Andrew Dykes BEd MA MSc CELTA FHEA

This project has stemmed from professional expertise gained at the University of Southampton 2003 - 2010, where my role was in supporting the learning development and technology needs of the university's community of students with dyslexia.

Widely experienced in earlier-career teaching and learning across the education sector in the UK, the move into Higher Education followed completion of my first Master's in Adult and Lifelong Learning at the University of Bath and the Open University. At Southampton, I completed a second Master's, in Specific Learning Difficulties, where the dissertation component of the course has evolved into the pilot study for this current research project based at Middlesex University, which I joined in 2014 on a university-funded Research Studentship.

In 2011 I gained the valuable CELTA qualification to become a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, subsequently teaching international students at an EFL Study Centre in the South of England. More recently my professional role has been as a learning development tutor and academic guide at an East Midlands widening participation university. My expertise and experience in HE has recently been recognized through Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

I am also a member of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE) and of the Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), where I am currently building my portfolio to gain Chartered Librarian status.

Given the substantial datapool collected, I am hoping that this research project will lead into post-doctoral research with the aim of gaining a better understanding about the impact of dyslexia in tertiary adult learners – particularly in the context of the unhelpfulness of the label. Further research will also support my advocacy of a much more accessible and inclusive learning environment at university, and also enable the development of fresh and innovative research instruments to exploit new technologies available in web-based data-collection and data-visualization techniques.

My wife is a library professional, my eldest son is close to completing his training in medicine and the younger one is working through A-levels, also planning to study medicine. The cat does very little.

June 2016