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.

Everybody dance now! – revolutionary songs continue to drive the revolution through the rhetoric of crisis

The Arts in Schools: Principles, practice and provision was published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1982; it was followed some 17 years later by All Our Futures Creativity, Culture and Education, published by NACCCE, the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. Both documents can trace their heritage to Half Our Future, a report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) published in 1963 and chaired by John Newsom, which, in its turn pays homage to the work of Herbert Read and his 1957 conference report for the Joint Council for Education through Art, Humanity, Technology and Education.

In setting out their argument to reposition arts education (in 1982) and creativity and cultural education (in 1999) in the curriculum, the documents argue from the position that as we live in unprecedented times, with unprecedented challenges, it is essential that educational policy makers and practitioners look to a future which commits to the centrality of arts or creative education in the development of school cultures and curricula.

In the Gulbenkian report, these ‘unprecedented challenges’ revolve around patterns of employment, the relationship between education and society and the nature of cultural change in Britain. These changes are heightened by various ‘threats’ of ‘falling school rolls, cuts in public expenditure and some of the demands of educational accountability’ and are characterised in a language of despair: ‘actual provision for the arts in schools, so far from getting better, is facing serious deterioration’ ; ‘nationally, the situation is bleak and becoming bleaker’.

All Our Futures, published by NACCCE in 1999 and chaired by Ken Robinson, starts in a similar tone. ‘Education faces challenges that are without precedent which it repeats, (‘Education throughout the world faces unprecedented challenges: technological, social, and personal.’) and then elaborates upon: ‘the benefits of success are enormous and the costs of inaction profound’. From its first pages, the report argues that the need for creative education is predominantly economically driven:

In 1997, the Government published its White Paper Excellence in Schools. It described education as a vital investment in ‘human capital’ for the twenty-first century. It argued that one of the problems in education is the low expectations of young people’s abilities and that it is essential to raise morale, motivation and self esteem in schools. The main focus of the White Paper was on raising standards in literacy and numeracy. But this will not be enough to meet the challenges that face education, and the White Paper recognised this…. It emphasised the urgent need to unlock the potential of every young person and argued that Britain’s economic prosperity and social cohesion depend on this. This report argues that a national strategy for creative and cultural education is essential to that process.

Robinson has continued to communicate this message of unprecedented change in education and the link to economic well being. At a key note address to an international conference in Holland, for example, he expressed his view that the debates on creativity and the relationship of arts within the curriculum had a global significance: ’the truth is that every educational system represented at this conference, every education system everywhere, is facing a revolution.’

The quasi-apocalyptic views that Robinson has expressed over the last 25 years are not new and his is not the voice of the lone prophet in the wilderness. Robinson himself is an echo of earlier voices in the English education system broadcasting much the same message of the need to redress the place of arts education within the curriculum. For example, at the conference held by the Joint Council for Education through Art in 1957, Blackham concluded:

We believe that neither the contribution of the arts to general education, nor the place of general education in the national life has yet been properly recognised, and we want to form a body of enlightened opinion drawn from all walks of life which will bring general public opinion to share our conviction and see our vision of the role of the arts in general and the role of general education in the life of our industrial mass society.

The Gulbenkian report refered back to this conference, insisting that ‘It is all the more poignant… that this is a struggle in which we are now, even more pressingly, engaged 20 years on’. Now, a further 54 years on from that report, it is telling that variations on the same theme are being heard from arts educators not just within the UK but around the world.

As James Callaghan once (didn’t) say: Crisis, what crisis?

Extract from
When Herbert Met Ken: Understanding the 100 Languages of Creativity English in Education / National Association for the Teaching of English, Vol. 41 No. 2., 2007.
Available at
http://aspire-trust.academia.edu/NIckOwen/Papers/881601/When_Herbert_met_Ken_understanding_the_100_languages_of_creativity

Original references removed for the sake of brevity.

More at: https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/rejoice-a-little-known-connection-between-creativity-cultural-education-and-the-falklands-malvinas-campaign/

The Education revolution starts TODAY! The radicals, at last, have all the best tunes.

