About Me: Derek Philip-Xu
I have always enjoyed working in the field of education so it feels natural to set up Refreshing Publishing to help clients with their digital learning needs.
And here's why: I spent almost 10 years teaching English to speakers of other languages, a big part of which was showing people how to be better writers. After all, writing is such an essential part of communication. Following on from English teaching, I moved into educational publishing where, as an editor, I mentored authors and helped develop effective digital English language learning materials. I did this for EF Education First in Shanghai and then Macmillan Education Ltd (part of the Springer Nature group) in London. My publishing experience has also provided me with a great deal of project management experience - working to tight deadlines and to budget as well as being able to effectively solve problems quickly. My publishing experience has similarly provided me with experience in UX design and UX writing which is very useful when it comes to reviewing digital content in platform (and during earlier editorial reviews). I am a professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. I achieved the Project Fundamentals Qualification from the Association for Project Management. I am an Accredited Accessible Learning Practitioner through the eLaHub and committed to accessible learning content. I am a published writer. I wrote an academic paper that was published in the International Journal of Bilingual and Multilingual Teachers of English. You are more than welcome to read it on the University of Bahrain's Scientific Journals website. Also, I am currently developing my own series of graded readers. I have a master's degree in applied linguistics from The Open University and another master's degree in educational research from the University of Exeter. Please do get in touch and we can have a chat about how I can best help you. |
Alongside his passion and knowledge for the subject, Derek brought with him an eagle eye for detail, impeccable organisation skills and a can-do attitude. |