Jennifer Farrar

Jennifer Farrar is a Senior Lecturer (Pedagogy, Praxis & Faith) in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, where she serves as the Director for Initial Teacher Education and Undergraduate. With an ESRC-funded doctoral background from the University of Glasgow (2017), she specializes in children's literature and literacies, bringing prior experience as a secondary English teacher in London and Edinburgh, as well as education journalism in London.

Her research interests span critical literacy, children's literature, non-fiction, metafiction, family literacies and home-school relationships, pedagogies for literacy teaching, picturebooks, and initial teacher education. She is actively researching student teachers' knowledge of children's literature and working to raise Scottish teacher and policymaker awareness of critical literacy's potential in classrooms. Her work demonstrates a consistent focus on how children's literature can be used to develop critical thinking and literacy skills across educational contexts.

Her extensive publication record shows a clear progression from her doctoral work on metafiction in picturebooks toward broader applications of critical literacy in teacher education and curriculum development. Recent publications increasingly address international comparative perspectives on children's literature in teacher education, visual literacy, and the role of critical literacy in addressing social issues. She has developed significant expertise in applying children's literature to contemporary educational challenges, including multicultural education and digital literacy.

• 2013: Winner, William Boyd Prize for Education (University of Glasgow)
• 2018: Winner, Estelle Brisard Prize for Early Career Researcher (Scottish Educational Research Association)
• 2019: Highly commended (BERA Doctoral Thesis Prize)
• 2021: Winner, Outstanding Contribution to Teaching (University of Glasgow Student Teaching Awards)
• 2021: Winner, College of Social Sciences Team award, Children's Literature and Literacies (University of Glasgow Teaching Excellence Awards)

As an educator, she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate courses including Language and Literacy, Children's Literature electives, Culture Arts and the Humanities, and Texts for Children and Young People. She supervises numerous doctoral students working on diverse topics related to children's literature and literacy education, with research spanning multicultural literature, multimodal assessment, and international perspectives on children's reading. Her editorial work with Literacy and Literacy Research journals demonstrates her commitment to advancing scholarship in the field.

She has been instrumental in developing research projects including 'Developing Politically Literate Young Citizens in Scottish Education' funded by the Gordon Cook Foundation, and has contributed to significant curriculum development initiatives in Wales. Her work bridges academic research with practical classroom applications, particularly through her focus on how teachers can effectively incorporate children's literature into their pedagogy.