Whilst Pink Floyd indicated their intent to start an educational revolution in the 1980s with their rousing ‘We Don’t Need No Education” (ironically indicating to the pedants amongst us exactly why some education was needed when it came to communicating to the rest of the English speaking world – it’s ANY education, Jones – not NO education – do keep up boy!), the most recent education revolution started TODAY at the recent TEDXLondon event at London’s Roundhouse.

And like all good revolutions, the Education Revolution is being broadcast through popular song with the revolutionaries on the stage proclaiming their intent through a collection of songs which will no doubt find their way onto ITunes in time for Christmas, or at least every school’s Nativity Play.

(Go work down) On the Waterfront is an exhilarating rehash of the old Simple Minds classic: it will be a treat to see them rejuvenate themselves and bring that thumping great bass line, simplistic memorable lyrics and exhortation to bring in the ‘real world of work’ into the imaginary world of the classroom.

Let’s Make Mistakes Together will be a soulful ballad delicately performed by Will Young and a backing chorus of X-Factor rejects who have been picked up off the audition room floor by Will, given a dusting down and placed on the road to fame and fortune.

I am me because of us is a defiant anthem which Celine Dion has penned but which U2 will be treating with a newly invigorated Eno at the mixing desk and Chumbawumba offering free style rabble rousing. Expect the addition of a further guitar courtesy of Paco de Lucia and the sampled ukele of George Formby.

Emily is one of the top ten outstanding people in the world is a remake of the lost Belle and Sebastian track from the 1998 album, Boy with the Arab Strap. It wasn’t a particularly impressive number then but with Goldie at the mixing desk, things can only get better as Ken Robinson was heard to be singing over the weblink.

She made a self-sustaining fridge for West Africa has been especially commissioned from Ray Davies, formerly of The Kinks, but still showing his penchant for English whimsy. ‘Self Sustaining Fridge’ is reminiscent of his early 1960s album, Arthur, on which She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina” was an audience favourite at the Marquee (just around the corner from the Roundhouse, funnily enough).

So although the education revolution starts TODAY and no-one’s too sure who’s leading this, who the guerillas are, where the anarchists are in the mix and where the collateral damage is going to occur, we can all at least be confident that this revolution will at least have some decent songs, downloads, tracks and other commerical spin offs.

Pitch a Film on a Friday: Len and the Art of Motorway Maintenance

LEN AND THE ART OF MOTORWAY MAINTENANCE is a full length road movie which crosses the English coast to coast, Hull to Liverpool, and traverses the musical tastes of our times.

It’s the story of a family of three – LEN (father), VAZ (son) AND JENNY LOOSE (daughter) who make a trip to their musical Meccas in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool along the length of the M62 in a bid to heal their musical and personal differences. LEN is not just a travelogue but maintains a dramatic tension which is driven by a strong character base with strong needs and desires.

LEN – the father, hippie poet of 50 whose spiritual home is Liverpool. Into solstice lines and paranormal phenomena. Protested against Leeds becoming the Motorway City of the North in the 60s and still refuses to use the ring road. VAZ – the son, a punk ranter, 25 at ease in Bradford. Bash the rich, via Blair via pets lib. via digging tunnels via boredom. Deep in the vegan underworld. JENNY LOOSE – the daughter, a new romantic-industrialist, no-one’s too sure about her gender. Searching for Ian Curtis from Joy Division who she thinks didn’t really die, he just took up sharing a flat in Hulme and can’t find his way out.

In LEN, the family are saddled at the beginning with an unspoken and unacknowledged source of grief which is resolved by the end of the film.

Inspired very loosely by the Robert M. Pirsig novel ZEN, AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, LEN… is intended not only as paying a humorous and quirky tribute to the ‘motorway that never freezes’ but also sees the journey along the M62 as a metaphor for the family’s healing and reconciliation.

