Monday, February 11, 2008
Vernacular playground
A day out at the Finlaystone estate yesterday yielded the following set of pictures - great, idiosyncratic vernacular play space design.
Expanding the learning soundscape
Graham is giving this talk at a CRASSH one day conference, Sound and the City, in Cambridge on Friday 22nd February. Hopefully a little micro-site will follow the talk, with links to some of the projects and ideas discussed.
Expanding the learning soundscape: notes from some interventions in urban arts education
To what extent is the embodied experience of the sonic open to exploration and reinvention within formal educational settings? Arguably the tools are cheap and ubiquitous, and in popularised forms they are persistent in the everyday lives of young people - from customising ringtones, making iPod playlists to beatcrunching and sonic cut-ups using readily available technologies. But music education often seems locked into a fairly closed view of its limits; the place of sound and its meanings is rarely discussed, and 'school music' is almost a sub-genre of its own, often displaying more conservatism than the fields of professional music-making. Tracking down an alternative story to the easy norms of 'music education', I will share some experiments in sound which were developed between artists, students and communities in East London in the first half of this decade. These are perhaps best understood when located in experimental traditions of arts education, participatory arts and sonic experimentation; and gain some of their expressive power from times of turbulent social and economic change, diverse multiethnnic communities, collaboration with theatre, dance and the visual arts and the gradual uptake of digital technologies in the music classroom. The projects surveyed also depend on subtle interactions between teachers and artists, working in collaboration with learners and communities. They foreground collaborative pedagogies, conversational learning, and exploratory approaches, playing attention to issues of place, space and the auditory, and so pointing towards a much broader conception of the 'music curriculum' than most syllabi and formal examinations allow for.
Expanding the learning soundscape: notes from some interventions in urban arts education
To what extent is the embodied experience of the sonic open to exploration and reinvention within formal educational settings? Arguably the tools are cheap and ubiquitous, and in popularised forms they are persistent in the everyday lives of young people - from customising ringtones, making iPod playlists to beatcrunching and sonic cut-ups using readily available technologies. But music education often seems locked into a fairly closed view of its limits; the place of sound and its meanings is rarely discussed, and 'school music' is almost a sub-genre of its own, often displaying more conservatism than the fields of professional music-making. Tracking down an alternative story to the easy norms of 'music education', I will share some experiments in sound which were developed between artists, students and communities in East London in the first half of this decade. These are perhaps best understood when located in experimental traditions of arts education, participatory arts and sonic experimentation; and gain some of their expressive power from times of turbulent social and economic change, diverse multiethnnic communities, collaboration with theatre, dance and the visual arts and the gradual uptake of digital technologies in the music classroom. The projects surveyed also depend on subtle interactions between teachers and artists, working in collaboration with learners and communities. They foreground collaborative pedagogies, conversational learning, and exploratory approaches, playing attention to issues of place, space and the auditory, and so pointing towards a much broader conception of the 'music curriculum' than most syllabi and formal examinations allow for.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Did You Know 2.0
Slightly cheesy and US-centric (even though it's about globalisation and learning) but an interesting piece of film nonetheless...
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
For all the tea in England
Kerry McLeod's film, with fragments of music by Graham, is now available for viewing on the BBC Film Network.
Friday, January 11, 2008
The McMaster Report
I am more than a little concerned about this report.
On a glance through (and I confess I need to read it more thoroughly, but this is a quick response) I think it is full of platitudes and to my mind empty, ungrounded rhetoric about artistic 'risk taking' and 'innovation'. I certainly have real issues with how 'excellence' is being used in such an unproblematised way. Its definitions are so poor that it's as if the last 100 years of cultural theory hadn't happened. Questions of cultural value and artistic 'quality' are much more complex than it is prepared to admit. Its attacks on a 'target-based' funding regime are an unfounded caricature of the current circumstances.
