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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…

How to use artworks in children’s art activities

Artworks can support children in imagining the world differently. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses, opening up new ways of thinking and being. There is also a resource list for educators and parents interested in incorporating artworks into children’s learning. “It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond” Maxine Greene (2000, p. 276). Artworks can be used in many ways for many different reasons in learning contexts. They offer rich possibilities for experiencing and imagining the world from new and multiple perspectives. Visual art as well as the arts more generally, have the ability to make people aware of…