Helen Burns

Helen Burns is a Senior Research Associate & Research Excellence Fellow at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University. Her work focuses on arts education, meta-cognition, and the role of imagination in learning. She combines mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) with visual tools like the Pupil Views Template and Blog Tree to assess learning strategies. Her research emphasizes ethical engagement with participants and practical outcomes for education.

Background: Trained as a fine artist, Burns transitioned into education through museum work and a Masters in community education. She completed a part-time doctorate in education while working with Creative Partnerships, a government-funded initiative. Her PhD explored imagination’s role in cognitive development.

Research Methods: Burns advocates for rigorous mixed methods, including randomized-control trials (RCTs), to validate arts-based interventions. She designs visual tools to capture children’s meta-cognitive processes and prioritizes triangulation across teacher diaries, observations, and focus groups.

Ethical & Philosophical Influences: Grounded in John Dewey’s pragmatism, she stresses the importance of ethics as integral to research quality—not an afterthought. She critiques over-reliance on qualitative methods in arts research and highlights the need for scalable, evidence-based approaches to defend arts education funding.

Key Challenges: Burns shares lessons from research blunders, including underestimating data volume and participant attrition. She advises researchers to plan for variability and avoid over-reliance on specific datasets.