Ask an Expert – Benjamin Feltham

Interviewer: What is your name?

Marble: Benjamin Feltham

Interviewer: What is your position at Six Red Marbles?

Marble: Senior Editor 

Interviewer: What does that position entail?

Marble: I work as a content lead for our projects. The role of the content lead is to take the client’s needs and goals and create a process to turn them into reality. That means all sorts of things! We help to set up a project with planning, prototyping, and outlining, ensuring what we will produce is what our client needs. We identify and manage writing and editing teams, providing them with the guidelines, templates, training, and feedback that they need. When writing is underway, we review the work our team is producing. Every now and then we do some editing ourselves! Throughout, we work closely with the client to help ensure their needs are being met and their feedback is implemented. It’s a role that requires us to be flexible – some projects need us to help develop and design the project, and every product’s specifications are different.

Interviewer: How did you become a part of Six Red Marbles?

Marble: My academic passion is history, especially ancient and medieval history, and I was pursuing studies along those lines before I decided to put them on hold to move to the United States. After the move, I worked as a freelance writer and editor for several years. At a certain point, I found myself working on Six Red Marbles projects almost exclusively – I liked working with the SRM team, and they obviously liked my work! When the Humanities team was recruiting a few years ago, I was asked if I wanted to take up a full-time position, and the rest is history.

Interviewer: What is the best part of your job?

Marble: My colleagues. We all have different strengths, experiences, and interests, but we all believe in providing the best and most rewarding educational materials we can. It’s a lively and collaborative atmosphere!

Interviewer: What do you wish people knew about your work at Six Red Marbles?

Marble: The main skill I use every day is simple flexibility. Being able to understand and adapt to the needs of different projects, clients, and people, and to situations as they change, is fundamental to what we do. Striving for excellence means knowing there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach.

Interviewer: What is a trend you see happening in the education space that you’re excited about?

Marble: All efforts to increase the diversity of representation in social studies by finding and examining sources, from texts to images, that both encourage students to see themselves and their own stories (as well as those of people not like them!) in the past, and show the great breadth and depth of the human experience in our educational materials.

Interviewer: What is one interesting fact about yourself that you’d like to share?

Marble:  I mentioned above that I moved to the United States – I’m from Great Britain! I was born in Wales, and I have an y Ddraig Goch (the red dragon) flag here on my desk.