Senior Lecturer
School of Teacher Education
Maria Elsam is a Senior Lecturer in Education within the Department of Primary Education. She is the Programme Director for the BA Part-time Primary Education Programme. She is also level lead for the Level 4 BA Part-time Primary Education Programme. She teaches on numerous undergraduate and postgraduate science programmes and is Primary Science Lead.
Her background stems from working as a research scientist in the industries of both pharmaceuticals and interior/exterior surface coatings. She completed her PGCE Post-Compulsory whilst teaching on a science degree programme at Canterbury at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Maria is a member of the Association of Science Educators and is registered as a Chartered Science Teacher, she is also a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Ambassador. Maria is actively involved in running STEM workshops.
Having completed her MA in Educational Studies she is intending to pursue her research interest of contextual relevance when developing subject knowledge in the primary science classroom. This builds on her interest of existing constructs/knowledge being dependent on prior experience.
She is currently working as the science lead for an International project funded by the World Bank that is based in Palestine. It is hoped that this international project will draw on both the relevance of context and pedagogy. The project has a particular focus on addressing the development of science pedagogical content knowledge in the Palestinian primary curriculum, the former is underpinned by an enquiry based pedagogy.
Maria recently worked with a team to present a workshop at the last annual Association of Science Educators (ASE) conference.