Some immediate thoughts:
There is plenty of stuff about 'valuing diversity' but there seems to be a desire to remove the use of cultural indicators altogether - i.e. we just don't worry about the fact that only so few managers/leaders in the cultural industries are women, or from ethnic minority backgrounds, etc? That it's disproportionately difficult for people starting out with little cash or few connections to make a living as artists, musicians or cultural businesses? Perhaps we worry a little about the fact that our most powerful cultural and educational institutions (and funding agencies....) are overwhelmingly populated by white kids from affluent middle class backgrounds, and that its much more difficult for kids from poorer backgrounds to break into the arts, but we're not prepared to require those organisations to change to become more inclusive and be tough with them when they don't? We worry about who 'our audience' is, but we don't want to collect statistics or data about their demographic profile in case it tells us uncomfortable truths that we don't want to hear, or be prepared to act on it? We might be concerned that some national cultural institutions are still too Eurocentric, that some local ones are too parochial (or vice versa), that not enough money is being spent directly on supporting artists to make new work, or on professional development, but we're not prepared to set some openly debated and clearly justified strategic priorities to reallocate funding, and have evaluation frameworks in place to see if these political decisions are working?
Knowing that the work is somehow giving off an aura of 'excellence' will explain it all away. I'm not impressed. This is no basis for a national cultural policy in a complex, globalised world.
I've never been a defender of audit cultures or policy based on narrow target-setting but I do believe that capturing data is important so that change can be tracked over time and that the impact of changes in policy and funding regimes can be understood...
McMaster offers a very liberal-individual view of what culture is (which seems to be 'whatever arts organisations and artists do for audiences") rather than a more dynamic or participatory vision of a culture in which everyone has a stake and in which everyone can take part.
'Peer review' is interesting as a counterbalance to questions of how to assess 'quality' but simply ignores the issue of whether central government and local communities should agree some priorities or a direction for public support for cultural offerings; it might defend the 'arm's length' principle but the big question it ignores is the appointment and public accountability of those who will undertake the 'peer review'. In spite of the problems of 'instrumentalism' of the last 10 years, at least an emphasis on access and inclusion has shaken up the sector a lot and got a lot more people involved.
Developing access and inclusion isn't primarily about 'free admission for a week', and 'more touring', it's about a democratisation of cultural production. That's not to say that opera houses, museums and concert halls shouldn't exist, it's to say that a whole spectrum of artistic activity has a place in a contemporary culture, and that historic cultural institutions need to reinvent themselves faced with a postmodern, networked, globalised world, and be prepared to defend their public value if they want public funding. Of course, to survive, the traditional - and popular - arts need to be valued, funded and taken seriously, but not put on a pedestal, immune from criticism, and seen as somehow part of an aesthetically autonomous zone untainted by social change, commerce, culture or politics. The same goes for artists, most of whom know this all too well as they struggle to make a living in these turbulent times.
Note the talk of 'education' not learning, 'audiences', not participants. Talented artists and expert curators know what culture is, and it's good for us, but we don't get to make it unless we are admitted to the the special creative class called professional artists. If we find their work difficult, then never mind, we just need to be educated to appreciate it. If we find it difficult to break into the artistic circle, it's not because of any structural, institutional problems with our excellent cultural system, it's probably just because we're not 'talented' (or 'excellent') enough. Take that bitter medicine, British public! Why? Because the arts are good for you, and those of us in the cultural know are blessed enough to know it. That's no formula for a renaissance, it's a recipe for disaster. So what about web2.0, about co-production, about social media, about new performance forms, about a potential shift towards an enabling and participatory public sphere characterised by digital flows, networks, hybridity, mobility, radical decentralisation, and tailored individual experiences, with all the opportunities and challenges that such a shift represents? Never mind all that, it's simple! Excellence will do the trick as a justification for funding culture.
