Rachelle Emily O’Brien has worked in the education sector for more than 10 years as a volunteer and an independent consultant, in higher education and the commercial sector in roles across the North of England. Rachelle is passionate about transforming education through developing playful and inclusive learning opportunities which prioritise access for all.
Inspired by her neurodivergent nephew, Rachelle’s career focus has been to understand how technological affordances and online environments can enable inclusive and playful learning opportunities that empower learners to become the master of their own journey. Rachelle’s ambition is to make the world not only more accepting, but a more inclusive and accessible place to enable those with differences to flourish and succeed. In her role as a Senior Learning Designer at Durham Centre for Academic Development at Durham University, Rachelle champions the integration of digital pedagogy, inclusivity and playfulness into curricula.
Rachelle is a curriculum transformation expert and leads educators to design and develop their learning, teaching and assessment practices to be more inclusive, enhance engagement and student experience through the incorporation of playfulness, creativity and games. Rachelle’s unique approach encourages educators to explore new practices in non-traditional ‘no-risk’ environments which advocate for learning from failure. Rachelle is an adventurer. She colours outside of the lines, breaks rules and experiments. Rachelle finds pedagogies and technologies and plays with them, exploring at their limits to understand possibilities outside of their original intention, to create inclusive and playful learning experiences for others.
Resulting from this, Rachelle has gained the nickname ‘Escape Room Queen’ and is well known for her unique delivery style that prioritises personal experiences. Rachelle’s use of playfulness, creativity and games in practice empowers others to cross boundaries, explore messiness and actively change and disrupt existing practices.
Driven by a curiosity to understand how and why people learn and celebrate the unique and diverse education community, Rachelle creates opportunities for others to showcase their experiences, enabling exploration with learning and teaching in non-traditional ways. Rachelle’s practice illustrates a more divergent, holistic approach to facilitate learning and is effective in producing curious, innovative, valued, independent and playful practitioners.