Category: Banging on about… Education

HS2 has nothing in common with the projects of Balnibarbi.

Swift’s Gullivers Travels tells of the Academy of Projectors established by the Balnibarbians: inhabitants of the land of Balnibarbi.

Balnibarbi’s Academy of Projectors was all about developing projects which were aimed to improve society.

They included a man who spent eight years extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, another whose project plan was to reconstitute human excrement back to its original food components and another who had designed a new method for building houses, by starting at the roof, and working downwards to the foundations.

Clearly ingenious people, the future grandchildren of the Bainibarbians are not related to those who have brought forth the master project to end all projects, the not so H of the HS2 rail project.

HS2 would not be a suitable subject for Swiftian satire, rooted as it is in rigorous thinking, exemplary planning and water tight financial projections.

Banging on about HS2: how can we help them prevent a PR disaster?

The HS2 team held a PR event in Liverpool recently where assembled movers, shakers and hangers on were invited to hear the latest news on the HS2 developments. About 50 of us gathered expectantly to hear what it’s really all about Alfie, and to get it straight from the horses mouth.

To say it was a non event would be kind to non events. There were a couple of short introductory speeches – the first of which apologised for the name of the project – HS2 – and made it clear that there would be nothing particularly HS about HS2 as it was much more about moving freight off the roads, on to the rails and down the current West Coast line. The need for the new line was as much about providing capacity for passengers to travel at speeds greater than 15mph – the average speed they would be travelling if they were stuck behind a mile long freight train carrying glass from St Helens to the city of London.

The second contributor marvelled at the current 15 apprentices who are currently were working on the designs of the line. He pointed out, this project could last their life time and it would be more than likely that they would be grandparents by the time the line was operational.

That fact sobered many of us in the room as it became clear that we were being asked to endorse a project which would outlive us, and perhaps even our children. The project will be alive and kicking when many of us in the room will be consigned to our graves, ashes urns or deep at the bottom of the sea – or even under the rails at Rainford for the enthusiasts amongst us.

The final contribution to the non-event was a glossy promotional video which showed a lighting fast cartoon train whizzing through an empty countryside in all its shiny happy people mode. The absence of people in the video emphasised one of the core problems to the HS2 marketing campaign. It doesn’t have any people in it who will be alive when the line supposedly opens. It’s emphasising its audiences mortality with a ya boo sucks approach – this project is more important than you here and now, and more important too than your children and grandchildren in the there and then.

What’s it all about Alfie is freight, freight and yet more freight trundling through the countryside at the dead of night, rattling by the graveyards of the movers, shakers and hangers on who are currently being asked to cough up in TB type spasmodic fits for its ever spiralling costs.

One way to prevent a PR disaster would be for the team to be honest about the purpose of HS2 and acknowledge that not many of us are going to be around to see the first train leave the new Manchester station which will be built just outside Skelmersdale some time in 2033.

Banging on about HS2 – a really meaty subject to bang on about

High Speed 2 – HS2 as it’s popularly known as in the UK (albeit not with a huge degree of popularity) – is proposed by the the UK government as being one of the most significant infrastructure projects to be produced in the UK since… Well, I don’t know, since ever.

As such, it is a perfect subject to bang on about given it will touch every raw nerve ending in English civic life: trains and the railways, urban regeneration, the North:South divide, town vs country, the nature of our national identity and every other political agenda item imaginable.

One of the exquisite features of this debate is that it will run and run well beyond the life time of any one political party’s tenuous hold on power – more than likely for the next 30 years. I may well be dead by the time we see its official opening. All the more reason to devote part of this blog to a subject which will transcend party politics, local and national allegiances and personal preferences for sitting in an aisle seat, a window seat, a quiet zone, facing the direction of travel or where you’ve come from.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, unborn children of the next generation, I give you my next blog subject: Banging on about HS2. Future posts are likely to be late, diverted via Crewe or cancelled. And certainly not likely to be completed before 2043. Your news and views are very welcome! The journey (dread cliche) starts here…

The taxi driver as the eiptome of post-modernism. Number 8 in the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

I reached a new level of taxi driver – passenger complexity tonight.

I get in a cab.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks. I tell him.

He says: “How do you want to get there?”
I say: “The shortest journey possible.”
He says: “What’s the shortest to you is not the shortest to me.”