The report as a whole has very little to say about communities, cities, people, places, festivals, neighbourhoods, schools etc.. all the CONTEXTS in which arts organisations operate: the places and spaces of the everyday cultural practices that underpin the making and partaking of art. It's these everyday rituals, small gestures, specific differences and special perspectives that mark the importance of the arts in people's lives. Rather it appears to be about the concert hall, the theatre, the gallery as 'temples of culture'. Very, very disappointing. Where is arts for health, for wellbeing, for learning, for provocation, as part of the formation and reinvention of identity and community? Some of the most 'excellent' and innovative work of the last ten years has been in these areas, where organisations have reinvented their role in communities and opened themselves up to collaboration, and radical independent practitioners have challenged the dull platitudes of the bourgeois art marketplace. This is the area - characterised by participation, partnerships and provocation - in which the UK is something of a world leader.
Interestingly it marks a sharp shift away from cultural economy/creative industries about which it has nothing, at all, to say - it prefers to deal with the 'intrinsic power of the arts' which is a rhetoric that has been endlessly critiqued over the last half century. I suspect that DCMS will have an uphill struggle if it tries to work with this script against the Treasury. The report's very narrow conception of 'innovation' seems entirely to be in the domain of artistic autonomy and have nothing to do with society at all - it certainly jars with the script that other bits of the Government have developed about creative business and social innovation; and it doesn't have a lot to say about the wider value of innovations in the cultural domain for quality of life more widely. Surely the arts are important because they enable conversations between communities, and, sometimes unsettling encounters - they help us to make sense of the world, express ideas, make places distinctive, enhance our living environments, tell stories about ourselves, learn about others, give pleasure and sometimes anxiety, express hopes and fears about the future, and find ways of communicating by analogy, metaphor and poetics.
The tone of the report contrasts sharply with all the broadly progressive work that DCMS has developed over the last 10 years, embedding arts in regeneration, in learning, working in local authorities, in communities; beginning to acknowledge a cultural dimension to policy decisions about health, schooling, education, communities, etc. and developing contested, but at least reasonably transparent frameworks for cultural planning. And then there is the explosive growth of the 'experience economy' to consider in which tourism, media and culture have formed such a significant part of placemaking strategies. Acknowledging the role of artists as catalysts, connectors, sometimes radical disruptors is indeed important but there is little on offer here that will make much difference to the profoundly marginalised status of much innovative work in the arts...or to those seeking to get a foot in the door. "More mentoring" is a pretty dubious response.
I suspect that what we will now get is a big debate about what 'excellence' is - which might be interesting, but more likely will just get us trapped in the high art/popular culture divide once again.
Surely 'assessing quality' is both about judgement AND measurement. Not one or the other. And there are many different sorts of criteria through which one might ascertain 'quality'. Not just a conveniently vague singularity called 'excellence'. Isn't there more than a whiff of a suggestion in there that culture is what 'cultured people' provide for the less cultured? ["Once the initial barrier of engagement is overcome, audiences must be given the opportunity to deepen their experience and be introduced to more complex work]. So, once people have 'engaged' they can 'move on' to 'more complex' (read:'high'?) forms? Hmmmmm.
There certainly seems to be a failure of 'cultural leadership' going on here. Poke the foundational ideas just gently and the whole edifice comes crumbling down...so, who's going to decide what is 'excellent' and what is not? On what basis exactly?
On a glance through (and I confess I need to read it more thoroughly, but this is a quick response) I think it is full of platitudes and to my mind empty, ungrounded rhetoric about artistic 'risk taking' and 'innovation'. I certainly have real issues with how 'excellence' is being used in such an unproblematised way. Its definitions are so poor that it's as if the last 100 years of cultural theory hadn't happened. Questions of cultural value and artistic 'quality' are much more complex than it is prepared to admit. Its attacks on a 'target-based' funding regime are an unfounded caricature of the current circumstances.
