(NB: I use the term ‘teacher’ here as a matter of convenience, but I’m not a classroom schoolteacher. While ‘teaching’ is certainly what I do, a more accurate term might be ‘educator’ or ‘facilitator of creative learning experiences’. Either way, my central motivation & passion is to share skills, ideas and inspiration with others, through process-based creative play, creative thinking, curiosity and discovery.)
The themes of education, creativity and neurodivergence are all strong in my family, so although it was always assumed I would ‘be an artist’, it makes sense that I would end up combining all three themes. I think my creative self is most at home in the process of teaching. I’m a very persistent self-guided learner, always exploring ideas and examining processes, and am self-taught in everything I do – including teaching. My childhood schooling experiences during the 70s were quite diverse, ranging from progressive innercity mainstream to tiny one-teacher rural, to homeschooling and beyond, which certainly gave me a strong sense of what kinds of learning approaches worked (or not) for me. A small handful of teachers along the way were truly inspirational human beings, and their impact has stayed with me.
From 1990 to 2017 I discovered and shaped my own specialist niche as an independent freelance arts educator and creative mentor, and this became my main stream of self-employment (alongside illustration, graphic design & music). Rather than pursuing this through academic channels, my training – ie inspiration – came from observing and experiencing the skills of several especially masterful group facilitators in the early 90s. I learned relational skills, techniques for reading the energy of a group, building rapport, and moving adaptively with a process. Thanks to those excellent facilitators I discovered an innate gift & passion in myself for inspiring people, especially children, to connect with themselves via creative exploration.
During those 27 years, my workshops reached thousands of people throughout Melbourne, regional Victoria, and across Tasmania; my work spanned all ages, from toddlers to octogenarians, across all ‘social demographics’, from insular privilege to severely marginalised. Teaching across such a broad range of settings afforded me a profound overview of human experience, and allowed me to observe common patterns & differences in how people learn. I developed an adaptive, compassionate teaching approach that was a natural extension of my authentic self. I aimed, wherever possible, to include everyone, whatever their perceived ability, sensitivities or ways of processing the world.
The core of my teaching work took the form of innovative workshops and residential programs in Primary & Secondary schools, using the art of cartoon-drawing as a learning tool and vehicle for exploring self-expression, emotional communication and creative thinking. I refined my approach into a simple but open-ended structure that allowed room for infinite spontaneity and flexibility, so I could tailor my workshops to virtually any context. This also enabled me to include teachers as collaborators, and I formed many wonderful creative partnerships with teachers & principals (and other leaders) over the years.
As the benefits of my particular approach became recognised by schools and other organisations, I was invited more frequently to work in a variety of other specialised areas, with a focus on well-being, self-awareness and mental health. These included (among others):
- gifted & remedial education
- creative mentoring projects
- youth-at-risk programs
- artist-in-school residencies
- numeracy & literacy programs
- community arts
- publishing projects
- children’s festivals
- private tutoring & afterschool programs
- adult education
- designing / coordinating creative holiday programs
Though I had to pause my teaching work in 2017, I returned to it in 2023 with some fresh perspectives. During my time away I received my late diagnosis of autism / Aspergers, and I spent several years researching autism / ADHD and monitoring the rise of neurodivergent awareness around the world, as well as reassessing my life’s work through the filter of autistic experience. My private classes had previously always attracted a high percentage of students who (before we had the terminology) were clearly neurodivergent. Parents recognised that I offered a learning environment that was responsive to children with particular needs & sensitivities. With increases in diagnoses / awareness alongside the related increases in homeschooling families, I’m noticing much more response from those communities rather than schools, and I think my approach is better suited in that direction.
I am also publishing a series of drawing-based creative learning games & resources (see below) and offering workshops to adult professionals (educators, therapists, allied health professionals etc ).
thINK Draw Connect Learn
Central to effective teaching is a willingness to be always learning alongside, and in relationship with, whoever you are sharing the experience with. My students have always been my greatest teachers, constantly showing me where to correct, refine, expand or discard, in response to their cues. Using cartoon-drawing as a creative thinking tool, I devised simple structures within which we could journey into the unknown together, experimenting, testing new approaches, cultivating a curious mind and an eye for happy accidents (discovery rather than failure). As my understanding of learning and brain connectivity deepened, I developed a metacognitive drawing-based teaching model or process I called thINK Draw Connect Learn. The thINK process deconstructs linemaking into a framework for students to ‘think about thinking’ – that is, to approach drawing as a mindful learning tool. I designed a suite of thINK teaching resources based on techniques I had tested and refined in workshops during my years in the field, as well as a lifetime’s drawing experience.
I am currently in the process of publishing these resources, starting with several drawing-based learning games using innovative decks of cards I designed ‘in the field’. The first of these, the thINK Face Cards Starter Deck, was published in 2024, with a number of other card sets nearing completion.
MUSIC EDUCATION
Music being another natural facet of my (self-taught) creative work, and a passion since childhood, I have applied my hands-on, non-theoretical teaching approach to it as I have with drawing. At various times I’ve offered private lessons in guitar / ukulele / drumming, and I continue to run public percussion & drumming group programs with a well-being focus. By deconstructing these musical processes into simple building blocks, and using a mix-and-match approach, seemingly-complex musical patterns can be made more accessible to beginners. As much as possible I aim to make the learning a ‘can’t fail’ experience, so that students can feel an immediate sense of accomplishment – which in turn creates a healthier brain chemistry for learning. At whatever age, the most common learning challenges are often in the form of self-talk – the inner dialogues of doubt, comparison, criticism, expectations – all of which are learned in the first place, and can be unlearned or reframed under the right conditions.
From 2008 – 2011 I was a specialist music teacher at Tarremah Steiner School (TAS), teaching African-style percussion & rhythm to secondary students from Grade 7 – 10.
During these years I also led two community drumming groups in Cygnet – Rhythm Collision (kids group, aged 9 – 15) and The Drummin’ Mummas (adult women) – both of whom performed regularly at local community events and festivals. I returned to community drumming in late 2023, with more focus on the social well-being process than performance.
Other applications for these drumming workshops included mental health, youth-at-risk, young refugees, and people with disabilities.
Pivotal to my work teaching rhythm were the two life-changing TA KE TI NA trainings I attended in the 90s, led by master percussionist / facilitator Reinhard Flatischler, who developed the TA KE TI NA process. These workshops were personally transformative, and opened up a whole new direction for my work in creative education, performance and musicmaking.
EDUCATIONAL ILLUSTRATION
Throughout my teaching practice I also used my skills in illustration and graphic design to develop many creative teaching resources, both for myself and for other educational settings. My ability to break down a process into clear steps of instruction translated visually into ‘how-to’ art and craft resources, technical diagrams, yoga and dance instruction, and more. Quite a bit of my freelance illustration work gravitated towards educational publishing, including a 16-year collaboration with Australian music education publishers Bushfire Press. You can find a comprehensive overview of my Bushfire illustration here.
The links below will take you to pages that illustrate a few specific areas of my past teaching work. It’s impossible to include the full scope, and the task of archiving is ongoing, but these links should offer a sense of the diversity:
CARTOONING WORKSHOPS & PROGRAMS:
- Creative Communication: Cartooning For Emotional Literacy
- Totally Random Stuff
- School Of Cartoon Artistry 2013 – 2016