CRAFTING HISTORY IS BASED IN WOODBRIDGE, SUFFOLK AND IS FOUNDED BY KATY WALLACE
About Katy
Katy is a history educator with fifteen years' experience working across diverse educational settings. Her teacher-training was in secondary history education and she started her teaching career in a large comprehensive school in London. Katy has since taught in state and independent secondary schools in the UK, at university level for undergraduate history students, as an online tutor in group and individual settings, and currently works part-time as a Lecturer in History Education and Education at UCL alongside running Crafting History. Katy's experience means she can provide both Crafting History sessions and traditional school history tutoring.
Katy is also an artist and a researcher. While Katy has always loved art, creativity, and colour, it is only in the past five years she has picked up both pencil and paintbrush again since her school days. We can all craft history because we can all be artists. Katy is living proof that you can start at any age.
Katy's journey back to art was through her research. She used craft as a key concept to think about how history is taught and learnt in classrooms. The research was also crafted; data was created and curated using arts-and-crafts methods. When we are thinking, we are creating.
Katy's own art draws inspiration from her academic research, the Suffolk landscape where she lives and grew up, and the hugely rich resource that is the past. Her work as a teacher, her research, and her art are all interdisciplinary and entangled expression of the past and the present.
Katy's first arts-and-crafts students were her much loved nieces and nephews. She started crafting together with them, as well as friends' children, and realised the potential for children to have agency when crafting that is not always achievable through more traditional classroom teaching methods. This practice of crafting together feeds into the theories behind Crafting History.
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Katy also enjoys rowing on the River Deben, travelling, festivals, and enjoying her beautiful garden.