Bio

Fraser Logan was an IATL/IAS Early Career Teaching Fellow during the 2023/24 academic year. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick in 2023 with a thesis titled “Nietzsche on Honesty”. He recently published a paper on the relationship between honesty and parrhēsia, the Cynic virtue of outspokenness. He is interested in unconventional forms of philosophical writing and has written a book of 800 original aphorisms: e.g., “No afterlife. Go after life.”

His full bio can be found on his IATL page.Link opens in a new window

Project Summary

Fraser focused his project on a free writing workshop that he led as part of his Early Career Teaching Fellowship with IATL. Fraser drew from his own background using creative writing in his teaching and research to deliver a free-writing workshop to undergraduate and postdoctoral researchers at Warwick from a variety of disciplines. The workshop consisted in students drawing writing prompts from a hat in the middle of the room. These prompts were generated both by Fraser and other students in two previous trial workshops. Students could skip or ignore prompts all together, and were not obligated to share their writings. In developing and delivering the workshop, Fraser aimed to explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching and learning by engaging with Midgelow’s conceptualisation of improvisation in pedagogy as well as bell hooks’ “engaged pedagogy” and Nietzsche’s “spontaneous life writing.” Fraser discussed how interdisciplinary teaching involves improvisation and spontaneity, which free writing can encourage. Free writing also fosters transdisciplinarity, as students draw from their own discipline-specific knowledge, other disciplines and past life experiences to engage in embodied and experiential learning. Importantly, Fraser himself participated in the workshop and offered reflections on his own journey with creative writing. This reflected Fraser’s use of bell hooks’ “engaged pedagogy” where teachers themselves must also be vulnerable with students to encourage risk taking. From the workshop experience, Fraser developed a pedagogical framework called “spontaneous interdisciplinarity,” where interdisciplinary practitioners may improvise integration from other disciplines in the moment, as occurred in the free writing workshops. Fraser’s project underscores how students’ wellbeing, creativity, agency and ability to deal with uncertainty are cultivated through an improvisational pedagogical experience such as free writing, and thus how free writing itself can be a powerful form of inter-, trans- disciplinary learning.