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.

Unleashing the Unwanted on the Unexpecting: teachers responses to creative moments

Picture a small Welsh Hotel in late February, fresh with glimmers of early spring sunshine reflecting optimistically off the grey Menai Straits. Thirty Primary Head Teachers, Education Action Zone Directors and LEA officers converge on the small town of Beaumaris for three days of discussing, planning, evaluating and reminding ourselves of the local nightlife. And Learning about Creativity. The sessions start promptly and we dutifully sit through workshops on the Extended School, School Leadership, Teaching and Learning, Special Educational Needs and a myriad of other agenda items which seem to flood into Head Teacher’s offices daily from on high. The tide of initiatives is unrelenting. Social Exclusion, Gifted and Talented, Learning Mentors, Accelerated Learning, E-credits, The Primary Strategy and now Creativity is on the agenda.

The message from up the food chain is that Creativity in the Classroom is now officially important. Word has passed down to all of us in the way that much communication is processed in education: people deliver monologues and soliloquies at each other. Government at the LEAs and Head Teachers, Head Teachers at teachers, and teachers at pupils. Monologues which like to think they’re dialogues, but in fact are rules and instructions dressed up as advice and ‘good practice’.

But first, before the creative potential of the Classroom can be released, it is our turn to participate in a Creative Workshop. We face the impending session with a mix of suspicion, interest and hangover. In some quarters there is a distinct unease about what is about to unfold. We are presented with a creative task. We have been told we are going to listen to some music and then, in response to this stimulus, we are to create a poem, make some music, prepare some movement and put the whole thing together into a presentation for the end of the afternoon. The music is Liadov’s Enchanted Island and Holst’s Mars from the Planet Suite, two too- obviously contrasting pieces of ‘classical’ canon fodder which instruct you to think ‘ooh, peaceful’ on the one hand or ‘cor, angry’ on the other.

We set out to magic up a piece of creativity in the wake of this piece of emotional and psychological manipulation, doing as we are asked in a well-behaved-group sort of way and having a lot of fun and discussion whilst preparing our various contributions. One of us opens up frankly about her unease about being asked to write a poem. Another, mightily irritated with how the original sources of music has been applied so didactically, writes a free-flowing rant in the Seething of Tunbridge Wells style of old which uses the f-word in a novel and liberating style.

https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/poetry-on-the-hoof-what-are-you-trying-to-sell/

This makes lots of us laugh heartily. We like to hear the f-word very much, so that the author is encouraged to repeat it in rehearsals as often as possible. Quite whether we would be happy to hear it in our classrooms is another matter entirely. Whilst we can be as creative as we like as responsible adults, allowing that old Anglo- Saxon English the free run of the modern classroom with a group of excitable and hormonally-drenched pubescents is quite another matter.

One of us notes that some kids in schools are like of bottles of Coke – you do not know if they have been shaken up before they come into the classroom or not, and if your efforts at unleashing their creativity are going to make them explode. That is one of the problems of creativity: how do you ever replace the top on the bottle once it has been opened?

Given that pupils’ experiences of schools these days is driven by the need to comply and meet targets… Given that it is about responding to and adapting to the hierarchy; listening (or pretending to listen) to the monologue being talked at you, about formulating your own version of that monologue and then delivering your take on it at someone else (a phenomenon also known as bullying)… Given all that, how is it possible – and is it even desirable – for creativity to flourish?

The tension generated when creativity is placed up alongside learning in schools is that the former is fundamentally about dialogue and collaboration. It is not about talking to yourself or foisting your own monologues on others. Whilst some Head Teachers stress that more enlightened teachers are teaching creatively by acknowledging their pupils’ differing learning styles and recognising multiple intelligences, the act of creativity itself is a process which demands a physical, psychological and metaphorical wrestling with demons, unpleasant and unwelcome impulses, significant others, parents, partners, neighbours, the hell of the past and visions and delusions of the future. It is, crucially, as much an act of destruction and chaos as it is about vision and creation – as much about killing your babies as it is about bringing them up.

Are we serious about enhancing creativity in our classrooms and our pupils’ learning experiences? If so, what is to be done in a climate which views creativity solely as a one-way ‘making’ process, is terrified of the correlatived yet essential ‘breaking’ process, and continues to rain down monologues day upon day?

