New Beginnings

Well its been almost a year since I last blogged and the new beginnings have not stopped coming!

Part of the reason the PGCE is so challenging is because it is a year of constant new beginnings and change, and no sooner do you get settled in one context and build the relationships and begin to understand the expectations, than you are back to square one starting a new placement or back in university building new timetables and relationships etc. Over the course of ten months, I worked in three school placements - all of which had very different approaches to developing community and children, delivering curriculum and indeed very different expectations of and attitudes towards student teachers. In between those three placements were a wide range of sessions within the university - every tutor desperately trying to enthuse and demonstrate the importance of their subject or discipline whilst cramming in as much as they could about what you needed to know about that subject alongside how to teach it, often within the space of two, four hour sessions. Hats off to those who tried and succeeded at getting their core message across. Fortunately, I felt very lucky to receive really good tuition in both maths and english, delivered by two tutors who were dedicated to finding engaging and creative approaches to teaching and enjoying their chosen subjects - this kept me going!

So the plan is to share a little more about my placements in future blogs - particularly the elements in which I was determined to continue using my experience of using creative approaches to teaching the wider curriculum - including using disciplines which I would not consider myself an expert but have often challenged other teachers to test out within various projects across the years! In particular, I wanted to discover whether it was possible to develop creative projects without the creative partnership infrastructure of additional staffing time, specialist input and budget for resources!

In addition to beginning (and concluding - yey!) my PGCE, I began married life just over a year ago -and we had the most wonderful time exploring New Zealand together on our honeymoon in December. It is simply one of the most stunning environments I have ever been to and I cannot wait to return one day! In the meantime, needless to say, I collected tonnes of resources and made a couple of contacts with a view to using New Zealand as a focus for cross curricular teaching at some stage - the possibilities are immense for every subject area! (Sorry Phil but thanks for being so patient on our holiday!)

And now the new beginnings keep coming as I await the imminent arrival of my son and develop a new approach to working that enables me to keep working within the arts and education sectors as I cannot imagine working in one without the other.