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  • Teaching 1984 in the surveillance culture of schools

    Teaching Orwell’s “1984” as a set text in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system.

  • Mindfulness and Creative Writing

    How mindfulness can be used by creative writers to develop their practice and pedagogy

  • The Teachers’ Standards and English Teaching

    Some interesting ideas about educating English teachers in relation to Teaching Standards set in 2012… However, these standards are less emphasized now than when I wrote this article.

  • two boys leaning over a book

    Riding the Reciprocal Teaching Bus. A teacher’s reflections on nurturing collaborative learning in a school culture obsessed by results

    My interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching (or Reciprocal Reading), which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups.

  • a book, in a beautiful setting

    Aesthetic literacy and autobiography

    How I became ‘aesthetically literate’, and used other artistic work to educate and heal myself. ‘Aesthetic literacy’ may even be more important than other forms of literacy because of its therapeutic dimensions.

  • representation of mindfulness (that looks suspiciously like it came from the mind of AI)

    Mindfulness and English Teaching

    Is English a mindful subject? How can mindfulness help English teachers teach their subject? I argue that awareness of the present moment can help learners appreciate the qualities of literature.

  • Dreaming of a Better World

    A creative writing and reading project, carried out at Deptford Green school, which put the principles of Reciprocal Teaching into practice.

  • The Creative Writing Teacher’s Toolkit

    There are certain pedagogical strategies, such as encouraging freewriting, using prompts and fostering flow which can significantly help learners to write creatively.

  • But sir, I lied – The value of autobiographical discourse in the classroom

    The benefits of teachers using their own autobiographical writing in the classroom. The blurring of truth and fiction in autobiographical writing can provide students with the cloak of fiction when writing about their own lives

  • flowers

    Aesthetic Learning, Creative Writing and English Teaching

    ‘Aesthetic learning’ can be helpful for English teachers, because we are all ‘aesthetic learners’: we learn to appreciate the qualities of the worlds we inhabit, whether actual or virtual.

  • Decolonising Creative Writing

    You can access the PowerPoint for this lecture here. Please do not publish it without first gaining my consent. References •Begum, N., & Saini, R. (2019). Decolonising the Curriculum. Political Studies Review, 17(2), 196-201. •Crinson, M. (2003) Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) •Evaristo, B. (2020) The Long Form Patriarchs, and […]

  • Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing

    An anthology written by creative teachers with diverse experience. The focus is on how to teach creative writing in imaginative, practical and socially just ways, helping people of all ages and backgrounds to write.

  • Get a free copy of ‘Who Do You Love’ on audio here!

    Blue Door Press is delighted to announce that the audiobook version of Who Do You Love (BDP 2017) is now available for sale on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. It was quite a journey working with the voice artist and actor Christopher James on the novel during this lockdown period. He and I talked quite intensely […]

  • Snow on the Danube: a wartime thriller and romance

    On a bitter winter morning, a young man stands on Budapest’s Chain Bridge, staring down at the Danube as snow melts into the river. He has lost everything. What stops him jumping is not hope, but the weight of an untold story. Snow on the Danube is a powerful, haunting novel that moves between modern day Budapest and the city’s darkest hours during the Second World War. When Béla Pongrácz inherits his great uncle’s manuscript, he discovers the hidden life of Count Zoltán Pongrácz, the last of a ruined Hungarian aristocratic family. Hypochondriac, musical and obsessively nostalgic, Zoltán grows up amid the splendour of Andrássy Avenue, the zoo, the circus and the Danube’s glittering banks. History soon tears that world apart. As fascism takes hold and Budapest becomes a city of disguises, cellars and shattered bridges, Zoltán is forced into acts of courage he never believed himself capable of, risking his life to save his adored sister Anna. His story is one of love, betrayal, survival and moral compromise. As Béla reads, past and present collide. What began as a legacy of words becomes a lifeline. Lyrical, darkly comic and deeply moving, Snow on the Danube is a novel about memory, inheritance and how stories can save us when we are closest to the edge.

  • My Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Audio Book is now published: free copies available, read more here!

    A discussion about the creation of my audio book for my best selling study guide on the novel ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.

  • What happened to the New Man?

    As I’ve pointed out in previous blogs, the process of listening to the audiobook of Who Do You Love has been enriching for me, making me return to the text some years after writing it. Christopher James  reads the book more slowly than me, taking his time, giving the narrator’s voice a melancholic, deadpan quality. […]

  • Listen to the first 15 mins of Who Do You Love for free here!

    I’m writing this blog post on the summer solstice, 20th June 2020, which is an important date in my novel Who Do You Love. In fact, I like to think the events on the summer solstice June 1988 in a Sussex wood, devastated by the hurricane of October 1987, are pivotal in the novel. They […]

  • Making an audio book of my Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde study guide

    I’m very excited to announce that the marvellous actor and audiobook reader Richard Bunn will be reading my bestselling study guide ‘Analysis and Study Guide: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. The book has proved to be one of my popular books over the years and has continued to sell well. I was impressed by all […]

  • Making an audio book out of my novel, Who Do You Love

    I’m very excited to be working on an audio book version of Who Do You Love, my novel which I published with Blue Door Press in 2017. I have investigated ways of doing this over the years, having a go at reading myself. I found that although I can be an expressive reader — some […]

  • the Time Devil cover

    The Time Devil

    A fantastic time-travelling story in the format of a ‘teaching script’, which helps teenage readers improve their ability to skim, scan, summarise, and ask questions.

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