Interview with Jack Zipes

-


This month I went to Cambridge to talk to Professor Jack Zipes about my PhD in storytelling and socialization. Here is a podcast about my visit. it begins with an introduction of my work followed by a summary from Professor Zipes of his unusual career path including how he believes storytelling can benefit young people: Click for Podcast

After outlining the summer school widening participation project me and Paul Whitehouse ran at Warwick University this year and our hopes to form a permanent programme in schools Professor Zipes invited me to go to Minneapolis and observe the Neighbourhood Bridges Program that he co-founded Peter Brosius, artistic director of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis in 1997. The Neighbourhood Bridges literacy program runs from September to May each year. There are about 15 to 20 sessions per every week in different schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the USA.

For more information please follow this link: Neighbourhood Bridges Project. 

 I am currently seeking a grant to allow me to take up this fabulous opportunity. 

I have also been invited to present a roundtable at the BSA conference this year but was unable to attend due to a family wedding. However I will be speaking at Leicester University's conference on Education, Emotions and the Future on the 22nd of January 2014.  

Thus far I have been able to continue in my PhD and related projects due to the generosity of the PREP fund at Warwick University, Warwick’s English Department, and the Adam Smith Institute.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storytelling Workshops

-
This month I have been arranging to go into three schools to start collecting data from focus groups. I have three student storytellers on board for three schools. And I will be conducting the research in the summer term (April – May). Paul Whitehouse (English PhD student) and I have also finalised details of our summer school programme for widening participation and are applying for funding. This will include 40 students from local schools over two days. The theme is transformations as it give the students a chance to rewrite and subvert fairy tales and put together a performance of their ideas for the final day. The two days will include storytelling, performance storytelling and writing workshops, A campus tour and hopefully a bit of shadow puppet making as well.
Read more

Posters to plasticine (Nov 2014)

-
Image
1 st November – poster presentation   Presented a poster of my research at the Herbert Art Gallery as part of the ESRC F estival of Social Sciences. The exhibition aimed to improve public access to innovative research in Warwick and Coventry and was attended by the general public, academics, small business owners, and policymakers.  See a pdf of my poster here . 6 th November – The Spirit of ‘45 Attended a Q&A to hear director Ken Loach talk about his new documentary ‘ The Spirit of 1945 ’. A film showing broken promises made by the Labour party, nationalisation , and the subsequent dismantling of the welfare state over time. During discussions at the end a member of the audience said, what can we do to protect our NHS? Our welfare? Loach suggested that socialist parties group together and co-ordinate, with voters supporting one another, negotiating and backing the Green Party (as an example), and in that way trying to ensure welfare is no...
Read more

Elephant Tusks

-
Image
  Inspired from the above photograph Rainbow by Helen Patience from the Hold Still digital exhibition , I wrote the following poem. The Duchess of Cambridge and the National Portrait Gallery revealed the winners in 2020, which featured 100 portraits from 31,598 submissions during the project’s six-week entry period. The images aimed to record of our shared and individual experiences during lockdown, and have been exbitited in Times Square in London.    Elephant tusks   Grey, What of grey? A rainbow window. A little girl. Upturning the gravel of her mind. A lassie’s sunflowered Macintosh waves from a distance bending towards her ma’s swan neck cocooned in a tartan scarf. Amber, turquiose and carmene are easy to understand, but what about grey? A woven net of grey weaves infront of her eyes, danglng on a stick. Pencil on paper the girl composes a list: scaffolding, TV aerials, paperclips, guitar strings, tins of peaches, hubs on the car,...
Read more