Is your boss acting like your parent? The pint that thinks it’s a quart.

In the name of keeping a friendly face to their workforce, some bosses think that they can put a friendly arm around you – or if you’re really unlucky place their tongue in your ear – and act in a semi parental way when enquiring about your health, family relations, social life and general demeanour and performance levels.

They rationalise this as demonstrating a concern for their employees, arguing that as a holistic learning, family friendly employer (for example) it is in everyone interests (including yours) for them to become your mum or your dad. This includes doing things like telling you to tuck your shirt in, put your tie on straight and speak nicely to the noisy neighbours.

They don’t realise that the last thing you need in your life is another bloody parent as the two you already have –or have had – are quite enough, thank you very much.

The boss who likes to think he or she is your surrogate dad or mum are like that old beer advert; the pint that thinks it’s a quart. They tend to see the workplace as their own personal fiefdom where everyone is some kind of subservient relationship to them; you are their prodigal son, their daughter, their wayward cousin, the nephew they always resented.

Whatever family role you find yourself playing, one thing is for sure: they don’t see you as their equal. One solution is to reverse roles and become – however temporarily – their hypercritical mum or dad.  Scold them ferociously; hug them harder than they hugged you; remind them of their embarassing faux pas at the last office party: whatever you do, don’t let them get away with sticking their tongue in your ear.

Frozen is the new fresh, horse is the new beef and I am the Count of Monte Cristo.

The MD of Unilever enthused 5 years ago to a conference of school teachers and chlldren that creativity is essential for business success. He suggested that creativity should be at all levels of the business, “not just the top”.  He referred to various examples – Virgin Airlines  (apparently an airline which makes you feel special every time you travel on it), Top Shop  (“many of you go to top shop and can now buy high fashion at affordable prices” and the café chain Patisserie Valerie (which makes you feel like you’re in France allegedly).

He said that Unilever needs to recruit people who think differently, people who can work with you, not for you, and leaders at all levels of the organisation whose task was to ‘clarify what was wanted, be a voice from the front, encourage risk taking and awaken peoples passion.’  An example of what he meant by passion followed on film –  a 5 minute advert for Findus foods which was to indicate how his employees were having their passion awakened by the generation of new products and ideas: frozen vegetables.

He finished his sequence with questions from the conference panel: ‘are schools doing enough to generate creative ideas for business’ and ‘how could you make sprouts more appealing to children?’  His final comment, in some joking aside about the issue of school dinners… ‘our frozen food is fresher than fresh food… Frozen is the New Fresh’: now makes a lot more sense 5 years later with the recent horse meat scandal.

Now we know that ‘creativity’ is often an excuse for all sorts of linguistic shenanigens and that teachers at conferences on creativity and education often have to swallow a lot of frogs when it comes to assessing what is ‘good practice’.  But in the era when  Frozen can be the New Fresh and Horse can be the New Beef then I can clearly become the Count of Monte Cristo.

The porkie pies that Findus have been unashamedly peddling for years are at least out in the open although you might reasonably wonder whether there is something else other than pork in those pies.  Over-enthusiastic marketing is built upon a lot more than reconstituted delusional seaweed.

Poetry on the Serbian Hoof

Some great stories and poems from young Serbian creatives here:

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Reasons to be pedagogical part 2: We’re going to make a slave ship out of pipe cleaners and mudroc

I’m watching a visiting artist, Lisa,  in a Year 6 class  with the teacher, Sally.  Lisa has started a project on Wilberforce, making a model slave ship, an African village and percussion project. She kicks off asking who Wilberforce is and what slavery is. She introduces the task of making a slave ship which she’s going to show – at the end of the week they will have an impressive piece of work which ‘we can display’.

“We’re going to make a slave ship out of pipe cleaners and mudroc” she announces.  Is there something a little inappropriate here?  Would we hear a session in which we would hear about making concentration camps and gas chambers out of ‘pipe cleaners and mudroc’?  Here’s  a Blue Peter version I made earlier….

