Olu’s journey as a Flourishing Spaces Researcher

'From true positives to positive truths'

I used to be a forensic linguist, with hundreds of citations (and an unfinished PhD) in linguistic deception detection including plagiarism and AI detection. My focus was on developing software that can help to catch cheats and fraudsters and I paid scant regard to the potential problem of criminalising students and educators. 

As a budding computational linguistic Colombo, sensitivity meant accuracy rather than empathy.  I presented excitedly at conferences machine learning models that could detect ghostwritten essays with a 90% true positive rate and argued that my aim of building a model with up to 5% false positive rate would be acceptable to the greater good of ‘cleaning up assessment in higher education.’ 

I discovered ‘flourishing spaces’ at a time when This ‘police work’ was sitting uncomfortably with my work as an education developer, mentoring and training early-career educators to be reflective and inclusive teaching practitioners -  Treating human beings as data points rather than authors of lived experience was starting to feel like a betrayal. 

 I had been working with MBBS students who in striving to ‘decolonise’ their curriculum had organised and implemented a survey of hundreds of students who shared their experience of studying medicine from the perspectives of belonging and empowerment - only to be told that their data was not statistically significant!  

I joined the ‘flourishing spaces’ team attracted by the transdisciplinary goal of creating environments - physical, digital and conceptual - that can enable human flourishing. Initially I felt that my contribution might be to provide new ways of identifying measuring the impact of the Flourishing Spaces work. But working with the team through our bi-weekly meetings, and with those meetings’ aim to help us ‘be the words’ through being conducted as a sharing and affirmation of lived experience of flourishing and shadow working on the project, I gradually shifted my aims to developing new directions in which to communicate the idea of Flourishing Spaces way beyond Medical Education.  

To date, I have introduced and collaborated with GTA developers across the UK to help create a practical EDI framework for the training of doctoral students that teach that enables and supports trainers and trainees to flourish in their roles (1); I have helped to embed flourishing spaces into the  PGCAP curriculum and its delivery (2); I have curated a professional development programme that shared and explored flourishing spaces principles in the context of social justice pedagogy (3); I co-curated a Flourishing Spaces art exhibition through an open call for artists to express and articulate a vision of the ‘Age of Flourishing’(4); I organised an LTHE tweet chat that shared the flourishing spaces ideas to the wider educator community (5).  

I believe in modelling as a pedagogy of transforming oneself and the people around you, whether students, colleagues, peers, friends, children. This involves communicating the truths, ideas and values you believe in while following those same truths, ideas and values. Working as a Flourishing Spaces researcher, educator and scholar has given me an opportunity to grow through creating, learn through sharing and to transform through healing. 

 

  1. Belonging, Dignity and Justice in GTA Development https://belongingdignityjustice.com/  

  2. How to make our class a flourishing space [website] (Queen Mary Academy PCAP Module 7216/B24) https://qmul.padlet.org/opopoola1/how-to-make-our-class-a-flourishing-space-7216-b24-p65h04bjnzcxp5dw  

  3. Pedrosa, D. (2025) Rethinking Pedagogy: Flourishing Spaces in Higher Education https://www.qmul.ac.uk/digital-education-studio/news-events/de25/march/rethinking-pedagogy/  

  4. Barts and the London Arts entrants to ‘Age of Flourishing’ exhibition @happenstancegallery https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ6sP9QIhQe/?igsh=amtrOWRmcmhkdDRs  

  5. Younie, L. & Popoola, O. (2024) #LTHEChat 309: What is a flourishing space and how might they be enabled in higher education? https://lthechat.com/2024/11/22/lthechat-309-what-is-a-flourishing-space-and-how-might-they-be-enabled-in-higher-education/