Dr Karen Hosack Janes

Karen is a Senior Lecturer in Education. She specialises in pedagogies that nurture creative development. She leads the Art and Design specialism on the undergraduate and postgraduate Initial Teacher Education and Training (ITET) programmes. She also leads the Creative and Therapeutic Approaches module on the Early Childhood and Education Studies undergraduate degree, as well supervising EdD students

Dr Karen Hosack Janes teaches on the BA(Hons) and Initial Teacher Education and Training (ITET) and BA(Hons) Early Childhood and Education Studies programmes. She specialises in pedagogies that nurture creative development. Her lastest book (2022) Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom: An exploration of consensus across theory and practice proposes three 'conditions for nurturing creativity'.

Karen trained as an Art and Design teacher, becoming Head of Department in a secondary school in Hampshire. She went on to lead the schools programme at the National Gallery, London. Whilst at the National Gallery she set up a cultural placement programme for Initial Teacher Education students from five universities, including many students from Oxford Brookes.

Her publications include Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom: An exploration of consensus across theory and practice (Critical Publishing) and Using the Visual Arts for Cross-curricular Teaching and Learning: Imaginative ideas for the primary school (Routledge). She is the author of number of books on art, including the What is Art? series (Raintree) and the How Artists See series (Heinemann Library). She co-authored Great Paintings (DK). A peer-reviewed article based on her research, titled Objects of Curiosity: How old master paintings have been used in the primary classroom to provide pupils with cognitive challenge and creative agency, is available in the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity (Hosack Janes, K. (2021), Vol 41. DOI 10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100861).