I say: “The quickest you can.”
He says: “What’s quickest to you is not the quickest to me.”
I say: “You’re the driver, you know best.”
He stays silent.

I say: “The cheapest route possible.”
He says: “What’s cheapest to you is not the cheapest to me.”
I say: “I think we can agree on a price of what constitutes cheap.”
I name a price.

It’s a ridiculously stupid low price. He grunts, puts his foot down and we get to my destination having jumped 2 red lights. The journey is £1.50 cheaper than it cost me earlier in the evening to get to the destination he collected me from.

But that last fact is not the most significant aspect of this transaction.

What’s significant is that everything we think we know about a taxi ride, is from the point of view of the taxi driver, uncertain, relative and open to dispute. Your putative knowledge about your desired journey is, from the point of the taxi driver, a pointless conceit.

The taxi driver is the epitome of post-modernism: nothing is stable, nothing certain, nothing definable and there are no foundations at all upon which we can agree to define a taxi journey by. No wonder they know nothing. They operate in a world which is fundamentally unknowable. They have reached the stage in human existence where the will to know about the universe meets its comeuppance. This allows them to say to you:

“Forget it. You know nothing. I know nothing. I may be a taxi driver with a satnav but deep down I am utterly ignorant. You are utterly ignorant. The sum knowledge of the human race wouldn’t fill the back of a postage stamp. Assuming we could agree on what a postage stamp looked like. So lets agree to disagree about our ignorance. There are no other valid philosophical positions. You might at least get a cheaper fare out of it. Or you might not. Who knows?”

He drops me off and I respectfully salute him as he drives off into the night, unsteadily weaving his way back and forth across the duel carriageway. I finally understand why taxi drivers never know anything at all. It is a position borne of deep wisdom, not a lack of familiarity with the mechanics of the taxi, the road, the Highway Code, of the A-Z of your home town. Respect.

More travel knowledge here.

I blame the parents! Why not hitting your grades has nothing to do with you.

Along with childhood obesity, teenage ennui and the English riots of 2011, the failure of all young people this summer not to achieve 100% in all their exam results can all be levelled at the doors of their wayward parents who clearly have not suffered long enough or hard enough in order to get their offspring to meet the highest GCSE grades that our pristine education system prides itself on.

If you haven’t made the grade and have ended up in a university you never wanted to attend in a city you’ve never heard of – don’t worry, it’s clearly your parents fault, the fault of the parents of those poor misguided examiners who set the exams in the first place and ultimately the fault of the current education minister’s parents for producing a human being whose educational mission is driven by important 21st century values of tradition, servitude and deference to the great and the good of the past – and their parents too of course.

Your parents are also no doubt are also suffering from their parents’ wilful mistakes in bringing them up, so it’s no wonder we’re all going to hell in a handcart with no more than 2 grade U’s and a cycling proficiency test between us all.

It’s tough being a parent these days. Not only are you responsible for your offsprings choice of teenage rebellion, you have to bear the brunt of their inability to dress properly, listen to the right music, buy the right newspaper, vote for the right party and do as the media instructs.

This summer though, instead of beating yourself about your parental breast about why your nearest and dearest have failed yet again to find the holy grail of true perfection, why not just set a torch to those newspapers, throw those parent manuals on the funeral pyre of parental disappointments and wave your offspring a cheery farewell as they sail into their freshers week, their gap year or their close encounters of the wierdest kind down at the job centre?

They won’t thank you for it – indeed, they’ll take great delight in blaming you for it when the going gets tough – but you can sleep peacefully knowing you never did your best because of your own parents inabilities to bring you up as an upstanding model citizen.

As Philip Larkin put it:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

The disappearing knowledge of the Hyperloop passenger: schools beware! Number 6 in the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

The hyperloop has hit the news again with dreams of tubing it from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than 10 minutes. Everyone around the world will have their equivalent journeys and will marvel at the apparent ease at which such previously long journeys have been reduced to bats of eyelashes. In the UK, we will wonder how a hyperloop journey could take us from London to Liverpool in just under 30 seconds: although given the magnetic pull London has on all things economic, political and social in the UK, it is a wonder that anything ever leaves London at all, never mind in a hyperloop tube.

But the greater significance of the hyperloop proposal is on how we understand knowledge of traffic flow and our place in the civilised world and how we engage with passengers, train spotters and irate cows on the line.

