I have been an art educator all my professional life, as a teacher, senior examiner, lecturer, senior advisor and inspector. I worked with government agencies, national associations and quangos to develop the UK national curriculum for art, assessment practices and guidance. I had set up a website for art teachers even before Bucks County Council (my employer at the time) had a website of it’s own. This was sustained throughout my time with Bucks and celebrated the work of teachers and students in Bucks schools and presented work I had produced. However, I abandoned this website when I left Bucks, though there are traces of my work in art education scattered around the Internet.
Since leaving Bucks I have worked with the London Institute of Education on a project to develop the art curriculum in Kazakhstan and I have just finished working on a project to write a new art curriculum for Saudi Arabia. I have also been a full time carer and latterly a full time widower, which has left me both sadder and wiser.
Sometimes it is good to share personal creative work with friends and others. So I have set up another ‘danchina’ website. I know it’s old fashioned to have a website, but it’s something I can control and add to when I feel like it. I don’t enjoy the unrestrained, constant compulsive sharing of social media.
I do make stuff and have used this site to record this stuff. So there are spoons and sculptures mixed into this site.
Perhaps I will gather up some of the earlier professional stuff, more as a reminiscence than a publishing programme. However, as teachers are now being required to reinvent the wheels that we reinvented some years ago, there may be stuff which stimulates ideas. For instance, here are some papers about assessment. Here is the website of the Expert Subject Advisory Group set up by the government in 2014. I was a member. It contains information which may still be of interest.
Dan China
PS I’ve recently been exploring and using AI on various projects. Here is a link to my experiments using AI. (Sept 2023)