Dr Katja Frimberger
Lecturer
Education
Personal statement
I am currently Lecturer in Education Studies at the Strathclyde Institute of Education in Glasgow, Scotland, where I teach on the Joint Honours Education and MSc Education Studies programmes.
My research is located in the area of aesthetic and cultural education. I am particularly interested in the reception and production processes of theatre and film-making and how these can be theorised as education (in the broad sense of "formation", i.e. of being formative).
My most recent publications (2022/23) look at German theatre maker/theorist Bertolt Brecht’s actor training and his philosophising theatre of estrangement; Latvian director Asja Lācis' educational philosophy in her proletarian children's theatre and the role of Hans-Georg Gadamer's aesthetic hermeneutics in researching intercultural encounters.
I was project lead on three film-making and digital animation education projects for care-experienced children and young people in Scotland (Little Animation Studio; UAnimate and Scotland Our New Home) collaborating with Glasgow-based filmmaker Simon Bishopp and stakeholders in the charity/education sector. The projects received funding through Creative Scotland, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the School for Social Entrepreneurs.
I regularly collaborate (as performer, producer) with filmmaker Simon Bishopp. Our Science Fiction Short Film "Refuge" was selected by Alex Proyas (director of The Crow, Dark City, I-Robot, Gods of Egypt) for his new 2022 Streaming Platform Vidiverse.
The short screened at Glasgow Short Film 2017; the London Sci-Fi Festival 2018; Inverness Film Festival 2018 and was selected for Film Hub Scotland's/BFI's "Shorts in Support" scheme, which aims to revive the tradition of the supporting short film by distributing eight new short films to cinemas and film societies to screen before features.
Previously Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London, I taught Applied Theatre, Performance Theory & Directing for the BA Theatre.
In my role as Research Associate at the University of Glasgow for the 3-year, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded, £2 mill. large grant project 'Researching Multilingually at the Borders of the Body, Language, Law & the State', I theorised the role of arts-based research methods in multilingual settings.
I was awarded a fully funded 3-year PhD research scholarship in the area of aesthetic/intercultural education (focus: applied theatre) from the College of Social Sciences/School of Education at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
My PhD project explored international students' lived experiences of 'interculturality' through a performance-based research pedagogy, based on German theatre maker Bertolt Brecht's theatre/actor training theory and practice. I passed my viva voce in May 2013.
Prior to my academic career, I worked as a language (English, German) and drama educator in secondary, adult & community education, in Germany, Venezuela, Ireland and Scotland.
Prize And Awards
- Little Animation Studio (Finalist National Lottery Good Causes Award 2023)
- Recipient
- 2023
- Small Grant Award from Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (£750)
- Recipient
- 2023
- Ideas & Pioneers Follow-On-Grant & Bespoke Support Package (£12,000 award)
- Recipient
- 2020
- Paul Hamlyn Foundation Ideas & Pioneers Award (£10,800)
- Recipient
- 2019
- Creative Scotland Open Project Fund Award (£24,970.24)
- Recipient
- 2019
- Film Festival Selection (London Sci-Fi/Inverness Film Festival; Film Hub Scotland)
- Recipient
- 2018
Qualifications
PhD University of Glasgow in Scotland/UK for a thesis entitled: Towards a Brechtian Research Pedagogy for Intercultural Education: Cultivating Intercultural Spaces of Experiment through Drama.
M.A. Theatre Studies, University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.
M.Ed. Education, with English & German, Universität Hildesheim in Germany
Teacher Training Qualification (secondary) for German & English in the federal state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen), Germany.
