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.

Give Us This Day: a Toast to Latvia

We have Christmas trees all year round.
2010 was the 500th anniversary
Of the first decorated tree.

The whole world is made of rye alcohol.
It forms the widest waterfall in Europe
apart from the Petrograd vodka estuary.

Our oldest chocolate was invented in 1937.
It drives the tallest vertical wind tunnels
When digested at the right time of day.

We have the loudest ice hockey fans.
The largest traditional folk lore festivals
of mushrooms: not only healthy, but popular.

You can’t say that about the English forest mushroom.

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

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

What IS the point of school?

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Curriculum is irrelevant and has been superceded by the Internet where children work out of their own curriculum and syllabus, perhaps blindly, perhaps intuitively, perhaps guided by who knows what –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.

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 it’s agents: the ability for me to understand you and you to understand me, in all our differences, three dimensional truths and multi dimensional complexities.

It’s Conference Season! How to avoid the worst of conferences

Its that time of year again!  Time to pack our bags, brush up our papers, remember how to work powerpoint remotely and steel ourselves for mass produced sandwiches in ecologically friendly cardboard boxes.  Yes, the joys of the conference and all it entails.

i’m really looking forward to conferences that don’t build on their content, aren’t a mix of practical and theoretical, are technologically unreliable, are unrigorous, provide a platform for the wrong kind of speakers, aren’t chaired well, don’t offer chances for dialogue, have the same old same old people on the panels and  provide too many spaces for axe grinding: and particularly those educational conferences which have little in the way of artistry and preach the educational message in an utterly non-educational manner.  Conferences with a pay-bar on the opening night are also low on the list.

But hope springs eternal and i’m looking forward to a better experience of meeting old colleagues, making new friends and confering – the whole point of the conference experience of course.  As Mohammed Arif said at our first All Our Futures conference, I came to England alone; and leave the conference with new friends’. So here’s to new friends, new ideas, new challenges and with any luck, new solutions to feeding the conference frenzied masses.

If you’re at BERA at the Institute of Education, London next week, the Transformative Difference Conference at Liverpool Hope University the week after, the PASCO Conference in Belgrade next month or the ISBE (Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurialship) Conference the month after, please feel free to come and strike up a conversation.  Who knows, we might have some ideas on what constitutes the best of conferences!

The difficulties of feeding international conferences

Food and its connections to our inner deeper emotional world  and how /why we feel insulted if people turn up their nose at what’s out in front of them – it’s not like home – whatever that is – and it’s not what you expect – it’s a statement of this is who we are, like it or not, and if you reject it, you reject us, and for all your laughter and hilarity and our liberal flexibility, this moment when a gulf of difference between us appears – says so much about our difference in our upbringing and emotional connections and ties -culture is too simplistic a word to express how we do things and how -if you’re not of our culture – how we expect you to do things..

The process of going to a restaurant is one of a microcosm of assimiliation, acculturation or rejection, of (in)tolerance and (dis)respect -and fear.