I am a Senior Lecturer in Business Education at Manchester Metropolitan University. I design and lead research-informed curriculum for students and degree apprentices working in settings shaped by digital transformation, complex challenge, and responsible business leadership. My practice brings together creative pedagogy, digital strategy, and a social realist view of knowledge, held together by a commitment to social justice and widening participation.
My position starts from a simple claim. Creativity is not the opposite of knowledge. It grows out of it. This is where the social realists matter to me. Bernstein, Young and Wheelahan give an account of why disciplinary knowledge is not just one option among many but something students have a right of access to. Wheelahan puts it well: deny learners the structuring principles of a discipline and you deny them the means to think beyond their immediate experience. For an educator working in employability and apprenticeships, that argument lands hard. All education is vocational in the end, because only real command of a body of knowledge prepares people for futures nobody has imagined yet. Skills talk on its own does not do this. Knowledge does.
So I build curriculum that secures disciplinary understanding first, then opens it up to creative work. Creativity is the heart of what I teach, not a decorative extra once the serious content is done. I want learners to develop genuine creative capability, the confidence to generate ideas inside a discipline and the judgement to know when its rules are worth breaking. My teaching is applied and experiential. It draws on design thinking, authentic assessment, work-integrated projects, and emerging technologies including immersive and AI tools. Students prototype, test, reflect, and build things that are real rather than proxies for real.
Artificial intelligence now sits inside most of what students do. I treat it as a feature of professional practice to be interrogated, not a threat to be policed. Used well, AI rewards exactly the disciplinary command the social realists defend, because you need to know a field to prompt it sharply, judge its output, and own the decisions it cannot make for you. Used badly, it becomes a substitute for thinking. The difference is knowledge. That is the line I hold across my assessment design.
Alongside teaching, I lead the Creative Futures Innovation Toolkit, my Developing Education Excellence project, which designs and evaluates resources for creativity and digital fluency across business education. I write on assessment policy, creative curriculum design, and the relationship between knowledge, skills, and practice in higher education. My work includes publication with Advance HE, Chartered Management Business Educator accreditation, recognition as a How to Change the World Experiential Learning Fellow, and selection in 2026 as one of twenty-five global faculty for Adobe’s inaugural Higher Education Faculty Leadership Cohort. As I-TELL Resources Lead and a DELTA digital innovator, I support colleagues across the faculty through collaborative professional development and sector engagement.
I believe education has a central role in advancing equality, sustainability, and inclusive economic growth. I build communities of practice that bring students, educators, and external partners together to make work that matters.
Structured Creativity 