Franzeska G. Ewart

FAQ's Work in Progress

I was born, in 1950, in Stranraer - a small town by the sea in Galloway. I spent my childhood in the countryside and down on the seashore and I still like to be there and wander about in the woods and along river banks.

I left school to study Medicine at Glasgow University. I found it very difficult and eventually I changed to Zoology which was much less stomach-turning!

For a while I did medical research, and then decided I wanted to teach so I did a year at Jordanhill and got my Primary Teaching Certificate.

I live in Glasgow - full-time with my cat

Lily, and part-time with my partner Adam. I love gardening, walking by the sea, painting, writing, frogs and cats - though probably in reverse order.

Most of my teaching life has been in a multicultural Primary school called Glendale in Pollokshields, Glasgow. I was always interested in the way bilingual children learn English. I'm 'bilingual' myself - my grandmother (whose name I inherited) was German, and my mother grew up in German-speaking Switzerland, so German was her mother tongue. I think it's fascinating how you seem to use different parts of your brain for different languages, and how differently you think.

In 1993 I got the chance to teach in Pakistan. I wanted to know what that country was like because so many of my pupils came from there. I taught in Karachi Grammar School, and had the most amazing three months of my life there. I've never experienced so much kindness and hospitality as I did from the Pakistani people I met.

While I was in Karachi I realised that I wanted more than anything to use shadow theatre to help teach English. I'd been experimenting with it in Glasgow, but in Karachi I did all my teaching through it - and the children really loved it and wrote their own plays. I even taught a School for the Deaf to use it, and in the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture I gave the students Celtic designs to turn into shadow puppets and the results were awesome.

Here are some of the shadow puppets people made in my workshops after I came back from Pakistan, left teaching, and taught puppetry full-time. (link to words 'shadow puppets').

For five years I used shadow puppets to help people express themselves. I don't always find it easy to express myself verbally, and usually want something to 'hide behind', and so I like helping other people to say what they want to say. Puppets, and shadow screens, are good things to 'hide behind' when you're a bit nervous.

I worked with all sorts of people - for example, with the Epilepsy Association of Scotland I used shadow puppets to let young people tell their feelings about having epilepsy; and with Survivors Poetry, people with a history of mental illness or abuse made shadow images (link to Survivors shadows) of things that troubled them and used these as springboards to poetry writing.

Eventually I decided to write a book about this work, so that other teachers might carry it on. It's called 'Let the Shadows Speak'.

At the same time I had 'The Pen-pal from Outer Space' accepted by Egmont, and they went on to ask me to write two fictionalised accounts of experiences I wrote about in 'Let the Shadows Speak' - so 'Shadowflight' and 'Speak up Spike!' were born.

These days, I still work part-time back in Glendale Primary teaching English as an Additional Language. The children and staff there often appear in my books! And occasionally I still do shadow theatre work, and show children the shadow puppets that appear in my books.