It is an absolute privilege to receive this 2022 National Teaching Fellowship award. This achievement, in conjunction with my current academic roles of Senior Lecturer, Co-Director of LJMUs Centre for Educational Research – CERES – and Managing Editor for the education-based journal PRISM, means that the bestowal of this award is amazing. However, it is even more meaningful when this recognition as an NTF is situated against the backdrop of my working class childhood and youth, with its associated experiences of failure at school and general limitation.
Since becoming a non-traditional entrant to higher education as an undergraduate in the late 1990s, I have achieved impressive levels of academic and career progression. Recently, I have written about the challenges, demands, and subsequent successes of my unorthodox journey into academia, as part of the autoethnographic chapter: Mr Airport Man and the Albatross: A Reverie of Flight, Hope and Transformation. In this piece, I celebrate my working class transformation through pivotal experiences with music, popular culture, (and of course airports); and my later academic relationship with music, memory and daydreaming.