Some immediate thoughts:
There is plenty of stuff about 'valuing diversity' but there seems to be a desire to remove the use of cultural indicators altogether - i.e. we just don't worry about the fact that only so few managers/leaders in the cultural industries are women, or from ethnic minority backgrounds, etc? That it's disproportionately difficult for people starting out with little cash or few connections to make a living as artists, musicians or cultural businesses? Perhaps we worry a little about the fact that our most powerful cultural and educational institutions (and funding agencies....) are overwhelmingly populated by white kids from affluent middle class backgrounds, and that its much more difficult for kids from poorer backgrounds to break into the arts, but we're not prepared to require those organisations to change to become more inclusive and be tough with them when they don't? We worry about who 'our audience' is, but we don't want to collect statistics or data about their demographic profile in case it tells us uncomfortable truths that we don't want to hear, or be prepared to act on it? We might be concerned that some national cultural institutions are still too Eurocentric, that some local ones are too parochial (or vice versa), that not enough money is being spent directly on supporting artists to make new work, or on professional development, but we're not prepared to set some openly debated and clearly justified strategic priorities to reallocate funding, and have evaluation frameworks in place to see if these political decisions are working?
Knowing that the work is somehow giving off an aura of 'excellence' will explain it all away. I'm not impressed. This is no basis for a national cultural policy in a complex, globalised world.
I've never been a defender of audit cultures or policy based on narrow target-setting but I do believe that capturing data is important so that change can be tracked over time and that the impact of changes in policy and funding regimes can be understood...
McMaster offers a very liberal-individual view of what culture is (which seems to be 'whatever arts organisations and artists do for audiences") rather than a more dynamic or participatory vision of a culture in which everyone has a stake and in which everyone can take part.
'Peer review' is interesting as a counterbalance to questions of how to assess 'quality' but simply ignores the issue of whether central government and local communities should agree some priorities or a direction for public support for cultural offerings; it might defend the 'arm's length' principle but the big question it ignores is the appointment and public accountability of those who will undertake the 'peer review'. In spite of the problems of 'instrumentalism' of the last 10 years, at least an emphasis on access and inclusion has shaken up the sector a lot and got a lot more people involved.
Developing access and inclusion isn't primarily about 'free admission for a week', and 'more touring', it's about a democratisation of cultural production. That's not to say that opera houses, museums and concert halls shouldn't exist, it's to say that a whole spectrum of artistic activity has a place in a contemporary culture, and that historic cultural institutions need to reinvent themselves faced with a postmodern, networked, globalised world, and be prepared to defend their public value if they want public funding. Of course, to survive, the traditional - and popular - arts need to be valued, funded and taken seriously, but not put on a pedestal, immune from criticism, and seen as somehow part of an aesthetically autonomous zone untainted by social change, commerce, culture or politics. The same goes for artists, most of whom know this all too well as they struggle to make a living in these turbulent times.
Note the talk of 'education' not learning, 'audiences', not participants. Talented artists and expert curators know what culture is, and it's good for us, but we don't get to make it unless we are admitted to the the special creative class called professional artists. If we find their work difficult, then never mind, we just need to be educated to appreciate it. If we find it difficult to break into the artistic circle, it's not because of any structural, institutional problems with our excellent cultural system, it's probably just because we're not 'talented' (or 'excellent') enough. Take that bitter medicine, British public! Why? Because the arts are good for you, and those of us in the cultural know are blessed enough to know it. That's no formula for a renaissance, it's a recipe for disaster. So what about web2.0, about co-production, about social media, about new performance forms, about a potential shift towards an enabling and participatory public sphere characterised by digital flows, networks, hybridity, mobility, radical decentralisation, and tailored individual experiences, with all the opportunities and challenges that such a shift represents? Never mind all that, it's simple! Excellence will do the trick as a justification for funding culture.
The report as a whole has very little to say about communities, cities, people, places, festivals, neighbourhoods, schools etc.. all the CONTEXTS in which arts organisations operate: the places and spaces of the everyday cultural practices that underpin the making and partaking of art. It's these everyday rituals, small gestures, specific differences and special perspectives that mark the importance of the arts in people's lives. Rather it appears to be about the concert hall, the theatre, the gallery as 'temples of culture'. Very, very disappointing. Where is arts for health, for wellbeing, for learning, for provocation, as part of the formation and reinvention of identity and community? Some of the most 'excellent' and innovative work of the last ten years has been in these areas, where organisations have reinvented their role in communities and opened themselves up to collaboration, and radical independent practitioners have challenged the dull platitudes of the bourgeois art marketplace. This is the area - characterised by participation, partnerships and provocation - in which the UK is something of a world leader.