Because make no mistake, in hyperloop world there will be no room for any of these travel distractions. In a hyperloop tube, you will be strapped to your seat, asked to brace yourself and before you know it you will have been shot across the planet with the equivalent of a ton of TNT shoved under your backside. You will know nothing of the experience and your sum knowledge of the world and all its wondrous creations will not have improved a jot.

This is why we should worry – and worry hard – about the proposed hyperloop project. No longer will students be able to revise on trains before exams; no longer will commuters be able to improve their literary knowledge and no longer will we see people frowning over Sudoku puzzles and other complex numerical machinations. The nation’s literacy, numeracy and emotional intelligences will all suffer enormously.

Where arts based research can help however will be on the hyperloop platforms, both pre and post-TNT backside kick. Artist researchers will offer passengers new ways of consolidating their knowledge before they take the fatal kick up the backside. These researchers will remind commuters of their 12 times table through pretty graphics; confirm proper grammatical construction of sentences and offer new ways of reminding ourselves of our Shakespearian heritage. Whilst the journey will be over in a bat of an eye, our memories shot to pieces, the learning will continue for ever: and for that, Michael Gove will be proud.

More travel knowledge here.

Participants wanted for “Street Art” project, 23 – 30 September in Luxembourg

Inter-actions are organising a Youth Democracy project called “Street art” which will give an opportunity to more than 80 young people from 4 countries to have a participative reflection about the place they have in the society through urban cultural active participation.

The themes will revolve around the role of active participation, empowerment, education, values. Street art forms are different around Europe and may change, but the street art stream goes on and is part and parcel of our all day life and urban space. Politics at any level cannot disregard this aspect that is part of our souranding and with this project we want to bring it to the open discussions.

In “Street art” young people will be able to participate in a complex self-development programme that will provide them with the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to become active social actors and get reflection about the topic. If they will come from the artistic backgrounds- the project will make them aware of civic dimension of their work, influence of their work on urban space and other citizens. It will also make them aware how their creation can be constructive for others and for their future employment. For all participants the project will be a chance to come into the dialogue with politicians on local level- the action that was not in their agenda till now. The project will reveal the sense of the common debate on topics that are important both for youth and for local authorities.

Active young people will take part in one of the 2 international Urban Seminars that will be organized in Luxembourg and in a “Open Art Week” that will organise street art events in several places in the country. It will give them a chance to reflect about street art and exchange their experience and opinions. These 3 events will provide young people with concrete methodology that they will be able to use after the international activity in their home countries with other peers.

Each Urban Seminar will have a particular focus. The first one will be around urban music (dance, singing, beatboxing), the second about visual art (graffiti, light animations, etc). The third event will bring together 40 young people who will organise events around Luxembourg.

During the 3 events young people will debate with decisions-makers, MEPs, deputies, mayors and experts about related topic as well as interact with local groups. The seminars will be organized in cooperation with local authorities and give visibility and content to the event. The discussions during the seminars will be facilitated by young people themselves to give them a chance to experience leading a real participative activity.

The project will have a sustainable impact and multiplier effect. We believe that many young people will be empowered by this action.

The project will reach numerous young people as well as decision-makers and make streetart as support for youth positive active participation.

Contact:

Luc Wendling
16,rue fort Wallis
L-2417 Luxembourg
Mail: wendling@inter-actions.lu
Tel.00352 492660
Gsm:00352 621 227 285

Listen hard, listen long and don’t forget to waggle your ears: It’s World Listening Day!

It’s another “World of…Something” day today, and today’s celebration is for the skill of  listening.  Hardly a day goes by these days without it turning into a day to celebrate some human micro-activity or another.  Many of these activities are focused around very small neuro-muscular complexes and are intended to produce specific movements by those complexes, presumably for the benefit of the individual concerned and the human race as a whole.  Today’s celebration is the combination of little bones, muscles and nerves which permit the act of listening.

In education recently, we’ve seen this tendency to glorify minor muscular movements in lots of different manifestations: we promote the acts of writing, singing and reading for example in stealth-like attempts to exercise and strengthen the neuro-muscular arrangements that constitute the fingers, the vocal cords and the ocular muscle systems.

This increasing focus on micro-regions of the human body has naturally generated educational initiatives and consequently businesses which promote those differentiated, atomised and fractured human activities. We already have many organisations which focus on the actions of writing, of reading and of talking: and today no doubt there are businesses committed to building the neuromuscular assemblages which will improve our ability to listen.

