About Me
Education needs to be done differently if it going to retain power to transform lives. Feel free to connect about higher education and apprenticeships, always happy to advise. A warning I'm fairly obsessed in the spaces between STEM and Arts & Humanities and how different education routes socialise our minds and priorities in different ways . I started as an engineer in the water sector, designing floodplain woodland for flood management, optimising sewerage systems and designing flood defences. Moved to engineering higher education, but quickly found my heart drawn to the psychology and sociology of engineering, capturing evidence of the dominance of positivist framing from STEM training and the lack of tolerance of uncertainty it trains in. Went through an anti-STEM phase in my 30s from seeing engineering education process progressively strip away nuance, curiosity, ambiguity and complexity from the cognitive toolbox of my students. All I saw was I was helping to run a factory taking in original and creative minds, cutting off all the bits that don't 'fit' engineering, and reducing the output to a homogenous group who didn't trust their own instincts, couldn't use emotional language, anxious to align to the norms of the sector and who sought external validation rather than inner resonance for their worth. At graduation, I missed those first year students with their big ideas and empathy. Three years later, those parts of them were smaller and I felt I was to blame. Somewhere in the middle now - STEM thinking has it's place - but we are still far away from making engineers human. I like to think the creative industries have a part to play in rehabilitating the STEM community who don't feel quite whole and don't quite know why. Engineers need art, poetry and creativity, but they have been trained to devalue their power. We need to introduce creativity into STEM education to preserve original insight. I'm now Director of Higher Education at Gower College Swansea and hopefully finding new ways to bridge the two cultures divide. Always interested in interdisciplinary conversations about how we can do this, and have even managed a few successes I'm happy to share. Feel free to reach out, would love to connect if this sparks anything for you.