Joanna Stonehouse

Position

CLAHRC Fellow 2014

About

Joanna is currently completing a professional doctorate in Child, Community and Educational Psychology at the Tavistock Institute, London, and has been working as a Trainee Educational Psychologist on placement with local authorities in London and Cambridgeshire. Before beginning her training, she worked for 10 years as a part-time Teaching Assistant at a primary school in Cambridge, supporting the learning and development of children with a range of special educational needs. She completed an MEd in Psychology and Education at the University of Cambridge in 2013 and then worked as a volunteer with CLAHRC for six months, helping to develop a self-report measure of emotions and feelings for young children ‘looked after’ by the local authority. She continued developing this work during her CLAHRC Fellowship through a project titled ‘How young children in foster care express their emotions – the perceptions and experiences of foster carers’. Common verbal and non-verbal ways in which young children communicate their feelings were investigated through a literature review and survey of foster carers. The aim was to use these findings to help foster carers work effectively with the young children in their care, including recording children’s emotions and feelings in a wellbeing profile. The study formed part of the EDD theme’s project, CloseUp training for foster carers.