Lisa demos  how to make a figure out of mudroc and pipe cleaners and takes questions as she goes.   Little slave figures made out of pipe cleaners.  “we don’t want arms sticking out, they should be down at the side”.  She sets up a little production line by asking them to make 2 or 3 figures each.  The class is set on a task of making about 50 – 75 different slave figures between them. “Mould the pipe cleaner, cut up mudroc, soak it, wrap it, repeat”.  I wonder whether someone will point out that they could develop the production line and have one child specialising in moulding, another in cutting, another in soaking.

As pipe cleaner figures start emerging, a few laughs are generated by children – feet are either too bog or heads too small. “He’s hop-along… what’s happened to his arms… mine’s called Gordon, mine’s Edmund… this one’s paraplegic”.  Groups work semi-independently, teacher is engaged in co-delivery of the session, moving from one table to another as Lisa does. “wrap the mudroc tightly around the skeleton otherwise it will fall off”.  Perhaps it would have been better to make people figures who had homes first and who were then enforced into slavery – using the kids enthusiasm for the figures to its advantage rather than opt for making slaves from the beginning.  The production line aspect of this approach ironically endorse the values which make the slave trade possible.  We’re not making  a character which has a personal connection to its sculptor.  There’s one black lad in the class who is joining in with all the activities; a small crowd of white mud roc figures starts being assembled;  some of which are splendid creations, others of which are not so splendid….

The project continues through the afternoon, with no time for play time which means for some kids that making slaves out of pipe cleaners is  becoming a bit of drudgery. The figures are now to be painted black, to represent the figures seen in the picture at the start of the session.  Blackened mudroc figures start to appear on table tops and are taken to the window ledge to dry; of course, they’re various in shape, size and coverage of black paint – but they are still faceless and the products of several cheerful production lines.  No shades of black, brown or tone… End of class, and Lisa moves the furniture back to where it started before I entered the classroom.  The figures are to be placed in the slave boat which is to be built tomorrow.  So what do we know about slavery after all this?

Poetry on the Hoof: I am not a mere Biochemist

I am not a mere biochemist
I am a DNA replicator
Intent on duplicating  my Genome
Through Vivisection and Genetic trials on Mitochondrial Enzymes.
My Phage like protein coat mutates
and my skin steams with Sulphuric acid.

A poem on the hoof: thanks to Cliff Yates

Today is our preparation for tomorrow: how to be happy at the end of the world

A reader recently asked me to compose a blog about the possibility of the world ending in 2015. Mindful of the wisdom of Harold Camping who predicted the worlds end at 6pm on 21 May 2011 (and then adjusted it to October when his apocalypse awkwardly failed to materialise), one might be inclined to be a little bit circumspect about those kind of high risk predictions. Especially now we are facing another imminent global meltdown some time in the next two minutes given the claims that Facebook has gone down has heralded the next end of the world as we know it.

However, it is stating the obvious to say that for many people, the end of their world as they know it has arrrived in the last few minutes, hours and days. Many, many people of Syria, Nigeria and the Sudan have seen their worlds end many times over recently in the shape of insurrection, warfare and mass murder. Those left behind will be facing new emotional, social and geographical landscapes daily. Their worlds-as-they-know-it are frequently ending.

For the rest of us who aren’t (yet) faced with those kind of catastrophes, the end of the-world-as-we-know-it is also happening; perhaps more discreetly, in a more nuanced fashion and perhaps with less obvious public impact. But end it does. Our engagements, our relationships, our actions all bring about the end of the world-as-we-know-it sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. Again, this much is obvious.

One question which arises from this is how do we face up to the ongoing end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it phenomenon? Too much change of this kind of order is surely too much for anyone to bear? Sonja Lyubomirsky from the University of California has the answer to dealing with the end of the world: be happy – today.

According to Sonya, happiness is the ability to…

1. Express gratitude
2. Cultivate optimism – visualise a future then write it down
3. Avoid obsessing over things / paying too much attention to what others are doing
4. Practice acts of kindness – more than you’re used to
5. Make time for friends – be supportive and loyal
6. Develop coping strategies – write down your feelings when youre upset – traumatic events make us stronger
7. Learn to forgive
8. Immerse yourself in activities and be open to new ones
9. Savour lifes joys – linger over rather than consume
10. Work towards meaningful goals
11. Practice religion and spirituality
12. Exercise.

