Dr Suzanne Culshaw is a Research Fellow in the Schools of Law and Education at the University of Hertfordshire. She is an Early Career Researcher who completed her PhD at the University of Hertfordshire in 2019. Her doctoral research explored the experience of struggling as a teacher and she used collage with her teacher participants. She defines struggling as a ‘temporary fractured state’ and has since written about the importance of love and care in education settings. Recent project work has focussed on distributed leadership, specifically supporting educational leaders – through the use of collage and gesture response – to strengthen capacity for collaborative leadership. In 2023 she published a chapter in the Handbook on Leadership in Education on using arts-based and embodied methods to research leadership in education. Suzanne offers creativity, reflexivity and sensitivity in everything she does as an educator; she is committed to establishing respectful and meaningful relationships and strives to communicate with compassion. She brings to the AECED project her interest in innovative approaches to teaching and learning and her experience of using arts-based and embodied approaches in research.
She is a practising Buddhist, training for ordination within the Triratna movement. Suzanne would love to get back into a regular habit of Nordic Walking in her local country park, but for now she enjoys her daily walks with the family dog – Penny, a dachshund-spaniel cross – in and around the small Suffolk town where she lives.
You can follow Suzanne on Twitter (X): @SuzanneCulshaw, or on LinkedIn.