Dr Karen Guldberg: Evidence Based Practice

About this contributor

Karen Guldberg

Dr Karen Guldberg is Senior Lecturer in Autism Studies, University of Birmingham. She is also Director of the Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Within ACER, Karen has developed and run a blended e-learning programme for practitioners and carers who work with children and adults on the autism spectrum. She now runs the first year of the Autism Children Distance Education programme. She has been involved in producing a number of online training resources, for educators as well as health practitioners. She led the development of the content for the Autism Education Trust partnership school-based training and has recently led the adaptation of this to Early Years. She supervises ten PhD students who are conducting research on educational practice for children with autism, including international research in India, Palestine and Saudi Arabia.

Karen conducts real-world research in the classroom, with a focus on pedagogy, social learning and the specific learning needs of children with autism. She has led and been involved in a number of projects working in partnership with schools, practitioners and parents to research technology use and the learning arising from this. She led the ESRC funded Shape project (2012-2013), which worked with six different schools to explore the use of technologies developed for children with autism; she was a partner on the ECHOES ESRC/EPSRC funded project (2008-2012), which developed a multi-modal environment and explored children’s learning within this, and she is a partner on the EPSRC funded Share-It project (2013-2014), which is working closely with parents, teachers and children to develop intelligent technologies and protocols for supporting home/school engagement. She is now leading an Erasmus Plus strategic partnership (2014-2017) to research good autism educational practice in Greece and Italy in order to i) better understand the cultural context for barriers to inclusion and ii) identify and promote good outcomes for individuals on the autism spectrum.