OHS Inspires
We’re thrilled to introduce our OHS Inspires programme, which takes our Sixth Form offering to new heights. Our Sixth Form students can dive into exciting masterclasses, covering a spectrum of subjects like the History of Art, Languages, Literature, Social Sciences, Classics, Science, and Medicine.
Masterclasses
Our new series of masterclasses builds on OHS’s well-established tradition of academic excellence, and provides our students with further opportunities to embrace intellectual challenge and go beyond GCSE and A Level.
The masterclasses enable students to deepen their knowledge and understanding, explore their interests and engage critically with a wide range of disciplines, and to be ready for the next steps of their education at top selecting universities. Each masterclass is delivered by one of our OHS Inspires Mentors, a group of academics who are also supervising our Sixth Form students in their extended research projects.
Through the programme, we strive to ensure that the masterclasses cover a range of different areas and disciplines to reflect our students’ diverse and varied academic interests. Each series of masterclasses is a series of 4 or 5 sessions run at lunchtime or after school, and we expect students to commit to the whole series so that they can get the maximum benefit from them.
Inspires Mentors
Our Inspires Mentors are seasoned academics and available to share their wealth of research experience and specialist knowledge, guiding Sixth Form students through their Extended Research Projects.
In addition to supervising our Sixth Form students in their Extended Research Projects OHS Inspires Mentors offer a range of exciting masterclasses open to all students in Year 10, Year 11 and Sixth Form.
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Olivia SinclairOlivia is a DPhil student in Biology at the University of Oxford. Her research explores eco-evolutionary dynamics in species to understand how natural populations will adapt to environmental changes over generations. Olivia’s findings aim to aid conservation efforts, particularly in the face of climate change. She primarily studies fish families known for their biodiversity and rapid evolution, although she anticipates that her research methods will be applicable to other species and study systems as well. Her favorite aspect of her research is conducting fieldwork in the jungles of Costa Rica and Trinidad. Outside of research, Olivia enjoys creating art, playing piano, and spending time with friends and animals. She is passionate about teaching; she loves mentoring students in various subjects and strives to create a warm, welcoming learning environment for everyone, regardless of their experience or knowledge. |
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Stephan NituStephan is an ancient historian interested in historical method and epistemology; his DPhil is about reconceptualizing the Classical Athenian economy, which has been ‘measured’ by scholars applying modern frameworks to give misleading conclusions about how remarkable economic growth and other indices were. He looks at these knowledge claims and goes through the biases and cognitive pitfalls that are otherwise left unaddressed. In the past, I’ve worked on historiography, sense perceptions (the cognitive and social consequences of an oral society, as Archaic Greece largely was), and the Roman Republic. Stephan is interested in the study of positive Humanities, i.e. the ways in which the Humanities add value to our lives and enable human flourishing. This entails, for example, historical and educational perspectives on ideas like happiness, love, or strengths of character such as self-discipline, leadership, etc. |
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Michael JohnstoneDr Michael Johnstone is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire, and he teaches in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. With a first degree in sociology and a PhD in free will and determinism in contemporary historical fiction, he has taught across the humanities and social sciences, but his specialism is in Creative Writing. Publishing as D.D. Johnston, he is a critically acclaimed novelist, described by the Financial Times as “Bringing light to a dark world” and by the Morning Star as “One of the country’s most important left-wing fiction writers”. In his free time, he’s a keen distance runner and is completing an MSc in sports coaching. |