Ms Sian Ephgrave

I was awarded a scholarship by the ESRC in 2015 to undertake my PhD and I currently combine part-time study and teaching with looking after my young daughter. My PhD project is an arts-based, participatory exploration of the dysbeing and wellbeing of secondary English teachers in England. It was inspired, to a significant extent, by my own experiences of teaching English in state institutions from 2003 until 2015. The project re-imagines teacher wellbeing within the democratic tripartite of freedom, equality and fellowship, with specific focus on fellowship as means and ends of human flourishing (Fielding 2014). Almost without my knowing, the project has become a response to Foucault’s call, in his seminal work ‘The Subject and Power’, for more-than-anti-authoritarian-struggles that seek to understand how we can resist the peculiarly totalising and simultaneously individualising forces shaping this present moment. It has become a project in challenging both a wellbeing agenda that promotes unrealistic, exclusionary ideas of a perfect self and an educational movement that seeks to reify human beings in alignment with market values. A framework for analysis was developed from the literature review, with wellbeing presented as an enlivening and opening process of radical inclusion and dysbeing (Wynter 2016) - as the antithesis of wellbeing - describing a deadening and closing process of reactionary exclusion. The project’s data collection takes the form of a book of over 90 poems and non-fiction pieces written by and with English teachers.