Interestingly it marks a sharp shift away from cultural economy/creative industries about which it has nothing, at all, to say - it prefers to deal with the 'intrinsic power of the arts' which is a rhetoric that has been endlessly critiqued over the last half century. I suspect that DCMS will have an uphill struggle if it tries to work with this script against the Treasury. The report's very narrow conception of 'innovation' seems entirely to be in the domain of artistic autonomy and have nothing to do with society at all - it certainly jars with the script that other bits of the Government have developed about creative business and social innovation; and it doesn't have a lot to say about the wider value of innovations in the cultural domain for quality of life more widely. Surely the arts are important because they enable conversations between communities, and, sometimes unsettling encounters - they help us to make sense of the world, express ideas, make places distinctive, enhance our living environments, tell stories about ourselves, learn about others, give pleasure and sometimes anxiety, express hopes and fears about the future, and find ways of communicating by analogy, metaphor and poetics.
The tone of the report contrasts sharply with all the broadly progressive work that DCMS has developed over the last 10 years, embedding arts in regeneration, in learning, working in local authorities, in communities; beginning to acknowledge a cultural dimension to policy decisions about health, schooling, education, communities, etc. and developing contested, but at least reasonably transparent frameworks for cultural planning. And then there is the explosive growth of the 'experience economy' to consider in which tourism, media and culture have formed such a significant part of placemaking strategies. Acknowledging the role of artists as catalysts, connectors, sometimes radical disruptors is indeed important but there is little on offer here that will make much difference to the profoundly marginalised status of much innovative work in the arts...or to those seeking to get a foot in the door. "More mentoring" is a pretty dubious response.
I suspect that what we will now get is a big debate about what 'excellence' is - which might be interesting, but more likely will just get us trapped in the high art/popular culture divide once again.
Surely 'assessing quality' is both about judgement AND measurement. Not one or the other. And there are many different sorts of criteria through which one might ascertain 'quality'. Not just a conveniently vague singularity called 'excellence'. Isn't there more than a whiff of a suggestion in there that culture is what 'cultured people' provide for the less cultured? ["Once the initial barrier of engagement is overcome, audiences must be given the opportunity to deepen their experience and be introduced to more complex work]. So, once people have 'engaged' they can 'move on' to 'more complex' (read:'high'?) forms? Hmmmmm.
There certainly seems to be a failure of 'cultural leadership' going on here. Poke the foundational ideas just gently and the whole edifice comes crumbling down...so, who's going to decide what is 'excellent' and what is not? On what basis exactly?
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
Christmas commodity fetishism
A few web shopping places that have caught my eye in the search for interesting gifts this year:Rare Device, Brooklyn and San Francisco
Dosh Wallets in Sydney
Swiss Miss, from New York
The ever-exciting and totally comprehensive Vinçon, in Barcelona...
Design 3000, based in Berlin
See Jane Work, Thousand Oaks, CA
Design Within Reach, USA - not merely shops but 'design studios'
etc etc
Enough, enough!...or I will produce a bucket of designer vomit in disgust at my own greedy hypocrisy.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Trading posts and border crossings
Graham is doing a seminar at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, at 4.30pm on 23rd January 2008. The summary of what he is talking about, based on the TAPP and Eastfeast research with David Jenkins and many others, is here:
To characterise creative partnership between artists and teachers as beset by latent conflict may appear to be unfair, but recent research undertaken within two professional development programmes, TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership) and Eastfeast illuminates just how complicated the dialogue between arts educators attempting to collaborate can become. In this seminar I will share some emergent findings and thoughts from this study, funded by Creative Partnerships, and entitled Mediated Conversations at a Cultural Trading Post. Surface narratives of collaboration, risk-taking and creativity might appear to be driven by consensual and convergent sets of values. However, behind the public face of partnership there is often a private process of conflict resolution and diplomacy. Putting partnership into practice often involves pragmatic compromises, misunderstandings, and the need for (self)critical reflection. Within the broad field of ‘creative partnership’, there are sharp differences and distinctions between different traditions and pedagogies. And when such partnerships attempt to intervene within the heavily regulated working environments of schools and colleges, some of these divisions and difficulties can become even more pronounced. Exploring how arts educators negotiate, combine, and account for their own trajectories and territories helps to illuminate some of the more shadowy and controversial corners of this very crowded arena of educational policy and practice.
