Category: Conferences

Hello all you readers in Indonesia!

We are honoured to welcome one of Indonesia’s leading performers and Youth Choirs to the Opening Day of All Our Futures International Education and Business Conference at the Cunard Building, Liverpool on Monday 16 June.

The “Lady In Red” Ms. Meily F.Pungus is an international vocal artist resident in Manado, North Sulawesi in Eastern Indonesia. Known as the Indonesian “Lady in Red” Meily delivers a special experience from the range of international hits delivered in her own distinctive rendition. The unique style and range of Meily does justice to acclaimed performances of superstars including Whitney Houston, Adele, Celine Dione and Maria Carey to name a few, and the versatility and range of her talent know no bounds.

Meily performs as the lead singer with the City of Manado Youth Choir delivering popular hits tunes and spiritual rendition of gospel and themed huts from screen and stage. Meily tailors her performance with her team to satisfy and excel in the local culture and feeling of the city she performs in. She is already a master of many of the Beatles Hits, Adele and other UK superstars in the singing world and we can’t wait to welcome her to the home of the Beatles!

For more information about All Our Futures, click here.

Calling teachers interested in educational and cultural exchange in the Caribbean

Over the last two years, Aspire has organised international  conferences for Principals and Head teachers from India, Nigeria and the UAE to visit UK schools.  We have also produced student exchange programmes for students from Nigeria, Serbia and Macedonia.

These events have been very powerful in establishing links between UK and overseas schools, developing educational exchanges, facilitating visits by UK Head teachers to India and offering unique insights into our mutual educational cultures.

Next year we are planning a similar programme of conferences in the Caribbean in conjunction with schools and universities there. To set up those programmes, I have been invited to visit Barbados, Trinidad and St Lucia in the first week of February to participate in a trade and culture mission with schools, the University, teachers and other colleagues.

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.

What constitutes an Olympian Educator?

In June 2012, we’ll be celebrating the concept of the ‘Olympian Educator’ with educators from across the world in a unique conference on London’s South Bank. As well as meeting diverse speakers and colleagues and sharing pedagogies, ideas and approaches from across the world, delegates will be able to visit London schools and meet – through the magic of the internet and the performing arts – ancient educators such as Socrates, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and Montessori.

But by Olympian, we don’t just mean schools with the highest visibility or schools with the highest performing pupils – but schools in which the efforts, talents and skills of the staff are making a real –Olympic – difference to local children’s and families lives.

So, to get the ball rolling, we’d like to know: what does being an Olympic Educator mean to you? Is it something in their training? Their performance? Their relationships with their students? Their pedagogy? The Olympic Educators Conference has kicked off now and will be a further 4 months in the making.

For further information or for the chance to be involved please see

https://drnicko.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=735&action=edit

or contact me at nowen.aspire@btconnect.com

Continuing Education, Economic Growth and Changes of Mind and Culture

Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy
making other plans.

John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)

This paper is about metamorphosis, and in particular the changes that occur during the process of transforming a publically sector driven education policy initiative into a third sector arts based education social enterprise. It will consider those changes that are forced upon the protagonists in that process; the changes the protagonists initiate for themselves and the effect of these changes on organisational structure, culture, identity, programme and the raison d’etre of the enterprise itself. It is particularly timely given the recent upheavals in the public sector and the Coalition government’s intention to broaden the supplier base of public services like to health and education to the private, charitable and social enterprise sectors.

It will do this by focusing on the Aspire Trust, a social enterprise based in Merseyside and will focus particularly on its current business activities in the field of continuous education and lifelong learning. Whilst it will demonstrate that its continuous education programmes have had a beneficial impact on its economic performance, the more significant findings and implications for practitioners who are considering the leap from public sector to social enterprise will be in relation to the structural, cultural and attitudinal changes took place during the company’s set up and establishment phases.

The changes that this company went through involved challenges on many practical and theoretical fronts: personal, social, political, artistic, and educational. Orthodoxies such as ‘The Business Plan’; ‘The Bottom Line’; ‘The Job’ all came under scrutiny in the company’s early years and the results of this scrutinisation are tangible in the company’s existence and will be drawn out through this blog.

The paper concludes with four specific transformations the company has undergone since its inception which have contributed to strengthening the linkage between its education programmes and its economic performance. These transformations are not however offered as a potential ‘toolkit’ for future social enterprise development but as the provisional and partial results of an retrospective analysis of the company’s birth and growth.

The paper will continue to develop here until its presentation at ISBE, Sheffield in November.

Running can increase your carbon footprint! A caveat for Earth Day

Commuters who think they are preventing global warming by getting out of their cars and onto their bikes have been told to think again. Sports scientists who recently met at the International Convention for Environmental Protection in the Azores heard that the carbon dioxide generated by personal exercise could contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer above the antarctic.

In a sophisticated computer modelling programme entiitled SCOFF, scientists have proven that mass cycling in cities the size of London over one working week will wreak havoc in one acre of Amazonian rain forest.

Consequences are far reaching, not only for cyclists. Running for at least five minutes a day will increase your carbon foot print by as much as 1.00003% over the average lifetime; and mass sports like football could cause enough rainfall to flood a country the size of Wales at least once every two years. An emergency disaster committee is now reviewing the consequences that the CO2 generated by the athletes at the 2012 Olympics will have in London. Early reports that the slow bicycle race may be a surprised addition as an Olympic sport have not been denied by the IOC.

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.