Happy new year!

I am now almost half way through my PhD; time has really flown. After a year of reading and writing, I finally finished my literacy review yesterday. It now includes sections on film and education, literacy, motivation and emotion and I am really proud that  it is done. Overall, it spans 40,000 words. I am very excited about passing it on to my (potential) new supervisor Ros McLellan from the University of Cambridge. Hopefully we will finally be able to start working together in a fortnight's time.

In the first week of January, I visited the MeCCSA in Bournemouth and spoke about the student population of the Bradford Film School. This was a very interesting experience as it was the first time I visited a conference and held a presentation on something that was not PhD related! You can actually find a short video here. I am writing quite a lot for the Steiner Academy Leeds free school bid at the moment, so I might try to put a different paper together for that, too.

Unfortunately my PhD research has hit a bit of a wall- the schools are not very good at getting back to me and after gathering data from the first 10 classes, it is very quiet now. I am a little bit worried that it is too late to re-approach some of the class teachers and I am hoping that Ros can help me to figure out a new strategy to gather as much data as possible in the last months of the school year. Fingers crossed!