To characterise creative partnership between artists and teachers as beset by latent conflict may appear to be unfair, but recent research undertaken within two professional development programmes, TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership) and Eastfeast illuminates just how complicated the dialogue between arts educators attempting to collaborate can become. In this seminar I will share some emergent findings and thoughts from this study, funded by Creative Partnerships, and entitled Mediated Conversations at a Cultural Trading Post. Surface narratives of collaboration, risk-taking and creativity might appear to be driven by consensual and convergent sets of values. However, behind the public face of partnership there is often a private process of conflict resolution and diplomacy. Putting partnership into practice often involves pragmatic compromises, misunderstandings, and the need for (self)critical reflection. Within the broad field of ‘creative partnership’, there are sharp differences and distinctions between different traditions and pedagogies. And when such partnerships attempt to intervene within the heavily regulated working environments of schools and colleges, some of these divisions and difficulties can become even more pronounced. Exploring how arts educators negotiate, combine, and account for their own trajectories and territories helps to illuminate some of the more shadowy and controversial corners of this very crowded arena of educational policy and practice.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Quick update on Graham's current projects and areas of work...
Finishing up the editing of the films and online content for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra artist residency/dialogue which took place in June in Smoo Cave, Durness
Doing some work as part of a team advising DCSF on creativity and education policy with colleagues at CapeUK
Completing the final report for "mediated conversations at a cultural trading post" - the research which examines partnership working in TAPP and Eastfeast
Ongoing work on an AHRC-funded study on performing arts and social inclusion in youth arts organisations based at UEL
Working with colleagues in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe and the USA exploring ways of establishing an annual summer school for teachers and artists to reflect on processes of collaboration; also considering how to extend meaningful and useful networks of professional practice for people working across institutional boundaries in the field of arts education and creative learning
Completing work on the publications and resource materials from TAPP
Trying to wrap things up properly in order to have a proper break in the forthcoming festive season....
And a few other, quite exciting, horizon scanning and speculative projects. More later...
Doing some work as part of a team advising DCSF on creativity and education policy with colleagues at CapeUK
Completing the final report for "mediated conversations at a cultural trading post" - the research which examines partnership working in TAPP and Eastfeast
Ongoing work on an AHRC-funded study on performing arts and social inclusion in youth arts organisations based at UEL
Working with colleagues in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe and the USA exploring ways of establishing an annual summer school for teachers and artists to reflect on processes of collaboration; also considering how to extend meaningful and useful networks of professional practice for people working across institutional boundaries in the field of arts education and creative learning
Completing work on the publications and resource materials from TAPP
Trying to wrap things up properly in order to have a proper break in the forthcoming festive season....
And a few other, quite exciting, horizon scanning and speculative projects. More later...
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
making it visible
Here's an interesting conference coming up, on November 22nd, in Glasgow which Jackie has been heavily involved in organising:
Artfull, the Scottish Arts Council and Glasgow Arts and Health Learning Network present making it visible: exploring the role of creativity and imagination in health and wellbeing.
The event will be chaired by Gregor Henderson, Director, National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Wellbeing, Scottish Government.
Artfull, the Scottish Arts Council and Glasgow Arts and Health Learning Network present making it visible: exploring the role of creativity and imagination in health and wellbeing.
