University of Gloucestershire

Graduate Student, Business, Education and Professional Studies

PhD Studentship in Education

Francis Close Hall

Thesis Title: Growing Wonder: the playful learning journey of Forest School Leader trainees

About

My research is on the transformative and creative role of Forest School leadership training, under the supervision of Professor Mary Fuller and Dr Janet Rose. It's about how adults learn to play with children in the woods, but for obvious reasons, it needs a better description.

I am studying Early Years practitioners and other children's services professionals who undertake the training, which includes learning and practising outdoor play, reflective practice and improvising responses to children outdoors. I am gathering case studies and analysing the participants' transformative shifts, in response to experiential practice, creative contact and reflection with the natural world. It is a narrative qualitative inquiry, using interviews, observation and reflective journaling.

I have always worked creatively with children, young people, schools and community groups on environmental and social justice topics. This has led me to research within education, where the focus is the development of the participant and their setting, in response to the natural world, towards sustainability and empowered action.

Prior to my doctoral studies, over twenty years I have worked as an actor-musician, improvisation teacher, writer, music therapist and creative outdoor practitioner. I have been consistently involved in environmental activism, environmental education and sustainable land projects. I hold a Masters in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and a postgraduate diploma in Music Therapy from the University of Bristol. I trained in applied music and theatre and ran the UK's first environmental education theatre company Trolley Theatre (1997 – 2004), writing and performing many plays on environmental topics. I am now a trained Forest Schools practitioner, conduct creative residencies in schools and run an improvising feral choir.

I have a passion for being outdoors, for creative expression linked to our relationship with the natural world and in leading creative and transformative participatory processes. In the MA (2006-7) I studied nature writing, narrative non-fiction and majored in scriptwriting. In my music therapy dissertation, I researched ecological applications of arts therapies (2002-3). I enjoy crossovers where the creative process is applied, how creativity is used both with a big C or a little c and the variety of applications of the arts in social contexts. I am fascinated by the processes of improvisation and interdependence and the links between creativity, ecology, politics and pedagogy.

My research interests include Forest Schools, ecopedagogy, ecopsychology, transformative learning, arts-in-education, outdoor play, imaginative play, progressive / radical / transnational / emancipatory / experiential education, risk, emotional intelligence, the creative process, imagination and consciousness, improvisation, self-reflexivity, creative writing, ethnography,  arts-for-development, ecocriticism, poststructural feminism & critical theory.

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