Whilst there have been both many American films of the genre (Wild at Heart; Natural Born Killers; Thelma and Louise)and German films predominantly directed by Wim Wenders (Kings of the Road, and Paris, Texas) a successful British Road Movie has still to be made: Len and the Art of Motorway Maintenance could just be that film!

The point of school: hanging out with new knowledges behind the bike sheds.

What’s the point of schools any more?  Kids are socialites at 7, adults at 12 and doubting everything the teacher and the school stands for. Behaviour is questionable, deference is a quaint notion of a rose tinted past when teachers were head of the classroom and everyone knew and welcomed their places.

Curriculum is irrelevant and has been superceded by the Internet where children work out of their own curriculum and syllabus, perhaps blindly, perhaps intuitively, perhaps guided by who knows what – certainly things we parents and teachers know nothing or little about.

These are desperate existential times when all our purposes reasons and rationales have been thrown up into the air and scrutinised like never before. So what place the teacher? The school? The curriculum even?

For all that despair and deep questioning…there is still the essence of the adult / child relationship at the heart of the learning process – the adult / old knowledge can’t be swept away. There is history -culture – language – the other – to contend with.Stuff which resides in the old, the unfamiliar, the awkward, the stuff the young don’t / won’t access drily through the Internet and the fashionable modes of social networking.

What we are left with -.and what can’t be swept away in a tide of acronyms and text speak – is us – you and me here and now in real time and space and our awkwardnesses and misunderstandings.

What is the point of school, teachers, curriculum? To learn of the other, from the other; to socialise the unsocial and antisocial; to expose our awkwardnesses and differences and to acknowledge, value and celebrate difference and otherness.

This is not just about engaging in extra-curricula activities. “The other” in this context means anyone who is not like us; who has different knowledge bases and skillsets, different languages and different habits and cbringing this means bringing different subjects and knowledges to the student through the essential relationship that students have with their teachers (and peers and families etc).

School has to be about bringing us close, again, to people ‘not like us’ – who we might deem unacceptable, troublesome, problematic as they don’t fit our world view. This is more than just going to art classes but meeting new cultures, ways of being and different socialities than we are accustomed to. Again, all matters which can be brought to bear by rigorous, challenging educational content: and certainly not just through ‘hanging about with your mates’ at the end of a long hard school day.

The point of schools is that they have to provide spaces, relationships and time with teachers and peers to bring all those matters to the fore. Whether our schools do that at the moment, again, is another question that needs asking.  No amount of befriending on facebook or googling the worlds ever expanding databases will ever be able to emulate the simple purpose of education and all its actors: the ability for me to understand you and you to understand me, in all our differences, three dimensional truths and multi dimensional complexities.

Why is Health and Safety a contradiction in terms? Some advice for Human Resource Managers

If a healthy mind and body can be associated with minimising fear, hence reducing insecurity, increasing confidence and so on – then why does a combination of health AND safety in policy documents and organisational habits actually cause the opposite – ie encouraging tendendencies to be risk averse, to be fearful and anxious – and hence feel less secure, less confident?

Being healthy is not the same as being safe. “Health and Safety” as a policy mantra has the makings of  a phrase which has a capacity for its own inbuilt contradiction and self destruction. It’s a fallacious concept behind which many human resource managers cower and attempt to frighten their resources into behaving and moving in particular ways. They would be clearer in their intentions if they were to relable their policies as “health and risk” or  “fearfulness and safety” or  “health and insecurity”.

Being risk-tolerant (and attractive even)  is possibly one of the key features that makes us healthy, alive individuals instead of cowered, withdrawn amoebae.

Might the arts be bad for your health?

There is a wealth of data, strategy documents and rhetoric out there which make the case that participating in, or experiencing, arts practice, is good for one’s health and wellbeing. This ‘good’ is frequently expressed in psychological terms, in social terms and of course with the usual economic justifications somewhere, sotto voce, off-stage. It seems that there’s nothing that a good dose of arts workshop, performance, practice or building can’t fix – or at least ameliorate – these days.

