Allan's practice converges on the design, development, and delivery of research informed teaching at doctoral, postgraduate taught, and undergraduate levels of education. He is leader of the MEd Professional Practice programme and editor of the Strathclyde Student Education Research Journal (SSERJ). What's more, he has specific expertise in the teaching of social and educational research methods, to say nothing of an enviable command of writing in the third person. As if that wasn't enough, and applying the findings from over a decade’s worth of funded research activity to his teaching, Allan makes a deeply knowledgeable contribution to the higher education experience, both in terms of the omnivorous methodological insights that he brings to bear, but also according to his empirically derived understanding that functioning effectively as a human being is the basis for fundamentally useful teaching and learning. In the context of the contemporary neoliberal wasteland of capital accumulation from university activity, this is more difficult than it sounds. But as the poet and teacher Gwendolyn Brooks reminds us, "we are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond." If you don't need to think about what Brooks means, you might be part of the problem.

Allan’s research interests have never fully been explained to him. He has some ideas about the enhancement of research and critique in teacher education through a wider literary reference base. However there may be the glimmer of a dark smirk in this – of the kind that goes unnoticed in the transactions of those who regard knowledge as something that can be ‘cascaded’, and which the rules of intransitive verbs do not in any case really permit. So, guided by doubts about how information can be expressed through a language grown detached from it – and with apologies for the inconvenience – let’s just say that Allan has become eclectic in argument, blending the hunches of the seasoned researcher with a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives. There may be grounds for suggesting that this self-questioning discourse is worthwhile and relevant for inquiry in teacher education. Those who believe in telekinetics might raise Allan’s hand now.

Allan has been a researcher on the European Commission’s Science-Teacher Education Advanced Methods project and, before that, the ESRC/TLRP-funded Early Professional Learning project. The EPL project was conceived to explore the extent to which a grounded theory of early professional learning could enhance the state’s competence-based model for new teachers and contribute to the theoretical and practical formulation of that process. The project employed a multi-method design which used ethnographic data as a basis for model building and testing in a correlational design that involved the development of five quantitative indicators of new teacher development.

The results of the project have since been turned into a book. Allan suggests that if you read only one book this year then it should of course be Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss; if you read two, however, make your second Improving Learning in a Professional Context: A Research Perspective on the New Teacher in School, edited by Jim McNally & Allan Blake (Routledge: ISBN: 978-0-415-49340-6). Says the Journal of Non-Euclidean Geometry: ‘this book represents a new high at Pseuds’ corner’.

More recently, Allan was a researcher on the Work of Teacher Education project. Funded by the Higher Education Academy through an ESCalate subject centre grant, the Work of Teacher Education project involved collaboration between researchers at three universities: Oxford, Brunel and Strathclyde. The project sought to open up for discussion the nature of teacher education as work in the higher education sector; where possible, to note similarities and differences in both practical activities and institutional conceptualisations; and to generate data that would be useful in setting a 21st century agenda for the development of teacher education. Participatory in design and framed by cultural-historical activity theory, the analysis of data is suggesting that the division of labour within HE education departments is formative in structuring the social relations of the work of teacher education, with teacher educators themselves coming to be regarded as a proletarianised class of academic worker.

Allan was the University of Stirling, 2002 Edward and Thomas Lunt Medal winner in English. He paid for his education at this time by writing book reviews and literary pieces for the Daily Express newspaper, and The Bookseller magazine.