Category: Schools

Poetry on the Hoof: Terraced? Semi? Detached? Year 7 plan their future homes.

You gotta decide the lighting,
It’s November, remember.
You gotta agree,
Sort it out reasonably.
You gotta think it out,
You’ve gotta act quick.
Silence hush descends.

You’ll need pools of light
You’ll need water, air, space.
Somewhere to park the car
When the days close in.
Can I get a red phone box?
Can I get an allotment?
Silence hush descends.

You’re gonna see nothing
With windows like that.
You’re gonna be a resident, remember.
You’re gonna freeze to death
With walls like that.
Are we gonna pretend?
That we have to pay mortgages an’ ‘owt?
Silence hush descends.

You gotta make a choice,
Or you’re gonna get stuck.
Best to say little,
If you’re not sure.
If you don’t wanna pay for ‘owt can we live in a toilet?
We could use our imagination.
Silence hush descends.

Everyone’s gotta live somewhere
Everyone’s gotta have a place
They can call their own.
But if you’re gonna want a family.
But if you’re gonna get you a mortgage,
You gotta be quick,
You gotta be sharp,
You gotta get rid of those ghosts that moved onto your land.
Silence hush descends.

Some responses by then young people of Kingstone School, Barnsley to recent exhortations to a ‘Housing Revolution’. Readers may be interested to know about similar revolutions being plotted in education.

The rhetoric of crisis is also echoed in housing and education too here.

Disneyworld as the aspirational role model for schools: just what’s so wrong with that?

Read on Twitter yesterday: Overheard a primary school learner describe a visit to a nearby high school as “this is like Disneyland”. It really was that good…

How tremendous would that be. School as an outpost of Disneyland and all its aspirational urgings: Let the memories begin…Explore the happiest place on earth…Welcome to the magic… all powerful metaphors which are hugely seductive for children, teachers and families.

And what’s so wrong with these metaphors? Why shouldn’t schools be the happiest places on earth? Perhaps there’s far too little magic in schools and a dose of Disneyfi-ed magic would do everyone a power of good? As a place to ‘let the memories begin’, its difficult to contradict the proposition that schools should be just that – places which shape memorable memories, shape our lives and futures and all that is good in the world.

And this is of course exactly the problem with the Disney model of school development and community building. There is no argument against it. It is impossible to critique the desire to be at the happiest place earth, the welcoming force of magic and a place for memory making. The Disneyfication of the school is the full stop at the end of the question which asks what schools are for.

Where is the place for resistance? For criticality? For unreconcilable difference? In short, no-where. There is no room for resistance in Disney. It is, as the Borg constantly remind us, futile. Any and all conflict in Disney is moderated, sanitised and overcome. The hero and heroine will always overcome the forces of the awkward buggers who get in their way. The awkward squad might be entertaining, or seductive in their repulsiveness: but one thing they never become are winners.

The individual- the Disney Hero – will always triumph in the Disney School: this is sometimes presented as being for the benefit of the individual themselves, at other times for the benefit of a wider, grateful community. Whatever else, the individual is central to all of Disney’s concerns. Nothing else matters as much as ensuring the desires of the individual are fulfilled. In that sense, the Disney school is the natural endpoint of the personalised learning agenda.

Which is where the combination of Disney and School in the same sentence becomes a potential nightmare because it generates the demand above all else that the child’s view is paramount. That their desires, interests, fashions and choices are all that matter; that the only function for teachers or other adults is to ensure their voices are heard and their demands met. In the Disneyfi-ed, personalised school, the child is in a 24/7 sweet shop, entranced by the baubles, hypnotised by the bangles, flattered by the flickering lights and fed, up to their back teeth, with the educational equivalents of coca cola, candy floss and Peter Pan.

But school is not a sweetshop. It should of course be magical and memorable and a place for happiness: but we should also welcome the reality that school is – and needs to be – tough, that learning is difficult, challenging and sometimes – dread word – boring. School – education – life – is a struggle, not a sherbet dip.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

The potential of potential

Creativity is often referred to as means of ‘unlocking potential’. There’s a sense that it’s something of the future, a store of source of energy in reserve. It’s a always a lot – we don’t refer to unlocking someone’s low level of potential – but we think too that once unlocked, it will have significant, positive consequences for the individual and wider society. It is by definition, unexpressed, a ‘good thing’ and unlockable.

Frustration with children may come from adults who sense a child has ‘potential’ which is not being made visible, or expressed despite their best efforts to release it. Teachers, parents and the wider family all stare at the unfortunate kid, frustrated in their attempts to ‘unlock her potential’.. If we only could unlock it, she would perform better and we’d all be happy.

On a larger scale, we’re faced with hoards of young people across the country whose potential is locked up – and so the argument goes, if we develop their creativity and enhance their cultural education then their potential will be unlocked released and possibly fulfilled. So, just what is this magical elixir, ‘potential?’

An acorn might have the potential to become an oak tree with the right conditions: but do we have our morphology lying in wait for us, planned out from the blueprint of the embryo? If so, this ‘potential’ is of quite a limited kind – the acorn has no potential for becoming an elm tree. So is potential a kind of destiny / fate – and if so, is the educators job to help us accept our fate? By providing the conditions for us to develop along a genetically preordained route? Or is there role for educators to identify and provide other routes for development? Despite providing the right conditions, the acorn may not grow – or it may start and stop at 60’ or 160’ – it’s still an oak tree – and where its stopped, has it reached its potential? And is that the time for us to walk away and leave it alone?

Is there something about the self here and how we use and view our bodies and minds? On the one hand our bodies and minds are being encouraged, our potentials exhorted and our feeble bodies being pushed to excel. Once we’re able to merge our flesh and bone with the silicon and software of computers we’ll really be able to live our potentials out and exert all our powers – and become like supermen to deal with the voracious capitalist economic appetite (Oh come on, Jones, do keep up can’t you!). In one sense the 100 Languages of Creativity are the means to becoming supermen and superwomen – enhanced versions of our feeble bodies and feeble minds (which are facets of a culture of feebleness).

Potential is also synonymous with ‘unique capacities ‘ and is also used to suggest internal reserves which are untapped / neglected – much like oil wells or gold mines. So tapping potential, in this sense, means exploiting the resources of human – cf exploiting the resources of the planet- and so here, the self has become the site for capitalist economic endeavour. Given that the education of the 19th century was useful for the industries of that time – now, in a new economic context, new skills and approaches are needed for the new industries – so instead of exploiting the planet since the onset of the industrial revolution, we’re now being urged to exploit the self for the purposes of economic deliverance of the 21st Century’s economic revolution.

So, in exhorting us to stop being feeble, and unleash our capacity to become superhuman, the calls for creativity aim to exploit the feeble self for its untapped power, energy and resources. Simultaneously despising the self, we secretly covet what it could yield up to us. We become both Jim Carrey and his observers in our very own Truman Show.