About and Contact

Hello! 你好!

My name is Stefan Kucharczyk. I am a primary school teacher, lecturer and writer from the UK. I run ARTiculate Education: an educational project that brings together teaching, consultancy and independent research to promote creativity in children’s writing, and other expressive and imaginative work.

I am looking to:
a) work in partnership with educators and learners to support children’s creative and expressive development;
b) conduct and disseminate independent research into children’s creativity in writing;
c) and provide creative workshops for children and training and mentoring for teachers, school leaders and education students.

My research interests: children as authors, primary writing, film-making, digital literacy, Shakespeare in primary literacy, teacher identity and professionalism, Star Wars in the classroom.

My ambition is to:
-    Help redefine how educators and learners understand creativity
-    Support learners and practitioners to recognise their own creative potential
-    Promote effective pedagogies that help learners fulfil their creative potential

My principles:
-    Respectful: respecting children’s ideas and helping to realise them
-    Inclusive: creativity is an inclusive space
-    Collaborative: working in partnership with the children, children working together
-    Holistic: acknowledging the value of a child’s range of experiences

To book a workshop, a guest lecture or to find out more, please email me at articulateeducation@gmail.com.

Follow me on Twitter: ARTiculate_UK

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

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

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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