Session information
In this webinar, Francesca Beard will share her poetic and pedagogic practice to provide a toolkit of exercises and techniques, designed to nurture and support creative thinking and expression in the classroom. This hands-on session for teachers of English at secondary level will include accessible examples of individual and group creative exercises that can be adapted to different teaching styles, syllabus requirements and educational needs. It will also invite teachers to share their own practice in a supportive and inspiring environment.
How can I register?
Priority will be given to teachers of English working at lower secondary and upper secondary state schools in Germany. Capacity is limited to a maximum of 60 participants, with registration required in advance on a first-come, first-served basis. If you would like to take part, please complete the registration form here as soon as possible and no later than 5 March 2025. We will confirm your place after that, and a link with the joining instructions will follow on the day before the event.
About the speaker
Francesca Beard is an internationally acclaimed spoken word artist who makes interactive and transformational work for live audiences. She has over twenty years of experience facilitating projects with a wide range of diverse communities.
Her first solo show, called ‘Chinese Whispers’, produced by Apples and Snakes in 2002, was seen as groundbreaking in its approach to performing poetry as a cross-arts form. Since then, she's written short plays for The Royal Court and BBC Radios 3 and 4, worked with The Young Vic and ICT to create participatory community-led shows, and held research residencies at Banff in Canada and The Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University to develop story-telling platforms for live and on-line audiences with B3 Media and Kings Cultural Institute.
She is a current Associate Artist with All Change, who leads the field in building long-term relationships with communities to make and share outstanding creative work and has been poet in residence at the Barbican, BBC White City, the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kingston Library, the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Police and a guest lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster.
She has represented contemporary UK literature with the British Council in 23 different countries, from a jazz café in Azerbaijan to a Bangkok shopping mall, in a Colombian prison to Zimbabwe’s National Library, working with Femrite, a Ugandan activist women’s literature organisation to create a public performance for the National Theatre in Kampala and with Makaan Arts and Culture, to create the first-ever student-led cross arts theatre show in Khartoum.
Her work is often research-informed and inspired by emerging knowledge about ourselves and the universe. She is currently developing a work of speculative fiction, ‘Pilotwave’, supported by Arts Council England.