Whether we are able to express ourselves any better, comprehend what previous generations are telling us, or hear what someone is trying to tell us is a moot point: but this fracturing of the human body into profit centres can only be good for the economy as a whole.   Whilst some faint hearts might be questioning whether or not fracking our planet might be good news for the environment as a whole, the good news is that the fracturing of the human body into profit centres can only be good for the economy – and with the minimum of disruption to the Blackpool pleasure beaches to boot.

PASCO: animating communities through the creative industries (the Aspire role)

The PASCO (Performing Arts Scene in Obrenovac) project has had significant effects on the cultural infrastructure in the Obrenovac municipality since the project started in 2009. Due to generous support both locally, Buskerud County in Norway and the KS funding programme of the Norwegian government, PASCO has had demonstrable economic, cultural and social impact on the region. The Aspire Trust, together with its Serbian and Norwegian partners had a critical role to play and this post discusses how that role was played out and what specific approaches were taken to achieve that success.

The Aspire Trust: a brief introduction

Aspire is dedicated to touching lives through creativity. Whether 3 or 93 years old, we offer a range of stimulating, innovative and challenging arts based programmes which will help people tell new stories, create new opportunities and learn new skills.

We were founded in 2002 as an Education Action Zone (EAZ) in the Wirral, UK  to help students in schools in deprived communities increase their educational attainment, attendance in school and attitudes to learning. It was so successful that when the EAZ funding ended in 2004, the Trust continued as an independent social enterprise and registered charity.  From its local beginnings in Wallasey, the Aspire Trust has grown into a truly international enterprise with links in India, the Middle East, Nigeria, and across Europe: most notably in Serbia, the Balkans and South East Europe.

What does  Aspire do?

The methodology informing our core activities is based on community arts based practice: a form which has been proven over many decades, in many different cultural contexts to have significant economic, social and cultural effects on local communities and economies across the world.  Whilst visible in the UK, the USA, Australia and many other countries across the world, it is also frequently prevalent in many parts of the world although its adherents and practitioners would not necessarily name it ‘community arts’ as such.

Its identification is made more difficult as its practice is hard to pin down and determine with any degree of clarity; it is  a concept which many people find hard to understand, sometimes equating it with amateur arts, arts activism or arts therapy.

However, we are quite clear about what we mean by ‘community arts’: it is arts practice which has a social purpose, uses high quality participatory techniques and is presented in a wide range of public spaces.   It uses creative and collaborative arts practice to identify the things that matter to people, to engage them in connecting them to their communities and the wider world and to tell tales that need to be told.

There is necessarily a fundamental connection between professional artists and communities in this process and that connection is characterised by people working together for a common good  – whether this be cultural, social or economic. It is not just about professional practitioners doing something ‘for’ or ‘to’ people; it is not just about teaching and learning new skills and it is not just about developing products and services which reflect particular issues that a community may face – although it may involve all of these things to a lesser or greater degree.

Rather, Community Arts practice emerges from the combination of social purpose, purposeful participation and production and promotion in public spaces: it is not a definable product or service which can easily be packaged up but a phenomenon which arises when a combination of people, places and politics coalesce at a particular point in time, space and history.

It is this methodology and approach we introduced to the PASCO project in 2009 and which we would suggest has been an important element of the success of the programme since then.

How did Aspire contribute to PASCO?

Aspire contributed knowledge and expertise through the following elements of the PASCO project:

Web design (Morning Movers) and Marketing workshops (October 2010)

Advice and Guidance on production of Christmas Show (December 2010)

Production of 2 short films made by PASCO participants (PASCO Film School, December 2010)

Delivery of workshops in performing arts for disabled people (December 2010)

Course design and delivery of the Autumn School, Buskerud (October 2011)

Shadow Theatre and Puppets workshops (May 2012)

Workshop on Partnership and Collaboration (November 2012)

Performing Arts workshops for UK based site specific production, Treasured (May 2012)

Cultural Exchange in Liverpool with students from FYR Macedonia (October 2012)

Furthermore, the results of other elements of the programme can also be viewed online:

Morning Movers short documentary film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky209K2JdqQ

Visit to Liverpool as part of the Treasured project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJWiwDoSilg

Short film: Kuda Ide Ovaj Zivot (Where Is This Life Going?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYrTC_zTbVM

Short film: The Book of Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HpzRJXtck

Thursday Beatbox short documentary film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuajksxYFN4

Short film: Anti-Dream Candy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WXrKYeDlxk

How did Aspire contribute to the success of  PASCO?

