Product reviews for Dancing About Architecture

Phil Beadle's inimitable style will be familiar to many and his passion for learning and desire to stir things up comes flooding through this small and very well-formed volume. His editor, Ian Gilbert, sets the tone when he opens the foreword thus: 'Creativity is like pornography. It's hard to define but you know what it is when you see it. And it can get you into a lot of trouble bringing it in to school.'

The book consists of a series of chapters that are designed to provoke and on the whole he succeeds in startling, getting the reader to laugh, to think and to re-think. His premise is that we have unused potential both in our curriculum and in our classrooms and he wants to shake us out of our torpor. He also offers a range of techniques for 'treating the arts as forms for pedagogy' rather than the arts being the (stultifying) content focus of tired pedagogical approaches. Rather than trying to liven up lessons with 'fun' starters, Beadle offers the prospect of the whole lesson being exciting, engaging and loaded with relevant content, surely the Holy Grail of teaching and learning?

'Dancing about architecture' is a genuine proposition, as is the 'punctuation ballet' and the potential for a mashup of physics and rugby. The ideas presented in this book are achievable by beginning and experienced teachers, provided they have the desire to have fun themselves. The comic tone should not deceive the reader: this is a serious book which offers teachers the opportunity not to be bored or boring.