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...

Computer games and 'deep play'

“Computer games are not a waste of time. They help me think strategically.” That is the best excuse I could come up with when my wife asked me whether I had spent the day wisely playing the strategy game Rome: Total War all afternoon, rather than tackling the pile of assignments I had to mark. In a way, this is true. I don’t run a business or manage other employees. I work alone, usually teaching online, managing my own workload and switching between a variety of self-generated creative projects. So, growing a city, managing an army, designing a profitable dinosaur amusement park: these activities demand a different kind of mental engagement than my usual work. And, yes, gaming is also fun and, as a career in professional football management is unlikely at this stage in my life, it offers a simulated experience for things I am probably not cut out for (although, at 39, I still feel I have a season or two in me as a non-league reserve goalkeeper). Classic city bulding game, The S...

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