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Research and publications

Stefan Kucharczyk, BA Hons, PGCE, PGCHE, FHEA MRes

Recent teaching roles

Associate Lecturer, (2018-present) - The Open University
Education Studies, Primary Education 

Research interests
  • creativity and children's writing in primary education
  • children as authors and auteurs
  • film-making, visual literacy, digital literacy
  • teacher identity

Keywords: writing, creativity, children as authors, film-making, graphic novels, teacher identity, performativity, children as auteurs

Publications

Books

Kucharczyk, S. and Kucharczyk, M. (forthcoming 2021) Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Literacy: All the World’s A Stage, London: David Fulton
 
Gill, A., Kucharczyk, S. and Lenahan, C. (2021) 'Reading and children’s lives'. In A. Gill, M. Stephenson, and D. Waugh (Eds.) Developing a Love of Reading and Books. London: Sage.

Kucharczyk, S. and Kucharczyk, M. (2017) All the World’s A Stage: Ideas for teaching Shakespeare in the primary classroom, Leeds: ARTiculate Education

Articles

Kucharczyk, S and Hanna, H., (2020) 'Balancing teacher power and children’s rights: rethinking the use of picturebooks in multicultural primary schools in England' in Human Rights Education Review 3(1):49-68, June 2020

Kucharczyk, S. (2020)  'Teacher identity in a performative age: Coming to research through autoethnography' BERA Blog Series, 5 May 2020 [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/teacher-identity-in-a-performative-age-coming-to-research-through-autoethnography  [Accessed on 5 May 2020]

Kucharczyk, S. (2018) ‘Ode to nowhere’, Storymakers Dialogues: Making Sense of Ourselves in the World, Issue 1, June 2018 [Online] Available at: http://anyflip.com/lcyg/uosj/basic
 
Hanna, H. & Kucharczyk, S. (2017) 'Sharing the tools of teaching and research: the value of picture-books'. SPICE Journal, 20th February 2017. Available at: http://spicejournal.org/2017/02/20/sharing-the-tools-of-teaching-and-research-the-value-of-picture-books/ 
 
Hanna, H. and Kucharczyk, S. (2017) ‘How to use picture books to get your class talking about emotions’ The Guardian Teacher Network, 26 October 2017 [Online] Available at: www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/oct/26/how-to-use-picture-books-to-get-your-class-talking-about-emotions

Kucharczyk, S. (2017) An Author Way: a shift in the pedagogy of writing [Online] Available at: https://www.tes.com/blog/author-way-a-shift-pedagogy-writing

Hanna, H. and Kucharczyk, S. (2016) ‘Five ways to help migrant children settle in your class.’ The Guardian Teacher Network, 22 November 2016 [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2016/nov/22/five-ways-to-help-migrant-children-settle-in-your-class

Kucharczyk, S. (2016) ‘More than a thousand words: a salute to the genius of picture books.’ TES Online, [Online] Available at: www.tes.com/blog/more-a-thousand-words-a-salute-genius-picture-books

Kucharczyk, S. (2016) ‘Engaging your rogue ones: using Star Wars in the classroom.’ TES Online [Online] Available at: www.tes.com/blog/engaging-your-rogue-ones-bringing-star-wars-classroom

Popular posts from this blog

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
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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
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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 seem to
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