Dr. Zoe Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in Early Years, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the field of education. Zoe moved into higher education after teaching in early years classrooms and undertaking several leadership roles in schools. She has also worked with a voluntary organisation for over 20 years, supporting adult volunteers and leading children’s camps, holidays and weekly activities. Her scholarship now focuses on early childhood education, outdoor learning and creative pedagogies.

Zoe’s doctoral research explored young children’s creativity in an art gallery and forest school setting through a relational materialist lens. This post-qualitative research underpins her current work investigating children’s play-based learning environments and our entangled relationships with nature, the material world and each other. Zoe now applies these theoretical principles to her teaching and research in HE.

She has been awarded research funding as the principal investigator for projects including a study of the experiences and perceptions of early childhood studies graduates in the workplace and an exploration of the power of creative pedagogies to foster a sense of inclusion and narrow awarding gaps in the HE classroom.

Zoe has presented widely both nationally and internationally and her work has been recognised through the Anna Craft Creativities in Education Prize, the BERA Arts Based Educational Research SIG and the BERA Children, Childhoods and Early Education SIG awards for the best presentation. Her research has been published in leading academic journals and book publications on early childhood and early years education.