Category

PhD Research

Category
PhD Research

New year, new job, new continent

Happy new year Art Play Children Learning followers! I hope you have all had a wonderful break. 2020 is well underway for all of us and if you are like me, you will have lots of hopes and ambitions for the year ahead. Sometimes these can be exciting and sometimes these can make one feel overwhelmed. My attitude is to always try to do my best to keep one foot moving in front of the other, even if they are just little steps and always stay open to the unexpected things that happen along the way. I have some exciting news to share with you all! I am starting a new job this year. I will be working at Harvard University as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Childhood Education. I am really excited about it and will be moving to Boston next week to get started. I have never lived…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

Finishing my PhD!

Two weeks ago I finished my PhD! I have spent the past 4 four years doing my PhD full-time. Day after day. Week after week. Slogging it out on a quest to create new knowledge that advances society. This experience has been exhausting, exciting, intellectually arduous and of course, deeply fulfilling. I mark the completion of the PhD as the moment I passed the viva, which is a final oral examination you do in the United Kingdom at the end of the program. The viva basically involves two academics, who are specialists in your field, reading your thesis and grilling you on it. My viva was tough. It went for two hours. I was asked very difficult questions that I somehow waded my way through. But I made it! And at the end was told I did not need to make any further corrections to the thesis, which is rare…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

‘Children’s learning with new, found and recycled stuff’ symposium at AARE

This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in Canberra, Australia. Image: Bradley Cummings On November 27, 2017 Professor Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham), Nina Odegard (University College of Oslo and Akershus) and myself (University of Nottingham) gave a presentation at the AARE conference on children’s learning with materials. Each of our presentations was built on the understanding that many educators and artists working with young children are committed to play-based practices and understand this as being critical to individual and social learning. Over the 90 minute symposium, we talked about how our individual work with children explores the research question: when children are ‘doing art’ play what are they learning with the materials they choose? Overall, we argued that when children are playing with materials, they are simultaneously:…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

Finishing my PhD fieldwork

Last week I had my final day of data generation in Manchester. Over the past couple of months I have been fortunate enough to have worked within a fantastic team comprised of an education curator, artists, teachers, children and parents. This time has been such an intense period of development, growth and expansion for my research and all of us on the team. I will spend the next couple of months writing up and theorising my findings before starting the second stage of fieldwork in 2017. At times it can be strange working with children in education settings. You have this intense period, whether it be a school year, or a series of repeat visits to a museum, or even a single workshop, where a particular group of little humans become the centre of your creative and intellectual being. You see them change and develop in their thinking, communicating and curiosities about…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

Learning with Serpentine – Interim Report

This is a repost from the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies (CRACL) blog. The original post was written by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education within the School of Education, University of Nottingham (UK).  We have been conducting an evaluation of learning in the Serpentine’s World without Walls programme. We have just reported on our interim results from an examination of two projects. One was the first instalment of Changing Play, a project conducted in partnership with the Portman Children’s Centre. Anton Franks did this first set of research. His investigation of the work that artist Albert Potrony did suggests the following benefits for children: awareness and understanding of a range of materials and objects, manipulative skills in handling large and small materials and objects, and ability to conceptualise them in form and use imaginative development in the interaction with materials, objects and other children, allowing experimentation in applying and combining of materials. linguistic development in the use of words, utterances and in the…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

What it was like to move to the other side of the world to do my PhD

Light play atelier children play

In this post I reflect on my decision to move to England to do my PhD. This month marks one year since I arrived in England. The title of this blog is misleading in that it is dramatising something that really was not such a big thing. Moving countries or cities is never easy but the process is broken down into such small steps that the change is not as overwhelming as it may seem to an outsider. The one thing I wish I had known before moving to England was how much I would love my work, studies and life here. Doing so has opened an expanding world of possibilities and connections, many of which I never knew existed. The decision to do my PhD was bundled up in a handful of other life decisions, none of which were particularly easy to make. There were tears, long philosophical conversations with family and…

Keep Reading
PhD Research

Why blogging about children, art & learning is important

Lou Penfold portrait

This is a philosophical post. I am writing to share my motivations for why I blog every week on Art Play Children Learning. Blogging is a fantastic thing. I point this out because I didn’t know it before I did it myself. Back in February 2016 when I started blogging, I had no idea where Art Play Children Learning would go. Since then I have published 60 posts, started accompanying Instagram and Pinterest pages, become more consistent with publishing content (every Thursday morning GMT), and built a following of fellow art and education lovers. Running Art Play Children Learning is time-consuming and sometimes costly. However, blogging is also deeply rewarding and so fulfilling. I would highly recommend starting a blog to others working in art and education. Here are my reasons why… Connecting with others who share a relentless enthusiasm towards art and education. Everything grows faster when people work…

Keep Reading
Load More