So next time you’re aware of your world ending, just tick Sonya’s checklist off against your state of being. Your end-of-the-world-as-you-know-it might not all be doom and gloom. Either way, today is your preparation for tomorrow. In whatever guise it takes.

The learning space is not the classroom.

The learning space is not a classroom; not any sort of physical space, perhaps not even a temporal space but is a place in the imagination where out emotions take root, ruffle their feathers, compare notes and parade in front of each other’ a space where our own intellect is suspended, disbanded from its usual analytical and derogatory function and is asked to keep its mouth shut. A place where ‘minds meet’ or ‘meld’ in a good old Star Trek spockian sense – his was the one true learning brain where the temporanetity of now was suspended and opened up to a multiple of other and then and possible whatevers and thens… and where 2 mutual souls or spirits stared at each other for the first time and apprehended each others presence, still comprehended the other and sought to find commonalities, alignments and future forward ways of looking out together down the Start Rite road to a glorious sunset – interrupted of course by the school and educational bells , ringing us back, ranging us back to the range of the hearth, the paddock and the typewriter until we find another learning space together, where comprehension is at its fullest and most momentous.

How to evaluate such spaces, place value on them, judge them or assign an arbitrary value to them? When everything about that quivering mass of learning protoplasm cannot be measured in crude linear or spectral ways; the quiver, the moment of mitosis is only rarely visible and then, once witnessed, a true wonder to behold, it a moment which captivates, spell binds us, blinds us and makes us lose our bearings temporarily until we rebalance; for its at heart a moment of unbalance, of being disbalanced, of being gently or radically transported from our ‘comfort zone’, our moment of balance, to such an extent that we think the world is going to topple and crumble – but it doesn’t, we put one foot forward in front of the other and continue to walk or stumble into our futures, rebalanced until we encompass or are absorbed by the next learning space and its transient, immeasurable, natural, continuing and ever echoing moments.

Nevermind the stories, nevermind the narrative, lets find the moments that last for us, the moments that last well beyond any normal sense of acceptable shelf life, the moments that continue to resonate out of the time they were born into, out of the space that brought them forth, out of the here and now and understand they are of the there, the here, the now and the what if?

For there is no narrative, no story, just a bead necklace of collected moments which we interpret as story because they’re bound together by the pathetic string of our desire for coherence – but all they are at heart are momentary, wondrous, jewel like moment of quivering, transitional, change and shift. It’s being in the moment that counts that time of flow, of ebb and flow, of breathing, of pulse, of being alive.

So how to evaluate mess? Through the jigsaw, pearl strong moments of temporariness, of the moments of ‘aha’, of satori, of the despondent eureka, of the ‘my god, what have I done?’ moments.

Reasons To Be Pedagogical part 1

Bristol Nursery School, midmorning. The visual artist, Maria, has been offered two days work in the school and has persuaded the management of the school to ‘go off timetable’ and to let teachers ‘follow the children’s’ desires’ during her residency there – although the regular ‘tidy times’ and lunch time remain in the timetable. Within an hour, one teachers temper frays about being left on her own in her own area. There are usually six areas each with a designated member of staff and those boundaries are melted down today – apart from the timetable, structure, the space is a lot more fluid / chaotic. Adults are ‘following what the children want to do’ – the adults have been excused from their responsibility here, and have been denied an identity almost. The walls are as noisy as ever but less imposing – all the focus is being drawn to the kids activities.

Some young wag threw a bean bag at me in the playground which reminded me of a visit to Hindley Prison some years ago and temporarily I felt a bit unsafe, a bit dodgy. A bit iffy. The staff room is chockablock with loads of stuff packed on to chairs, tables, feels vaguely disturbing, a bit like a bad dream. Even Maria is spotting the limits with one of the children who is insisting on taking more clay from the bag with a spoon:
Femi ‘More more more!’
Maria ‘ Use what you’ve got Femi! You’ll have someone’s eye out. Be careful.’

A couple of girls are wandering in and out of the bathroom, scissors in hand – this feels a tad dangerous and I’m thinking about the consequences of one of them coming out with scissors sticking out of their head. A few teachers wander around the classroom aimlessly with cameras in hand, tourists in their own land. Following the children’s desires never felt less desireable.