About

I work at the intersection of practice, research, and reflection. My background is in primary education, where I teach Year 6 full time and work in school leadership, alongside ongoing engagement with phenomenological research and applied inquiry. Across these contexts, I am interested in how learning, practice, and professional judgement are lived and experienced, rather than simply designed or measured.

Much of my work is shaped by a concern for how educational and professional practices are often driven by instrumental logics, outcomes, and procedures, sometimes at the expense of meaning, attentiveness, and human experience. My orientation towards phenomenology has grown out of practical questions encountered in everyday work, rather than abstract theoretical commitments.

Professional orientation

I am a teacher and school leader, working primarily in primary education, with particular interests in mathematics, outdoor learning, and learning beyond the classroom. Teaching Year 6 provides a continual point of reference for my thinking, grounding research ideas in lived classroom experience and reminding me of the complexity, unpredictability, and relational nature of learning.

Alongside classroom teaching, I am a PGCE tutor and mathematics subject specialist for initial teacher education, supporting trainee teachers to develop both subject knowledge and professional judgement. This work has deepened my interest in how teachers learn to navigate uncertainty, accountability, and ethical responsibility in practice.

I also support colleagues through professional dialogue, collaborative curriculum design, and practitioner-led inquiry within schools. Across these roles, I am particularly interested in how professional judgement is formed, exercised, and sustained under the pressures of policy, assessment, and everyday institutional life.

Research and phenomenology

My research draws on hermeneutic phenomenology to explore lived experiences of learning, pedagogy, and educational practice. Rather than seeking to produce generalisable claims or prescriptive models, this work aims to illuminate aspects of experience that are often taken for granted or rendered invisible within dominant research paradigms.

Alongside my own research, I support doctoral and practitioner researchers engaging with phenomenology, particularly those navigating methodological questions around reflexivity, interpretation, and writing. I am interested in how phenomenology can be approached as a thoughtful practice rather than a fixed procedure, and in how researchers come to inhabit a phenomenological attitude over time.

More broadly, I am interested in applied phenomenology across disciplines — how phenomenological ways of attending can inform professional practice, research, writing, and everyday life. This orientation runs through my academic publications, my writing beyond journals, and my involvement in collaborative and dialogic projects.

Writing and dialogue

Alongside peer-reviewed publications, I write shorter, exploratory pieces that allow ideas to be developed provisionally and responsively. Writing functions for me as a mode of inquiry — a way of thinking with experience, practice, and theory rather than simply reporting conclusions.

I also co-host a podcast focused on applied phenomenology, which brings together conversations with people working across different disciplines. These dialogues explore how phenomenological thinking shapes ways of seeing, working, and being in the world, and how it can remain grounded in everyday practice.

Current work

At present, my work continues to centre on teaching, teacher education, and phenomenological inquiry, with ongoing interests in outdoor learning, low-stakes approaches to pedagogy, and research–practice relationships. I am particularly concerned with how educational and professional practices can remain thoughtful, humane, and attentive to lived experience amid increasing pressures towards standardisation and certainty.