Quick Read…
It’s an exciting time for the Reimagining the diary project; our Principal Investigator Dr Lucy Kelly’s new book is reaching out and sharing ideas and findings from the project and connecting with an even wider range of 
education practitioners. This is so important in a climate where the 2022 Teacher Wellbeing Index (TWI) observed that “Staff working in education experience higher levels of depression and anxiety than those reported in the general population” (TWI 2022). Clearly education professionals need strategies like the Diary Toolkit to support their mental health and enable them to address issues of work life balance and low levels of wellbeing.
Reviews
Realised just over a month ago on 10th March 2023, Reimagining the Diary: Reflective practice as a positive tool for educator wellbeing has been receiving positive reviews from individuals that can see the transformative potential of diary keeping for wellbeing:
Kelly draws on an extensive body of knowledge about humanity and our connection to the written form to create a unique guide to understanding the process of teaching. Teaching is not a role that we can ever truly perfect, as our variable (children) is such an unpredictable one. Instead, Kelly focuses our attention on developing an awareness of the process of reflection, enabling teachers to look back retrospectively and see their sustained development over time, thus leading to a sense of healthy well-being. A special read for teachers and leaders. — Kat Howard, Director, DRET Teaching School Hub
Lucy explains in an entertaining, accessible and compelling way how such a record can support our reflection, help us to process our experiences and our response to them, and serve as an invaluable ‘safety-valve’ and source of relaxation and ease. Lucy exhorts us to prioritise ourselves and create the space for intentional reflective practice, which she believes is key to helping educational professionals find a manageable and sustainable balance in their lives. She asserts, “I want this book to help you fall in love with diary-keeping – whether that’s for the first time, a second time, or a third time.” It certainly worked for me, and I am confident it will work for others. –Jill Berry, Leadership development consultant, educational commentator and writer
What a beautiful book! Easy to follow, with practical examples to really immerse yourself in the process of diary keeping. Although aimed at educators, I feel this book could benefit anyone in any industry especially at a time when people strive to manage their work life balance and daily pressures within the modern-day world. This book seriously inspired me to reconsider my own reflective practices and prioritise my well-being. I’ll certainly be having a go at diary keeping after reading this! – Amazon Customer
Key Ideas
In an interview with available via Myatt & Co, Lucy takes us through some of the key points in the book and points to how the diary keeping process can play a central role in teacher and education professional wellbeing.
What Diary Keeping Offers
- Catharsis – diaries can help bring abstract thoughts and feelings into concrete words, images and
reflections. This offers a chance to ‘park’ the day and can help us free up cognitive load - Celebration – a chance to capture what goes well and help overcome negativity bias, the tendency to focus on the negative and recall negative events and comments more readily than positive ones
- Perspective – opportunity to zoom out or to look at things from a different angle
Diaries are a process not product
In the interview, Lucy considers how specially within the western tradition, diary keeping is often laden with judgement and expectation – a written process which carries conventions and ideas of ‘correctness’. For diaries
for be seen as different from work it is useful to bear in mind playfulness, multimodality and creativity and move away from a formal and rigid structure. The Reimagining the Diary project therefore opens the diary up to versatility and a variety of cultural practices (with examples from Japan and Mali) where diaries take different forms and are kept for different purposes. More on this will follow in a future blog post on creativity and diary keeping.
Wide-ranging Benefits
Lucy also discusses how the diary can be used to test out and rehearse conversations; as well as helping with wellbeing and preparing for things that may make us anxious or that we are dwelling on, this may help with our relationships too. In phase 7 of the RtD project 68.2% of respondent said that keeping the diary had helped with relationships offering feedback such as: “(I’m) Less reactive, more present and I took opportunities to connect and slow down as I realised how important they were and how they made me feel better”; “I was able to use some of the activities at work with the students to help them”; “I became more away of my roles and responsibilities and how to divide my time between work, family, friends and myself”.
Crucially in hectic times, writing a diary can also be a type of ‘rest’ a way of diverting the brain away from the working day and anxieties towards reflection. The transitions section of the Diary Toolkits provides a selection of short activities which enable diary keepers to do just that.
‘The Light of our Life’
The book begins with a quote from Virgina Woolf, which is the perfect place to leave this blog post. Woolf desired her diary to “embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful” and “reflect the light of our life” (Woolf in Kelly 2023), as Lucy’s book shows, the diary toolkit can be a central part of this process.
References and further reading
Reimagining the Diary: Reflective practice as a positive tool for educator wellbeing – Lucy Kelly
John Catt Books March 2023