The event will be chaired by Gregor Henderson, Director, National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Wellbeing, Scottish Government.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Today has been cancelled
This is an interesting stunt by the Tories, who, whilst secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren't facing a fourth meltdown (and, even if not meltdown, at least mild disinterest/apathy) in the polls today, are making as much political capital as they can from Gordon Brown's discomfort over the unneccessary hyping of a possible autumn poll. Now it's a clever ad, but I just wonder if it's something of a miscalculation? The graphics have clear echoes of wartime/postwar austerity; the poster reads like a quasi-situationist detournement of goverment public information propagada from the mid-20th century ; the lack of anything other than text just underpins the authoritarianism of the message. The whole tone of the poster conjures up a grim view of the state of the country which is at odds, to me at least, with the contradiction and complexity of the current social and economic situation. Yes there are considerable economic uncertainties at the moment; yes, globalisation is fuelling increased (im)migration; but to suggest that the remedy can be provided by a Big Brother type of government and that we are faced with a kind of 'wartime crisis' seems entirely misguided to me.
And as for the list of policy one-liners at the bottom of the poster, is this what Britain's electorate (other than the rabid Daily Mail-reading tendency who'll vote Tory anyway) really wants?
- Stopping NHS cuts and the closure of District General Hospitals*
[*deconstruct that as a phrase - completely conjours up images of the 1940s NHS]
- Teaching by ability and more discipline in schools
- National Citizen Service for every school-leaver
- Proper immigration controls and a new Border Police Force
- A vote on the EU constitution
- Ending the early release of prisoners
It all adds up to a pretty bleak view of the challenges facing the country - which certainly play on the sense of anxiety and moral panic about the country's place in the world in uncertain times - indeed, it plays on the whole notion of "Britishness", where the so-called "Blitz spirit" - embodied in that great propaganda poster keep calm and carry on still, perhaps, defines something of the country's national identity...
It strikes me that 'Border Control' - in the sense of trying to capture and define the terms of political discourse - is a good metaphor for what is happening between Labour and the Tories here. Both are falling back far too readily on authoritarian 'solutions' which will actually just stoke the contradictions in such rhetoric even more. Authoritarianism and fundamentalism resolve their internal tensions through an appeal to naturalized 'truths' and 'common sense' approaches. I don't detect a political language here from the Tories (or Labour) that can really reconcile: individual liberty/freedom and centralised state planning; a strong sense of 'nationhood' and the complexity of social identities in a globalised world; enforced 'standards' from the centre and the desire to enable 'personalisation' and local autonomy/flexibility in public services. None of these tensions can be resolved through authoritarianism. But both Labour and the Tories seem to be competing for the same narrow ideological territory (a shift to the right?)...
I went to the Cold War exhibition at RAF Cosford the other week, which is scary in its own way too. Perhaps it's an attempt by liberal thinkers in the military/industrial complex to demystify and make accessible some of the military thinking of the 1948 - 1989 years. It is most notable for having actual ('decommissioned') nuclear missiles and bombs on display and borrows heavily from postwar media material, attempting to put all the military machines - and the mad doctrines that fuelled them - into more of a social, cultural and ideological context than is customary in displays of military hardware. At one level it's impressive in its transparency; at another there are a whole set of assumptions about the morality of putting such terrifying stuff on display that need to be unpicked; but it's certainly provocative, for a former CND activist such as myself, to face some of the demons of the nuclear state head on. 
There was something rather chilling and terrifying about watching small kids running around in the cavernous hangar, in amongst the relics of Britain's nuclear present, whilst mothers with pushchairs looked on in a slightly bored fashion at earnest looking clean cut men with short haircuts avidly tossing around their opinions about the power of the thrust accellerators and megaton ratings of the missiles, all of which have names like "Blue Steel" and "Thor".So is this part of a return to a discourse of austerity and authoritarianism? The return of the 1940s and 1950s? Nuclear family values? There are some parallels, but as I've tracked elsewhere, I think the 1970s are a more useful source of zeitgeist fuel for the current situation, especially as the metaphor of ecological crisis is so potent right now.
