Grace Healy

Bio

Grace Healy is the Education Director (Secondary) at David Ross Education Trust. Grace leads the Trust’s curriculum and teacher development work and a curriculum team of Trust-wide subject leads. As part of this role, she works closely with Principals to sustain a model for continuously renewing all aspects of curriculum intent, to build capacity in senior curriculum leadership, and to ensure a culture of subject-sensitivity and disciplinary rigour pervades all work on teacher development.

She has been the founding Director of a Teaching School Hub and continues to maintain strategic oversight of the Teaching School Hub as Chair of the TSH’s Strategic Board. She has previously led the geography subject community across a multi-academy trust of 13 primary and secondary schools and contributed to the leadership of a SCITT. Grace is undertaking a PhD at UCL Institute of Education.

Grace chairs the Teacher Education Phase Committee of the Geographical Association and has been elected on to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) as Honorary Secretary (Education). She is Treasurer for GEReCo and the RGS’s Geography and Education Research Group. Grace is a corresponding member of the editorial board of Teaching Geography. She also serves on British Educational Research Association’s (BERA) Publication Committee and on the editorial boards of The Curriculum Journal and the London Review of Education.

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Research Interests

• Curriculum theory

• Senior curriculum leadership

• Subject-specific mentoring and professional development of teachers

• Geography teachers’ curricular theorising

• Knowledge exchange across schools and universities in both geography and education

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Key Publications

Healy, G., Hammond, L. Puttick, S. and Walshe, N. (Eds.). (2022).Mentoring Geography Teachers in the Secondary School. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003157120

Fotheringham, P., Harriot, T., Healy, G., Arenge, G., and Wilson, E. (2022). Pressures and influences on school leaders navigating policy development during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Educational Research Journal. 48(2), 201-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3760

Finn, M., Hammond, L., Healy, G., Todd, J., Marvell, A., McKendrick, J. and Yorke, L. (2022). Looking ahead to the future of GeogEd: creating spaces of exchange between communities of practice. Area, 54(1), pp.41-51. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/area.12701

Healy, G. (2021). A call to view disciplinary knowledge through the lens of geography teachers’ professional practice. In M. Fargher, D. Mitchell and E. Till. (Eds.). Recontextualising Geography in Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73722-1_6

Walshe, N. and Healy, G. (Eds.). (2021). Geography Education in the Digital World: Linking Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274909

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Projects

The discursive construction of ‘progress’ in education through the case of geography

The role of disciplinary knowledge within geography teachers’ professional practice

El Niño a phenomenon with opportunities: learning history and valuing community assets for an empowering digital curriculum in northern Peru. https://elninophenomenon.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk (AHRC GCRF Collaborator)

Geographies of Sustainable Development: What does Bolivia teach us? https://www.rgs.org/schools/teaching-resources/geographies-of-sustainable-development-what-does/ (RGS Innovative Geography Teaching Grant)