortium grant (DIGIWHIST) and a six-year ERC FP7 grant (PRIVMORT) at the University of Cambridge within the Department of Sociology. Prior to joining the University, she worked in the international NGO sector for over 20 years where she developed and ran multiple EC-funded human rights and development projects primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet state, focusing on freedom of expression, access to information, government transparency, minority rights, women’s rights and peace and reconciliation. She is also an experienced external evaluator of EC and government-funded projects in the field of media freedom. Fiona has an LLM in International Human Rights Law and a first degree in Modern Languages and Linguistics. She is also a qualified professional translator from German to English.

Dr Riikka Hofmann is a University Lecturer at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the processes and mechanisms of professional change in schools and healthcare settings, as well as dialogic teaching and learning. Riikka's research, informed by sociocultural psychology and cultural-historical activity theory, has involved schools in the U.K., Finland, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; she also works with various NHS Trusts in the U.K. Prior to completing her PhD in Cambridge, Riikka also studied at the University of Helsinki and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Riikka holds multiple advisory roles: she is an expert member of the cross-Whitehall policy trials advisory panel, working with a range of U.K. government departments, and advises the U.K. Cabinet Office on the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme. In the DIALLS project, Riikka is particularly involved in the development and implementation of the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (WP3) and the analysis of dialogue and argumentation (WP5). Learn more about her work here.  

Dr Zoe Jaques in a Senior Lecturer in Children's Literature at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Children’s Literature and the Posthuman (Routledge, 2015) and co-author of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History (Ashgate, 2013). These books reflect her diverse interests in the history of children’s books and illustration and the intersections of children’s literature and film with literary theory and philosophy. She is also a general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English in three volumes. For DIALLS, Zoe is working on the text selection towards the production of an annotated bibliography of relevant wordless picturebooks and animations for promoting the values of the Cultural Analysis Framework (WP2). Learn more about her work here.    

Dr Anna Cermakova is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Before joining the DIALLS project, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Birmingham working on GLARE project - Exploring Gender in Children’s Literature from a Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Perspective. Anna is a corpus linguist, she has completed her PhD in corpus linguistics at Charles University (Prague) and her main research interests are in the language of children’s literature, contrastive linguistics and more generally, contextual approaches to meaning. For DIALLS, Anna is working primarily on WP3 and WP5, which focus on data collection of how children talk and create meaning and analysis thereof.

Victoria Cook was the lead Cambridge-based Research Associate on DIALLS from August 2018 until April 2019 and returned to the project in September 2020. Whilst Victoria's role has covered all aspects of the project, she has focused predominantly be focusing on the design and implementation of the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (WP3) and widening impact with teachers (WP4) Victoria also works as a Research Associate on the DiDiAC project at the University of Cambridge, investigating the use of digital technology to support classroom dialogue. Funded by the Research Council of Norway (2016-2020) and undertaken in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oslo, DiDiAC utilises dialogic classroom strategies and a micro-blogging tool (TalkWall) to develop 21st century skills in schools. She is currently responsible for the development of Talkwall use in schools, running professional development sessions for primary and secondary teachers. Victoria has previously worked as a Research Associate for the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research (CEDiR) Group, supporting the work of the group and overseeing recruitment for the current T-SEDA trials. Prior to joining the Faculty of Education in 2016, Victoria worked as a secondary school geography teacher.  

Julia Peck is the Cambridge-based DIALLS Research Assistant from April 2020 through the end of the project. She joined DIALLS after completing an MPhil in Linguistics at the University of Oxford as an Ertegun Scholar, where she researched the ways speakers of a minority language (Istanbul Judeo-Spanish) code-switch with a majority language. Before that, she'd studied social anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics at Columbia University – where she found excuses to create online museums and digital children's books with communities from Northern New Mexico to eastern Turkey. In between, she lived and taught languages in Morocco and France to children, teens, and asylum-seeking adults. She is outdoors as much as possible and has begun the Forest School certification process. She will primarily be working on the classroom data (WP3 and WP5) for DIALLS, as well as the website.

Mia is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall). She first joined the University of Cambridge as a recipient of The Cambridge Assessment Scholarship from Cambridge Overseas Trust. Her dissertation is about the role of language when bilingual students express school-related experiences. Prior to joining the DIALLS project, she worked as a research assistant in several other projects at her faculty such as Classroom Dialogue (Does it really make a difference for student learning?), Lesson Study Project (Teacher Learning and Lesson Study in Mathematics Higher Order Teaching and Learning), and Play, Learning and Narrative Skills (PLaNS). Her doctoral work and academic background in education, psychology, and religion focuses on understanding the role of dialogue in students’ cognitive and emotional development in multicultural, interreligious, and transnational contexts.   She currently serves as a PhD student representative of the Psychology, Education, Learning Studies (PELS) Group at the Faculty of Education, and is also a member of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research (CEDiR) Group. She recently translated a Korean version of Interthinking by Neil Mercer. Other than her academic work, she enjoys teaching Korean language and culture at Cambridge Korean School. Mia’s role in DIALLS involves data collection of classroom conversation and the analysis of dialogue and argumentation.

Gabriel joins the DIALLS Project after completing the MPhil in Education (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature) at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, in July 2018. Gabriel studied English at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before relocating to Cambridge in 2015. He has worked for different public library services around the south of England in various roles since 2006, and has most recently worked within the children’s library team for Cambridgeshire Public Libraries. He joined Homerton College Library in 2016 where he continues to assist in the conservation and promotion of the Children’s Literature Collection and Rare Books. Gabriel is at present working as the Research Assistant for the DIALLS Project with Dr Zoe Jaques, assembling a database of Cultural Texts produced in and around Europe for use throughout the project (WP2).

Victoria Ball’s interest and experience in intercultural communication bring her to DIALLS. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology from St John’s College Cambridge and an MA in Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies from the War Studies department of King’s College London. Victoria has worked in strategic communication in business and founded her own company, Eloquentia Communication, to help young people develop intercultural and interpersonal communication skills. Language fascinates her - she has studied nine languages and has lived and worked abroad. She is passionate about storytelling – she is a keen writer and was a professional stage and television actor. Victoria recently gave a TEDx talk on ‘The Power of Talking’, arguing that dialogue is the key to understanding oneself and others. Her own research interests centre on diverse minorities in heterogenous societies, hidden narratives of women and children, and education’s role in ideological development. She will predominantly be collecting data from schools (WP3) and preparing it for analysis (WP5).