Philip Chambers worked as a lecturer in Drama, Dance and Education at the University of Worcester UK for thirty years, where he also led the Postgraduate Education Programme for ten years. He chaired the Reflective Practice Thematic Interest Group for the European Teacher Education Network’s annual conference for five years. He was joint founder of the International Reflective Practice Research Group in 2001 and continues to work with them as a consultant.
His research and teaching interests emphasise the importance of the self, the concept of narrative and the lived experience paradigm. Central to his approach in the areas of both research and teaching is risk taking and the challenging of orthodoxies. Such a creative approach emphasises innovation, trying out new approaches and the potential, resultant, unanticipated outcomes.
Researching Academic Visions and Realities
Learning from the Arts
The capacity of the arts for refining the sentiments and speaking the truth is universally accepted but not always subscribed to in the realities of everyday life. Something similar is true of the academic world and it is my belief that the arts have an unrealized potential in academic life. If we are to move forward and realize our visions we need to disrupt some of the academic realities with which we are familiar. By re-examining the arts and positioning them in a hierarchy of academic needs I believe we might further enrich research and practice in a number of innovative ways.
As a dance and drama tutor and a lover of literature my personal academic vision and reality is closely bound up with creativity and the arts. This presentation is an attempt to begin to interrogate some of the ways in which we might learn from creativity and the arts in the areas identified as the three key themes of the conference:
Conceptions of Leadership: The Art of Leadership. Leadership Lessons from Dance
Applying the principles of dance performance to the management of change and the improvement of individual and organizational leadership. How might we use a different vocabulary to think about academic and professional leadership?
Emergent Pedagogies: Inclusion, Diversity, Dignity and Humanity. Directing a Play
The promotion of social inclusion and individualization through the agency of drama. Approaches to reconstructing and stabilizing social enterprises. Can we learn anything about the techniques and strategies for sharing across borders and sustaining innovation from directing a play?
Academic Writing: Poetry and Reflection
‘All art aspires to the condition of music' (Walter Pater). Does all reflection aspire to the condition of poetry? Considering reflection and poetry as process and product. The epistemological point of reflection; coming to know. Defamiliarisation and the transformative possibilities of reflective learning. What do we mean by reflective writing?
Presentation: Philip Chambers: iPED2008