Author: drnicko

Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.

Aspire up the Amazon: calling teachers interested in outdoor education in the Amazon and French Guyana

Over the last few years, Aspire has been involved in adult learning programmes which have focused on outdoor and forest education. These programmes have been very powerful in establishing links between UK and overseas schools, developing educational exchanges and facilitating visits by UK based artists to partners across Europe.

I will be visiting French Guyana in February to participate in the outdoor education programme, Environmental Education On : Amazonia In French Guiana, run by ICOFOR, the French Guyana based training organisation, Intermédiaire de Commerce et Formateur. The aims of the training programme are to:

* help the development of innovative practices in the adult education and their transfer between participanting countries;
* gain knowledge about Amazonia;
* learn methods for teaching different subjects “out of the classroom”;
* encourage international exchanges as well as future co-operation between participants.

On the north-­east coast of South America, between Surinam and Brazil, French Guyana is a fascinating and wild country: a green paradise par excellence. It is almost entirely covered by thick Amazonian forest and criss-­crossed by wide rivers. Almost half of its eight million hectares of French Amazonian are a protected environment, 90% covered by forest.

If you would like your school to benefit from my visit – e.g. by making links with schools, connections with head teachers and pupils, curriculum developments, CPD opportunities or other possibilities – then please get in touch to discuss how I could facilitate connections and exchanges between those schools and your own. I can be contacted at nick@aspire-trust.org.

The Aspire Twitter Panto introduces…Heinous the Banker – and her first whistle!

Once Upon A Time there was a very, very kind caring and considerate BANKER, Heinous, who spent her lifetime looking after other peoples financial problems. She had a vast collection of piggy banks which she regularly tended with great care and affection.

Set in the ancient town of Royal Gluttonnee Bloater, Heinous tends to the rich, the poor and the ultra-poor without favour, prejudice or discrimination. Times are good in Royal Gluttonee Bloater with everyone being able to get some piece of the action. Plates are full, Christmas stockings are full to bursting, shops are bursting to the seams with food from all corners of the world and everyone’s living in the best of all possible worlds.

For more about her Heinous and her exploits in Royal Gluttonee Bloater why not visit:IMG_0364

http://heinous.weavrs.info/#/view/grid/

And here’s her first whistle:

 

He’s Behind You! – the AspireTwitterPanto Character Blogs

The AspireTwitterPanto is taking on a life of its own: three of its lead characters now have their own twitter accounts and will be interacting entirely independently of any (much) authorial control.

Interact with them at:

@Heinous25
and
@flashbuttons
and
@failureofgreed

More at https://drnicko.com/2011/10/28/hes-behind-you-the-aspire-christmas-panto/

Lean back and glare: a waiting story in the supermarket ebb and flow

I was shopping as-per in the as-per multinational su-per market today and was confided in by one of the check out staff whilst I was waiting to rid myself of my unwanted cash in return for their highly desireable goods.

“I’m off in 8 so I sit back in my chair and glare at them hoping they’ll go away“. ‘Them’ of course being your average as per customer ie the likes of you and me.

I thanked her for her insight into the ways of the check out staff and made a mental note that next time I visited the as per su-per market, i would keep an eye out for staff who were due to come off their shifts, stack up the trolley with as much produce as possible, stagger over to them, laboriously unload all my shopping and then admit to forgetting my credit card.

This would be a sure fire way to disrupt the massive machine that is the as-per su-per market. This action could be coupled with plans for other shoppers to amble slowly the wrong way around the shops; breaking eggs in the wrong aisles, taking phone calls at the fish stall and ensuring that the smooth movements the market has planned for us the moment we enter their premises are disrupted at every conceivable opportunity.

Whilst this may not encourage modern capitalism to reconsider its ways, it may be a contributory factor to ensuring that the su-per market senior management oiks have to respond to the irrationality and unpredictability of human beings, even if it does mean their staff have to stay a bit longer and clean up the mess. There’s always more reasons to find ways to ensure every little helps with their overtime bills, I’m sure.

All Our Futures: International Educational Study Visit to Liverpool in partnership with the British Council Bulgaria and Aspire-India

All Our Futures is Aspire’s annual conference for international head teachers took place in Liverpool between 11 and 14 June 2013. The event aimed to introduce pedagogical practices which are being applied at various levels in English schools by providing participants with exclusive, intense immersive experiences in schools and do generate unique, high quality insights into teaching and learning.

All Our Futures was produced in partnership with both the British Council, Bulgaria and our sister company, Aspire-India based in Bhubaneswar, Orisha: and so have welcomed Head teachers from the Indian subcontinent and introduced them to our schools in Liverpool, Wirral and Knowsley.

Further details of our programme in March with Bulgarian Head teachers and the British Council, Bulgaria are here:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151543038237812.1073741827.657337811&type=1

More on the June conference as it happened here:

https://www.facebook.com/nick.owen.3781/media_set?set=a.10151732950132028.1073741829.686222027&type=3

and here:

Poetry on the Hoof: Feeding frenzy (How Schools Devour Each Other)

The feeder primary school feeds
the secondary school which feeds
the universities or the workforce.

