Isabelle is the PGCE secondary subject leader for modern languages. She spent over 8 years in secondary education including middle management roles in school (Second in MFL Department, i/c Spanish) as well as being a moderator for the IBO (French).
Isabelle has worked at the university since 2008 with additional responsibilities as a PGCE module lead and delivering the PGCE part of SCITT programme. Isabelle is also the interim Quality Coordinator for the School of Education.
Research interests include cross-curricular and cross-phase collaboration, social justice and the development of reading comprehension in modern languages.
She has published articles on trainees’ views of cross-phase collaboration (Schäfer, 2016) on attitudes to teaching literature in modern languages in secondary schools (Ulma and Schäfer, 2018) and on literary extracts in GCSE papers (Ulma and Schäfer, 2022). She presented PGCE students’ work on language learning for social justice at the Language World 2022 national conference.
She co-presented research on the use of literary extracts in GCSE papers at an international conference in France in 2019. She has a Master’s degree in English Literature and a Master’s degree in Education. She is a senior fellow of the HEA.