But is there a risk that in promoting this all-encompassing goodness of the arts that we risk exaggerating and glorifying what effects they can achieve? Our ever-increasing instrumentalisation of the arts might be good for the arts economy but is it good for the arts? And actually is it all that good for us?

Lets face it, if we break a leg, we go to hospital, we don’t go to see the local choreographer and ask them to repair the bones and ligaments. If we need come root canal work done, chances are we’d rather have an injection of some rather powerful lignocaine in our gums rather than opt for the opportunity to sing away the pain.

Perhaps the best we can say is that the arts don’t actually do us any harm and that after a broken leg or that excruciating root canal work the best thing we can do is read some poetry or listen to some Beethoven whilst we keep taking the Neurofen.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there’s a possibility that drama work we so fond of might actually be damaging our mental health. Perhaps learning the guitar is tantamount to smoking 5 cigarettes a day. Perhaps the choir we joined is actually increasing infection rates of airborne diseases by factors which we can only wildly guess at the moment.

These are possibly quite preposterous suggestions and the evidence, strategies and rhetoric will flatten them in the matter of seconds. But perhaps not: there might well be a nasty surprise in the middle of all that goodness which will come out to bite us when we’re least expecting it.

Imagining Chris Thompson: an original Geordie mother of invention

Chris Thompson was a Community Arts graduate from LIPA who died 5 years ago this week: but some images of Chris which have stayed with me over the last 15: images which suggest a powerful, creative, expressive artist who didn’t pay much attention to the rules, who didn’t know when to stop – but who did  know intuitively and compulsively how to capture, thrill and entertain an audience.

Watching Chris in rehearsal or on stage, you always had the sense that he was about to take you on a roller coaster of theatrical  thrills and spills – he’d tear off your safety harness, lock you into the front seat – and then, like a figurehead at the bow of a ship, perform to blazes, completely fearless in his imagination and shameless in his performance.

As a 1st year student wielding a large kitchen knife borrowed from the LIPA canteen one Friday afternoon;  as an actor pleasuring himself in the window of the college library during performances of The Tin Drum; and as film actor in My Life as an American, Chris’s muse and inspiration – Frank Zappa – was always close to hand – and we, his audience, were privileged to see our very own extreme Geordie artist in action: and we will miss that energy, imagination and vivacity. As Zappa said in the International Times in 1970 once he’d dissolved the band which took him to international prominence – and as Zappa might have said of Chris himself: The Mothers of Invention, infamous & repulsive rocking teen combo, is not doing concerts any more. Frank – you’re in good company with Mr. Thompson – make sure he’s still riding that roller coaster when we join you both and when it’s our time to leave the funfair.

Lifelines – how to use arts based research to help improve local health services

We’ve all been ill at some point in our lives and many of us may have called on the help of the NHS to help us through those difficult times.  Even if we’ve been lucky enough not to have to needed their help, we’re all too well aware these days of the importance of staying fit, keeping healthy and doing the right thing for our health and wellbeing for ourselves and our families.

But sometimes this is more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes the services  we need are difficult to access; sometimes it seems that health professionals aren’t listening to what we’re saying; sometimes we know more about our health than those professionals do and it can be frustrating for our experiences not to be heard and acted upon.

Lifelines was a  South Liverpool research project has a made a modest contribution to changing all that.  Working with artists from the Aspire Trust and health professionals from Liverpool Primary Care Trust, we ran an arts based research programme across South Liverpool which listened to residents’ experiences of  local health care services: and are now using those experiences to improve the health for future generations in the community.

We generated story telling, poetry and arts techniques  to  understand critical moments in the health experiences of South Liverpool residents. We produced into a book, audio recording and exhibition which toured South Liverpool and went onto the Bluecoat Arts Gallery in Liverpool, as well as a formal research technical report for the policy makers.

As well as some important findings which have been reported back to the PCT, GPs and other health professionals in the region, the project identified some important aspects of why arts based research is useful in health contexts: its non-invasiveness, its ability to generate responses from participants rather than interrogate – and its ability to co-construct data with research participants rather than mine it from their souls.

