Skip to main content

A talk at the University of the Western Cape



Last month, I submitted my Masters by Research thesis at Leeds Beckett University. My topic was teacher identity and creativity and on Tuesday, I was delighted to be invited to speak on it at the University of the Western Cape. It was lovely to meet the staff from the Faculty of Education and I thank them for going easy on me with the questions! It was my first academic talk and I am glad it was in my home-from-home of Cape Town.

I'll spare you the full 15,000 words, but the research was into my identity as a teacher and how growing accountability is reshaping not only the role of teachers but also how they see themselves as trusted professionals. Although this autoethnographic research was into my own story as a teacher, exploring the experiences of others is something I am following up through my Facebook blog Teacher Talking Time

The key aspect of this research was in the area of creativity in primary education. If the process of learning and working creativily involves risk taking, experimentation, and learning from failure, how can this be part of an education system that demands product over process and penalises teachers for failure to ensure progress? In view of literaxy, how can we develop children into writers who have the voice and verve of real authors if they are excluded from any say in the process?

This is just a brief summary of my ideas on this but if you'd like to talk about this further, I'd love to hear from you. 

Keywords: creativity, teacher identity, University of the Western Cape, performativity, Kucharczyk, autoethnography, primary education, literacy, writing

Popular posts from this blog

Filthy wretch or poor thing? Rethinking the Island, KS2, Week 1

A treat for the final half term - a new workshop at a delightful school in Leeds! This half term I am working with two Year 5 teachers to develop a cross-year group, cross-curricular writing project based on my favourite picture book, Armin Greder's The Island . I've done this book many times and every time the response is different! This week, we got to grips with the facts, possibilities and mysteries of the story. What do we know about the story so far? (we only ever read up to page 6 to leave it on a knife edge...) What doesn't this story tell us and what could we infer or predict?     We looked at the crowd of islanders who 'welcome' the stranger's arrival. As in every class, country or community, no group ever sees the world the same way and we discussed how the islanders might react differently to the man. Is he a poor thing who needs to be rescued? Is he a curiosity? Is he a threat? We each adopted an islander and took on their perspective f...

Progression in primary drama - going beyond the National Curriculum

Drama is an integral component of primary English teaching. It is the engine that drives creative responses to stories, helping children explore characters, settings and predicaments. Yet the primary National Curriculum for England (DfE, 2013) makes scant reference to drama. Some generic guidance indicates the importance of speaking, listening and performing although these points are both too obvious and too generalised to be useful to teachers and subject coordinators hoping to embed drama across the whole school. When writing our forthcoming book, Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools: All the World's a Stage (Routledge, David Fulton, 2021), both Maureen and I felt that whole-school drama guidance for primary teachers - so integral to teaching Shakespeare's plays - was notably lacking from online resources currently available (apologies if you have produced such a document but we could not find it!). We decided to compile our own. In fact, you may have found this blog post...

What does storytelling software Twine have to offer young writers?

    A fter a chance bit of Googling this week, I stumbled across Twine - an interactive storytelling platform for building text-based games. It is a platform with pot ential for developing narrative in our schools . ⌚ 6 minutes   I have spent my summer reading. After spending lockdown in Thailand with a rapidly deleting selection of books (reading A Casual Vacancy was a last resort), coming back to a house of full bookshelves was a treat. It felt good for the soul to escape the worries of the present by slipping into another, fictional world whose problems were not my concern. I have also been playing a lot of computer games, revisiting many of the games that I enjoyed as a child: The Settlers , Civilisation , Frontier Elite , Rome Total War . If you're not a 1990s computer game fan then, no, you're not alone but please indulge me as I reminisce. This summer, with time on my hands, I started to think seriously about why it was I enjoy playing these games, and why they se...