NAVIGATING THIS SITE & INTRODUCTION

A good place to start

Navigating this site

If you’re viewing this site on a computer, you’ll see headings in the top banner to the various sections of this stack.

If you’re using the Substack App, you’ll see something like this:

Navigating to the various sections of The Mythopoetic Classroom on the Substack App can be initially a bit tricky. You can use the following links instead. Click on a heading and you’ll be taken to that section.

Home

This Home section has links to my regular newsletters and posts from my time teaching in schools and university. There’s a list of the most viewed posts and another of stacks I would recommend.

Notes

A place where short conversations and news happens with a wider audience.

Chat

This is a section where quick conversations between subscribers can happen.

The Worlds of Harriet Henderson

Here you can read my 2019 novel, or listen to the audio. There are many reviews of the novel included in this section.

School Portrait

This is where I’ve republishing my 1987 book School Portrait, together with reviews. Each chapter has an audio version.

Books & articles

Here you’ll find summaries of all my books, my two theses (Masters and PhD) and all published articles.

Sally and the Universarium

This is where I’ll be publishing my new novel, which I expect to finish … sometime!

Short stories

Full text & summaries (often with audio) of all my short stories.

Archive

All posts are listed here.

Newsletters

This is where you can subscribe or unsubscribe for particular sections. It’s a good idea to visit this, and to turn off sections for which you don’t want to receive notifications.

About

This is a brief description of my background and current life.

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The story behind the creation of this site

Having been retired from full time work for almost a decade now, and having just had my 77th birthday, I thought, as the new year began, that 2024 was going to be all about cooking, gardening, travelling, spending time with family, getting to know our new dog, and perhaps finishing my next novel.

I had no inkling that I’d soon be knee deep in a Substack-inspired attempt to document my teaching life, no idea that I’d be noticing the ways this concept of the mythopoetic classroom kept surfacing, even long before I started using the term.

The mythopoetic classroom?

I use the term to highlight essential aspects of a classroom which, in my experience, are too often invisible to our outcome-focused rational minds.

If a teacher is aware that her classroom is a mythopoetic space, she knows that

1. the unconscious, the intuitive, and the imagined will be present and will play some part, often highly useful, in what transpires.

2. virtual time (ie past, present and future ) exists in every moment)

3. time operates at varying speeds for different participants

4. students and teacher are bodies (Deleuze would say machines or assemblages) with permeable boundaries, where there is a constant and natural flow of affect in myriad directions

5. the active passions (variants of joy) and passive passions (variants of sadness) saturate the space with feeling

A bit too conceptual? Not sounding like real people in real places?

For the most part here in this stack, I haven’t written about the mythopoetic classroom theoretically, though there are posts and the odd article where I try to get my head around Deleuze or Spinoza or any number of other writers who say something that seems relevant to how I’ve experienced life as a teacher in classrooms.

Most of the time these five essential aspects are implied in my writing of

• anecdotes, like the one describing a hot afternoon in a Year 6 classroom in my second year of teaching, or

• short stories, as with the story The Poetry Lesson which I wrote with two colleagues

• non-fiction books about, for example, four students and how they and their classmates built and lived in a simulated medieval village for over a month. The book, published in 1987, was called School Portrait.

• novels like The Worlds of Harriet Henderson.

I suppose what I’m constantly doing in all of this writing is to try to make sense of what I have experienced over the past 50 years as a teacher. And the concept of the mythopoetic classroom has become a kind of useful idea in my evolving thinking.