Publications
- 'Labours of love & self-forgetfulness' : how to craft a secret call to education in art & film
- Frimberger Katja
- Annual Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (2024)
- The craft of acting as a pedagogical model for living a flourishing life in a world of tensions and contradictions
- Frimberger Katja
- Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol 56, pp. 74-85 (2024)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2023.2226862
- Cultivating care-ful(l) everyday gestures : in-formations into a greater love in Meister Eckhart and the film Of Gods and Men
- Frimberger Katja
- North Americam Association for Philosophy and Education (NAAPE) Annual Conference, pp. 1-37 (2023)
- The tyranny of truth and the preservation of human happiness à la Bertolt Brecht and Paul Feyerabend
- Frimberger Katja
- Education for a Free Society Paul Feyerabend and the Pedagogy of Irritation (2023) (2023)
- 'Reading intercultural encounters as art' : the call of the other and the relevance of beauty
- Frimberger Katja
- Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol 31, pp. 283-304 (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2022.2164343
- Cultivating the art of living : the pleasures of Bertolt Brecht's philosophising theatre pedagogy
- Frimberger Katja
- Studies in Philosophy and Education Vol 41, pp. 653-668 (2022)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-022-09852-6
Research Interests
Research Interests:
- Aesthetic and cultural education/philosophy of education
Memberships:
- The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB)
- The International Network of Philosophers of Education (INPE)
- The North American Association for Philosophy of Education (NAAPE/APOE)
Professional Activities
- PhD External Examiner (Durham University)
- Examiner
- 14/3/2024
- Dominican Seminar 2024
- Participant
- 1/3/2024
- Education as Formation in Meister Eckhart's Bild-based theology
- Speaker
- 29/2/2024
- In-formations into a Greater Love in Meister Eckhart and the Film Of Gods and Men
- Speaker
- 8/12/2023
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
- Visiting researcher
- 1/12/2023
- ‘Artists in Love & Mysteries in the Making’: Wondering at our Educational Relation with Art- and Film-Making
- Speaker
- 8/11/2023
Projects
- Little Animation Studio Follow-On Funding (awarded £12,000 by Paul Hamlyn Foundation & School for Social Entrepreneurs )
- Frimberger, Katja (Principal Investigator) Bishopp, Simon (Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2020 - 01-Jan-2021
- Creative Multilingualism: from Practice to Research to Education (Project Team Member)
- Frimberger, Katja (Academic)
- Member of the research team of the project Creative Multilingualism funded through the Greek Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.). The project is led by Prof George Androulakis at the University of Thessaly (Volos).
- 03-Jan-2020 - 01-Jan-2022
- Little Animation Studio: Digital Animation Education (awarded £24,970.24/ Creative Scotland)
- Frimberger, Katja (Principal Investigator) Simon, Bishopp (Co-investigator)
- Little Animation Studio is a Creative Scotland-funded digital animation education project that supports children with differing needs through the whole production process of creating their first animated short film.
- 14-Jan-2019 - 14-Jan-2020
- UAnimate: Performance captured storytelling (awarded £10,800, Paul Hamlyn Foundation)
- Frimberger, Katja (Principal Investigator) Bishopp, Simon (Principal Investigator)
- UAnimate: Performance-captured storytelling for care-experienced children, collaboration with Showmanmedia, Harmeny Education Trust, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2019 (£10,800).
- 21-Jan-2019 - 21-Jan-2019
- Scotland Our New Home: Participatory Filmmaking (awarded £19,339 by Creative Scotland)
- Frimberger, Katja (Principal Investigator) Bishopp, Simon (Co-investigator)
- Scotland, Our New Home (SONH) was a Creative Scotland-funded participatory film-making project for young people, most of whom had arrived in Scotland as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ (Education Scotland, 2015). This legal term means that young people have often reached the UK (and, in this case, are now living in Glasgow), unaccompanied by adults, are under the care of the local city council, and are (or were) involved in the complicated and lengthy process of applying for refugee status in the UK. The young people were part of the New Young Peers Scotland (NYPS) group, founded by their ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher and social worker, with the aim of training young people to become peer mentors for other new young arrivals in Glasgow. We got to know the NYPS founders in 2014, when working for a three-year research project that explored the role of arts-based pedagogies in multilingual education contexts (Frimberger et al., 2018; Frimberger, 2016). The ESOL programme, which many of the peer mentors had attended (or still were attending), had been innovated by the college’s ESOL teachers as a holistic educational response to the learning, social and psychological needs of newly arrived, unaccompanied, young people between 16 and 21 years old. Our film project arose out of a later, voluntary collaboration between film-maker Simon Bishopp and some of the young people from NYPS in 2017 for an animation project that gave our film project Scotland, Our New Home its name (you can watch the animation here: https://youtu.be/tD--1v607Hs). The peer mentors wanted to create a resource to communicate the hopes and challenges that life in Scotland entails for an unaccompanied young person and crafted a voice-over script, which Simon translated into hand-drawn, animated imagery.
The young people took the animation to the Glasgow Southside Film Festival, and it has since been shown – by the peer mentors themselves, their social workers, teachers and ourselves – at a number of youth, social work and education conferences in the UK, Sicily and Greece. Our funding application for the SONH film project was motivated by the young people’s ambition to now make a film in their role as peer mentors, explicitly for other newly arrived young people, and with the aim of supporting them in the process of making a home in Scotland. - 02-Jan-2018 - 28-Jan-2019
- Researching Multilingually at the Borders of the Body, Language, Law and the State (Research Associate)
- Frimberger, Katja (Researcher)
- I was Research Associate on the project, with a focus on the role of arts-based research methods in multilingual settings.
- 01-Jan-2014 - 01-Jan-2016