Mrs Christine Bower

Prior to working within academia, Christine has experience across a range of educational settings including early years, primary school, secondary school, special school and youth work contexts. Along with this experience, Christine has also worked within the political sector in Northern Ireland as both a local councillor and a policy and research manager.

In 2017, Christine was awarded a scholarship from the Department of the Economy in Northern Ireland to complete a PhD through Queen's University Belfast. Whilst completing her PhD, she was also employed as a Research Assistant on two large, funded research projects. The first project was funded by the Education Endownment Foundation and was an evaluation of the effectiveness of a Reciprocal Reading Programme as a whole class teaching method and as an intervention for children with poor comprehension skills. The second project was funded by a NGO in Belgium and required Christine and a colleague to explore how inclusive education was in educational centres for disabled students in Palestine. As a result of this research, Christine and her colleague went on to design, develop and deliver training for teachers and educational professionals in Palestine.

Christine's doctoral research focuses on friendships for young people with a learning disability and/or autism. She has taken a participatory action research approach and has co-produced this research with a small group of young people from Mencap NI. 

Christine joined the Open University in 2021 as a Lecturer.