Day Sixty-Seven : Amateur Illustrators

Monday 9th March 2020

Today we were visited by Joel Petrie who is the author of "Further Education and the Twelve Dancing Princesses" and "The Principal: Power and professionalism in FE". He gave a lecture about his next book which I think will be called "Caliban's Dance" and his other books which he worked on with Marie Daley, Kevin Orr and others. He said Further Education has been described as the second chance sector and the cinderella sector for various reasons. He said that it can be transformative but it is significantly underfunded. The third book uses Caliban from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" to describe FE in his latest book that is going to be published in late summer. The first book in this trilogy used "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", a fairytale published by Brothers Grimm in 1812, as the metaphor and "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli for the second book.

In the play, Caliban is called "Hag seed", "Deformed slave" and "Mis-shapen knave" but despite this, he can be said to be one of the most poetic characters in Shakespeare's play. This is all important information as Joel Petrie came to UCA because he was looking for 17 illustrations for the 17 chapters of this new book. We were asked to each create 1 black and white illustration, in portrait proportions to fit a book page. Out of the 94 that will be created only 17 will be chosen. This is a really interesting opportunity that we get to take part in.

After the lecture/presentation I was interested in reading "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli so I am going to see where I can get it to read.