The feeder primary school is fed by nursery schools
who, in turn, are fed by child minders, nannies or parents and finally
the cradle or the grave.

Such is the feeding chain:
Each school is fed by or feeds another.
Each school is but a source, or consumer, of food, of pupils.

The feeding frenzy of schools upon other schools and upon each other
is the ecology of winners and losers,
victors and collateral damage.

Whilst no-one wants to be fed upon,
we’re happy to muscle into the feeding trough:
slake our appetite on lesser mortals.

5 tips for everyone: how not to become part of the business world

Every now and then you have to take stock of what you’re part of and what is expected of you in this multi-demanding world we find ourselves in. Either every teenager is expected to want to go to university, or everyone over 50 is expected to don their dancing shoes, shake off the years and become lean, mean fighting machines, or every public sector worker is expected to turn into an eagle eyed entrepreneur and set up their own business, often on the flimsiest of pretexts.

This latter expectation is particularly worrying given the myths and legends which seem to populate public fantasies about what it’s like to work in the business world. So, here’s some advice on how not to become part of that world, should you wish to stay sane in your own personal world of education, employment or imagination.

1. Don’t think in terms of targets, key performance indicators, goals, strategies, visions, missions, or any thing else that has vaguely military overtones to it. Don’t even use these words. Ever.

2. Don’t dress to impress or invest. You can spend far too much time worrying about what you look like in other peoples eyes, particularly those who you imagine might have access to large wads of cash. They frequently don’t.

3. Don’t polish your shoes. Ever. Shiny shoes are a sign of mental anguish and a desire to please the craven. They promise the world and deliver the gutter.

4. Dowse the word ‘marketing’ with a large cup of petrol and throw a match at it. Stand well back. Try not to promote anything to anyone, ever.

5. Imagine your world shorn of logos, brands and tradmarks. Aim to live your life with the minimum of these commercial albatrosses around your neck.

6. Either trade in your passport for or take out as many as you possibly can. Refuse to identify with any one nation, one corporation or one brand of chocolate.

Go on, you know you want to.

Farewell then, the Mathew Street Festival: you will not be missed it seems…

So, Liverpool’s MSF has finally been axed in a torrent of righteous civic reasoning: its cost, its burden on the rate payer, the fact that it didn’t give Liverpool good marketing head, the dire quality of its lookalikee, soundalottee-like-the Beatles bands and the staple rhetorical ingredient that has everyone nodding vigorously: the plethora of out of control drunken youth and elders who should know better who spitted and slavered and vomited their way through days of debauchery, inchoate vileness and early morning urban horror when you forgot where you parked your car and which hedge you left that stash of Special Brew under. Oh sorry, where they forgot to park their car and forgot the hedge that they left that stash of Special Brew under.

The inability to find anyone who will speak up for the MSF is curious. Is there no-one out there who admits to having affectionate memories of its tawdriness? I for one will remember it fondly; the afternoons of hanging out with the squash team and assorted wives, girl friends and partners, strolling through the deserted commercial district, bereft of business purpose for a few short hours, as we guzzled down can upon can, stuffed kebabs into our faces and generally appreciated the diabolical renderings of songs we knew, loved and now felt sorry for as they were being mutilated by bands of cough cough aged hairy blokes thrashing at their guitars in misguided attempts to recreate Woodstock in the back alleys off Duke Street.

For all the mess and spit and spew, many of us did have some good times during those August afternoons and whilst the booking of the RLPO in Sefton Park might be useful in civilising us all a tad more, and those family friendly days will bring out the tots with their previously scared mums and dads, nothing will quite beat the experience of listening, astonished, to those assorted ‘tribute’ bands with hackneyed names and shocking hair styles.

No doubt within a couple of years, though, the call will go out for a city centre music festival that can capture the mess, sound and incoherent fury that all good rock and pop encapsulates. Until then, we’ll sit around Sefton Park lake like the good modern citizens we are, and applaud the endeavours of our city fathers in helping make the city a reasonable, polite place to live in.

Give Us This Day: a Toast to Miracles.

Ambling through the back streets of a market in Port of Spain, Trinidad, you come across a church – modestly rebranding itself as the Jesus Miracle Centre – with the claim that should you wish to visit it, you can ‘come expect a miracle’ no less.

Expecting a miracle is perhaps something we’ve gotten out of the habit in recent years, depending as we do on rational, positivistic ways of thinking that persuade us that without ‘x’ input, then ‘y’ output is impossible: that the imagination and dream land are concepts best left in the hinterlands of the Australian outback and that everything in this world is determinable and forecastable, if only we had enough clean data available at our disposal.

We don’t talk often enough about miracles and we certainly are encouraged not to expect them – and perhaps we should. Expecting a daily miracle might just help us deal with the imminent threat of economic melt down, global warming up and Liverpool failing to win the Premier League for one more season.

My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and Members of the Jury, please raise a toast to Miracles.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Toast: read all about toasting here