I am a Reader in Arts and Humanities Education at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh. I began my career in education as an English teacher and worked in both England and Scotland for eight years. In 2010 I joined the School of Education at the University of Stirling where I worked on the Initial Teacher Education Programme until November 2013. 



My research interests have arisen from a broad concern with literary and visual cultures, text, practices of reading and writing and pedagogies both inside and outside of formal educational institutions. In particular, my work explores the boundaries between the arts and humanities, anthropological approaches and educational processes. This has included work in schools on multimodal literacies, reading cultures and practices of critical interpretation. I have worked specifically on comics and graphic novels within the secondary context. 

A second strand of research involves museum education, public pedagogy, and creative writing. I published an ethnographic monograph on museum education in 2018 which focused on a creative writing group based at the National Galleries of Scotland.

Between 2017 - 2019, I worked on ESRC and AHRC funded projects exploring young peoples' experiences  of displacement as a result of nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands. The various projects involved collaboration with indigenous artists, arts education workshops and art-based approaches to research. 

My new project, 'Remediating Stevenson' is funded by the AHRC and focuses on how graphic adaptation, arts education and community-based participatory research practices can decolonize Stevenson's Pacific Island fiction for contemporary audiences.

I teach across two of our Masters courses: MSc Comparative Education and International Development and MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching

I am Course Organiser for the following:

• The Anthropology of Education and Learning, MSc Comparative Education and International Development
• Assessing What Matters, MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching
• English Specialism 1, MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching