Karen Guldberg

Karen Guldberg is a Professor in Autism Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is also the Director of the Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK. She 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 a number of projects working in partnership with schools, practitioners, and parents to research technology use and the learning arising from this. Her work has included the ESRC funded Shape project (2012-2013), which worked with six different schools to explore the use of technologies developed for children with autism; the ECHOES ESRC/EPSRC TLRP funded project (2008-2012), which developed a multi-modal environment and explored children’s learning within this, and the EPSRC funded Share-It project (2013-2014), which worked closely with parents, teachers and children to develop intelligent technologies and protocols for supporting home/school engagement.

She has produced a number of online training resources, for educators as well as health practitioners, starting with the development of the WebAutism program at the University of Birmingham. This blended e-learning programme was launched in 2002. Since then she has led the development of the Autism Education Trust partnership school-based training and the adaptation of this to Early Years. She has led an Erasmus Plus strategic partnership (2014-2017) called Transform Autism Education 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. Her team just completed research for the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Qatar. The report outlining this work is entitled 'Meeting the needs of pupils with autism in Qatar: moving forward.'