The urge to write has always come as an urge to make sense of something for myself that has confused me. Probably the topic has confused me because the literature has - to put it bluntly, seemed to be ‘all over the place’. Writing a book is a chance to spend thinking time on a topic and to chase it up hill and down dale until it seems to make better sense to me. I then try to record the travels of my thought process so that others can travel the same journey.

‘Reflection’ was the first set of literature that was ‘all over the place’ and as a consequence I set off on the first book Reflection in Learning and Professional Development (2000). The last chapter in that book was on learning journals and the first edition of the book on learning journals followed. Short Courses and Workshops (2000) followed soon after this – I had realized that I liked writing and went back to some of the work on running short courses that I had done in health education work. I felt that there was far too much reliance on trite theories of learning and myths about how one should run short courses. By then I had been working in higher education for some years, and had been running courses on using level descriptors and writing learning outcomes for years – work that I had developed in government funded project in the mid 90’s. The book, The The Module and Programme Development Handbook (2002) gathered up material from the workshops and has supported program development in many countries I am told.

2004 brought the return of reflection in the form of the Routledge publication A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning (2004). I had done more thinking and wanted another go at the topic and also to explore experiential learning – another topic loaded with hype. I wanted then to look at the role of story in education – but I was advised that such a book would not sell then so I wrote the second edition of Learning Journals (2006).

Critical Thinking (2008) had been an idea that had intrigued me. What was this thing and why was it apparently so special? Again the literature was very confusing and I came to realize how important it is that teachers have done some thinking before they use terms like critical thinking and reflective learning with students. In writing the book I saw that students need to be able to challenge the ideas of others, to be able to say they have made a mistake and to be able to change their minds. I developed the term ‘academic assertiveness’ and set about writing a book Achieving Success through Academic Assertiveness (2008), a title primarily for students. I loved writing the scenarios to illustrate the points I was making. The scenarios were of course stories – and finally I have come back to story as a topic in its own right. I always knew I would be back to this one day. Using Story (2010) was both the hardest and the most satisfying book to write. In the book I have tried to include many new ideas and to promote something that I am passionate about. Amongst a variety of other benefits I wanted to convey the ability that oral storytelling has to help teachers to learn to teach and students to learn to give presentations.

You might see all that I have written above as a set of vague wanderings of a vagrant mind. Something similar could be said of the career that underpins it all. I started with a Zoology degree. Though I did not stay with hard science I am very pleased to have started there. It has helped my thinking greatly. Via an interesting set of influences that involved a manic depressive M.Phil supervisor and his dyslexic son I ended up in education and took a further step to psychology. There were then some years doing interesting things such as working in a mental health project, teaching English at a suspect boarding school, assertiveness training, creative writing classes, craft skills, working as a counsellor and hypnotherapist and a run of jobs that faded because funding ran out. I found myself working in health education and this got me into higher education work. I was in two posts in educational development and finally I reached the post that has given me the greatest opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do. I have been working at Bournemouth University in the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice for the last five years. Here I have been able to explore and write about the topics that have become my books and in a freelance capacity, I have run workshops for teachers across the UK and in many places round the world. In fact, the sweat drips into the keyboard of the laptop as I write this the sticky climate of Bangkok.

For more information and downloadable material please click here.