Kimberly Safford

I am an Honorary Associate of the Open University, formerly Senior Lecturer in Education.

I support the OU’s mission to promote adult learning across all ages and stages in the UK and internationally, through research, learning design, course authoring, Open Educational Resource creation, postgraduate supervision, monitoring and evaluation, You can see my publications in Open Research Online.

I am a member of the British Council / Open University research project ‘EMEGen’ that explores the impact of English as the medium of school instruction on gender equity in Nepal and Nigeria. A set of Open Educational Resources for secondary school leaders, teachers, and informal learning facilitators has been created based on this research. 

I work with TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South, developing resources for school leaders on making changes through an Improvement Science approach. We published a suite of courses in OpenLearnCreate on scaling teacher professional development that has been studied by 14 country teams in a GPE-KIX Learning Cycle.   

I am an OU Climate Ambassador and trustee of Climate Change All Change, an exciting cross-curricular programme where primary school children and professional designers create imaginative responses to the climate crisis. 

I am the advisor for the Routledge open research collection on Education, Equity and Equality. 

In the OU Primary Education Studies team, I co-authored the course 'Comparative and international studies in primary education' and the textbook 'Learning and Teaching Around the World' (Routledge). I co-developed two highly-regarded OU International Development and Teacher Education programmes: the Sierra Leone Learning Assistant Programme and TESS India.

Before coming to the OU, I was Senior Lecturer in Primary English Education at Roehampton University, and research officer for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).  I was a primary school teacher in London. In a previous career, I worked for 20 years as a radio and television journalist in San Francisco, New York and London.