Lisa moved into secondary teaching in 2001, following a career in finance management in the UK. Her Masters studies with The Open University, which began in 2010, opened up the broader understanding of education as a discipline and moved her focus towards exploring the context of the teaching profession and understanding the opportunities and challenges which exist for teaching and teacher education.

She completed her PhD in 2021 which was focused on the importance of relationships for teachers in the context of their commitment within the workplace and to their practice. Drawing from the work on capital, agency, and resilience the PhD concludes with a focus towards sustainability for the profession through the lens of morphogenesis and how we shift towards a systems approach in how we view resilience and adaptability.

Lisa’s research methodologies focus on qualitative approaches, with the use of innovative methods to generate authentic dialogue, and is specifically interested in the role of critical subjectivity as a way to extend the conversation around reflexivity and bias in research. She considers this an important part in the recognition of the wisdom and knowledge researchers bring to inquiry and offers an alternative argument to the challenge around validity in qualitative study.

Lisa's methodological approaches also explore further participatory and co-operative inquiry and the use of narrative to capture the nuances and rich detail of lived experiences. 

Wider interests extend from her doctorial work and are focused on (but not exclusively): social networks and social capitals; social justices and the role of cultural capitals in education; professional capitals and the impact on agency; the ‘latent capacity’ model of resilience with a focus on complexity theory to enable adaptability and sustainability.

Lisa hosts a Special Interest Group on Social Capital and is an active member of the Institute of Social Capital. Her current work focuses on the dark side of social capital and the exclusion of individuals and groups from communities and organisations. 

Lisa is currently the British Education Research Association (BERA) Early Career Researcher (ECR) convenor for Scotland and is the BERA ECR and Developing Early Career (DEC) researchers representative for World Education Research Association (WERA).

Lisa teaches on the MA Education, PGDE, and MEd programmes. Her current teaching is focused on pedagogy, sociology and philosophy  of education, especially the impact of structural inequalities and social (in)justices. She was Module Leader for the 4th year MA module: Research and the Teacher, which is focused on student teachers engaging in an extended piece of research in order to produce their own thesis. She was also MA Convenor for Curriculum and Assessment.

Lisa supervises students on their dissertations as part of the MA and MEd programmes and supervises doctoral students, with current studies focused on student experiences in ITE, school transitions, and understanding of social justice.