The Mars Bar model of research: a state of work, rest and play

Conference kicks off this week with a motley gathering of arts based researchers at BERA, the international education conference at the Institute of Education, London. But what’s arts based research? Surely that’s an oxymoron?

ABER: early moments and awakenings

The foundations for arguing that arts practice contributes in new and valuable ways to research methodologies can be traced to Elliot Eisner amongst many significant others. His presence at the first ABER conference in Queens University Belfast in 2005 marked perhaps a ‘Spring Awakening’ moment for many young researchers who had started to  explore this area of research which had challenged and inspired many of their more mature colleagues over recent years.  It led, amongst other intended and unintended consequences, to the establishment of the BERA ABER SIG in 2010, convened by Dr. Nick Owen of the Aspire Trust, the Merseyside based Arts Education specialists. Lesley Saunders summarised the arguments for Arts based research in 2009 thus:

  • ethics:  the researcher gives up claims to objectivity and the particular kind of expropriation of others’ identity and experiences to which that leads  and lays claim instead to imaginative sensuousness or to passion as more plausible forms of authenticity;
  • life-likeness: narrative, images, evocations, recollected memories, dance, group drama and so forth are much more like the lives people lead than are purely rational prose accounts or numerical data;
  • epistemology: we need representations of knowledge which themselves enact and make manifest – through ‘bricoleurship’ – the provisionality and ‘fuzziness’ of knowledge in the social sciences;  and we also need to recognise that the arts create a different kind of knowledge – ‘not the goal of curiosity but the fruit of experience’[1] perhaps – with which we can enrich social, particularly educational, research;
  • expression: the language of academic research should divest itself of the ‘managerialist’ and ‘performative’ discourse which has infected it, and be more like poetry in its sensuousness and felt emotion;
  • the unconscious: the gifts of the non-rational mind – memories, dreams, reflections – should be welcomed as part of the cognitive project of inquiry for understanding
  • education: these modes of engaging in inquiry are in themselves educative, artistically and socially

The BERA ABER SIG: 3 acronyms upon we rest our work

The BERA ABER SIG (or British Educational Research Association’s Arts Based Educational Research Special Interest Group for the unitiated) aims to provide new opportunities in Arts Based Educational Research  by supporting and advocating rigorous,  and inter-disciplinary arts research practice which connects theory, research, practice and policy on local, regional and international stages.  We aim to provide connections within and across these constituencies in order to:

* Provide expertise and guidance in arts based research, practice and theory for universities, teacher training and arts organisations;

* Develop, lobby and advocate for practice which is built on principles of social justice, innovation, challenge, collaboration, rigour, scholarship, excellence and purpose;

* Encourage new conversations and dialogues between diverse agencies and organisations.

* Provide a platform for  theoreticians and practitioners working in arts, education and other fields to discuss, share and reflect on research practice and outcomes, both illuminating and problematical.

Whilst these aims are necessarily aspirational in nature, they are also presented within an overall spirit of ongoing challenge and enquiry:  ‘inclusiveness’, ‘rigour’ and ‘social justice’ are all terms for example which the field constantly contests and this dialogue will be encouraged and stimulated through the activities of the SIG.

THE ABER BERA SIG: playing for influence, change and recognition

Whilst the work of ABER is variously playful, challenging and sometimes bewildering, we are highly serious in our intent.  We have been working together to

* Explore, support develop and critique  arts-based educational research theory and practice across differing educational contexts through a series of annual seminars which are held inbetween annual BERA conference;

* Co-ordinating and lobbying for publication in significant educational journals, presentation at international conferences;

* Advising on training and developmental opportunities for artists, researchers and other practitioners who wish to extend their expertise in the field.

For further information on arts based research and how it relates to other research disciplines please have a look here: http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1szjh/BERASummer2011/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.yudu.com%25252Fitem%25252Fdetails%25252F364631%25252FBERA-Summer-2011

Watch out for those shaking research foundations!

(Adapted from Research Intelligence, Summer 2011)