Annouchka Bayley

But after a few years of a globetrotting artistic life, it was clear that something was missing.

 “I was living this very worthy, very broke life as a practising artist, back in the UK and in Paris for a while, but I really missed scholarship. Whenever I wrote notes in the theatre they were all multi-layered, and I really wanted to develop artistic ways of knowing that feed into critical ways of knowing.”

 Annouchka returned to academia via an MA in Theatre and Performance at Warwick University, before a stint as an emerging director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She then “brought it all together” in a PhD in Education, while continuing to perform in one-woman shows and beginning to publish her research.

Teaching performance skills in Pupil Referral Units and Further Education Colleges expanded her understanding of how the curriculum can be delivered, as well as education’s capacity to reach those students who sometimes get left behind.

“Those teenagers have their own way of knowing,” she says. “How can we develop better ways of listening, and knowing how to take students at their word?”

After developing an MA in Creative Education at King’s College London and co-designing two BA Liberal Arts modules at the Royal College of Art, Annouchka joined the Faculty of Education at Cambridge in 2020 as Assistant Professor of Education and Lead Co-ordinator of the MPhil in Arts, Creativities and Education.

“When I saw the job advertised, it felt like the culmination of everything I’d done up to that point. Everything I’m working on here is underpinned by post-human pedagogies, introducing Master’s students to the concept of challenging their basic assumptions, thinking about what it means to live a distributive life, not airbrushing aspects of our experience but thinking about what happens in the in-between spaces, unpacking our own experience and opening ourselves out in multiple ways.”

Students on the MPhil course vary from educators working in schools, museums, theatres, galleries and art schools, to lecturers wanting to consider their own practice, and those progressing to a PhD. Annouchka is justly proud of the fact that 75% of last year’s participants returned as mentors to their successors this academic year, stating that the course allows them to think in a different way to any other context. 

The scale of Cambridge’s Education Faculty permits an interdisciplinarity that Annouchka regards as integral to her approach. With a reformulated Master’s programme, a newly published book on artistic research, and a forthcoming novel, it’s an approach which is proving productive.

“Elsewhere I’ve encountered resistance or bias, either against the arts or against education – they were seen as two separate things. But interdisciplinarity is central to dealing with complexity. It’s like a huge carpet – you pull one end and all these other issues emerge. The whole point is the different ways of knowing.”