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experience: 

I have been teaching in higher education for over twenty years, having held full-time academic posts at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where I was the Doctoral Programme Leader (2017-2022) and at Kingston University (Senior/Lecturer in Drama 2004-2017).  In 2022, I was amazed and delighted to be selected as the D'Oyly Carte Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health in the GKT School of Medical Education at King's College London.  Over the years, I have also guest lectured, external examined or otherwise contributed to teaching and learning at (long list alert!) Wimbledon School of Arts; Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; Royal Holloway, University of London; Goldsmith College, University of London; London Metropolitan University, University of Manchester; University of Kent; Imperial College London; Warwick University; University of Surrey, Roehampton University and more. I have an HEA Fellowship, PG Certificates in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

expertise: 

My 'home' discipline and main expertise is in theatre and performance. However, my career has increasingly involved teaching students in other disciplines. While at Guildhall School I led a doctoral programme encompassing music, musicology and related social science disciplines as well as performance. My post at King's College London is focussed on medical students, building on the healthcare educational and public engagement work I've been doing through my company, Chimera, which also encompasses nursing education.

ethos:

I believe (in no particular order)... 

• education is a political and ethical practice
• critical thinking is emancipatory, enabling us to see and challenge injustice and oppressions that have been normalised
• creativity and playfulness help us imagine better ways of being in the world
• in challenging assumptions about the relative merits of arts, humanities, medical and scientific disciplines; and about the relative 'validity' of qualitative, interpretive, conceptual, empirical, quantitative ways of making sense of the world
• all learning (even book learning) is embodied and emotional
• all learning (even practical learning) involves rationality and rigour
• that words and numbers are not the only way of acquiring and demonstrating knowledge 
• in teaching with care and feeling (expertise is helpful but creating safe and brave conditions for learning is at least as important)
• learning is a communal activity: we all have something to learn from each other and knowledge is co-created through discussion and creative practice
• in teaching the 'whole person'
• in the classroom as a mini-society in which we can model more caring, mutually supportive, open, playful and equitable ways of being together
• what matters, in learners, is curiosity, openness and perseverence.  Having natural ability is helpful but not paramount
• ...though often, by the time we get to higher education, 'natural ability' has a lot to do with social and economic privilege
• in challenging neoliberal concepts of formal education as a way of churning out economically productive citizens...
• without underestimating the reality that education brings social status and financial independence to people from communities that have been marginalised from these privileges
• in staying painfully conscious of vast groups of people who have been excluded from formal education or particular forms of education...
• because of my personal history, I am especially conscious of the exclusion of girls and women from education