Aspire’s arts based methodology is based on community arts principles: arts practice which has a social purpose, uses high quality participatory techniques and is presented in a wide range of public spaces.  There are several implications of this practice for artists, teachers, practitioners and participants which we aim to address when it comes to participating or leading a project.  These are as follows.

Social purpose

Community arts practice is driven by a social agenda: this may involve attempting to address a number of social ills such as unemployment, social exclusion or cultural intolerance.  Whatever the motive, it is the social agenda that provides the ‘call to action’ for community artists, not the cultural agenda implicit in an ‘arts for arts sake’ model.

Participation

Community Arts practice depends on the ability of its practitioners to engage a wide range of people in a diverse range of settings, spaces and cultural contexts.  Frequently, they may be working with people for whom school and traditional, didactic ways of teaching and learning are not appropriate. Consequently, they need to understand that their strategies of engaging people in the creative process rely heavily on constructivist forms of learning: forms which are experiential, value the voice and experience of the participant and which are about facilitating peoples expressiveness and creativity, as opposed to instructing them.

Presentation

Without the element of presentation in community arts projects,  work becomes too process orientated and means that the audience from whom the work stemmed are unable to comment on or feedback to the artists and participants who were responsible for generating the work in the first place.  This issue is constantly referred to in debates of whether ‘process or product’ is more important in the community arts field:  our view is that both elements are equally important.  Presentation however does not have to happen in traditional platforms of the theatre or gallery; they can also take place in the housing block, the day centre or increasingly on-line via blogs, YouTube, Facebook or other social networking sites.  What is critical in this part of the work is that whatever is produced or published to the wider public has to be of the highest quality: not just its production values but with the necessary frameworks around the work which help contextualise the work to audiences who may not be  familiar with the background to a particular context.

Partnership working

We aim  to build effective partnerships between  artists, educators and participants.  By ‘partnership’ we mean the development of relationships which are based upon principles of co-constructing, co-delivering and co-assessing unique, challenging and innovative creative arts educational projects in which all participants’ voices are heard.   The principles we aim to adhere to behind effective partnership working are available on line at https://www.dropbox.com/s/na92hsteaiu2yef/effectivepships.ppt

Commitment to Professional development

We believe and are committed to delivering practice which extends and enhances teachers own  skills, expertise and approaches: if this occurs in a project, then the work has more likelihood of being sustainable in the future.   Therefore, where-ever practical, we offer  sustainable, innovative and rigorous continuing professional development  (CPD) programmes for teachers which focuses on the application of arts disciplines and techniques for the greater purpose of  pupil attainment, attendance in school and attitudes to learning. Arts practice in this context is of an instrumental nature, not an ‘arts for arts sake’ practice which values and privileges the voice of the artist over all others.

Programmes in which all partners learn from each other

PASCO programmes have not simply been a model of importing a UK skill set into a particular cultural context in Obrenovac: an essential part of the process for us has been the learning by our practitioners of other knowledges, skills and expertise which our Serbian and Norwegian colleagues have bought to us.  The process has particularly added to the richness of our experience and knowledge of Eastern Europe and this has been a vital element in the ongoing success of the project.

Programmes which challenge participants with high quality intellectual resources

Where-ever practical, we have aimed to critically challenge and support new approaches to theatrical and media production by all participants.  This entails a pedagogical approach which doesn’t just accept ‘first choice’ material when it comes to creating new work but continues to ‘raise the bar’ for participants and offer new and innovative methods of creative practice.

Offer long term relationships with partners

It has been important for us from the onset to see the PASCO project as a long term commitment by us to all the partners.  This has meant that we have been able to build on the work achieved and plan for different opportunities e.g. when funding streams come to an end.

Recast learners in new roles and identities whilst offering them new ways to articulate learner voice

This is perhaps the most critical part of the methodology we use: the need to allow other participants to redefine themselves and ‘find their voice’ in ways which have not been traditionally available to them.  This was most noticeable in the workshops run at the Disability Day Centres in Obrenovac and Belgrade in May 2011.

Future posts describe the development of the programme in Serbia and beyond and suggest possible horizons of what might happen next.