Endnote:
Blimey, the plot/intertextuality thickens. Here's a home-made YouTube video of Helen Shapiro's 1969 recording of the song 'Today has been cancelled."
More retro-nostalgia for a more 'innocent'/vanilla popular culture of cold war Britain...?
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
A convivial culture for health
Here's a link to Jackie's dissertation, written back in 2000 as part of her MA Art in Architecture programme at the University of East London. It's called
A convivial culture for health: case studies in holistic practiceand it gives an account of five key sites for arts and health development in the second half of the 20th Century - the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre, Charlton Lane Acute Mental Health Unit in Gloucestershire, the Bromley By Bow Centre, Vital Arts at the Barts and The London NHS Trust, and Dr Malcolm Rigler's work with artists at Withymoor Surgery in the West Midlands. It could be a helpful reference point for people that want to find out more about the origins and development of the arts in health movement in the UK.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Constructive tensions/impossible contradictions
For those of you that can stomach the download (it's a 25MB file, so apologies!) here is the presentation I gave in Exeter on 9th October. It's called: teaching in the arts through partnerships and collaboration: constructive tensions or impossible contradictions? As always, comments very welcome.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Fifteen observations about 'innovation' and the standards agenda
A bit of a rant, but I'm really worked up about this at the moment. Comments very welcome!
There are lots of articles and activity over at NESTA about the need to encourage risk-taking in the public sector, particularly education, if we’re going to have an education system that produces the kinds of ‘creative citizens’ that are needed in the 21st century knowledge economy. Leaving aside some of the problems with the idea that we really are in a knowledge society (or at least, whether anyone other than ‘knowledge and policy entrepreneurs’ and the bloggers really are) here are some thoughts in relation to this:
1. Schools, colleges and universities (particularly schools and colleges) are under tremendous pressure to continually improve their 'results' - i.e. the quantity and quality (measured in grades) of the qualifications that their learners obtain. Education Minister Ed Balls’ recent speech just underlines this further.
2. In a climate in which educational outcomes are measured by league tables, institutions have to repeatedly demonstrate through internal planning and external reporting and inspection how they are performing. Those that appear to be doing well are rewarded with ‘status marks’, brands, logos etc. Those that do badly are ‘named and shamed’ as failing schools, targeted for intervention and pilloried in the popular press. There’s an understandable concern at the heart of this that no child should be in a school that doesn’t give them an entitlement to high quality learning; it’s not the concern to give equal opportunity that I object to, more the preferred method of achieving it. Michael Fullan, in a recent Newsnight Scotland interview pointed out that the evidence is that collaborative approaches, in which professionals share and collaborate across schools according to particular strengths, and get involved in learning together, is more likely to lead to ‘raising standards’.
3. In my book I also pointed out that there is a central contradiction in exhorting schools to ‘collaborate’ when in a performative system they are pitted against each other, particularly in their competition to attract and retain the best kinds of students (i.e. the least risky in terms of their likelihood of failing qualifications). This prejudices the entire system against young people who, for reasons outside of their own control, are particularly challenged in the performance stakes.
4. So what is ‘performativity’? The phrase originates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 report The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. He argued that, with the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, the collapse of 19th century ‘grand narratives’, and the ending of a consensus that a cadre of elite, expert professionals could determine what counts as valid knowledge, (in part driven by the challenge to ‘normative’ knowledge mounted by the new social movements and by radical politics), instead the value placed upon knowledge is how it performs a function: “in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures.” (1979, p. 46). In other words, knowledge, rather than being based on abstracted laws is validated – legitimated – insofar as it fits the stated aims and purposes for which it is being used.
5. In education performativity leads to an obsessive focus on 'attainment’, as measured in test scores and grades. Anything that is not seen as directly impacting on attainment measures is regarded as less important in the life of the school and harder to justify spending any time or money on. It also sends a message to children that the most significant part of their education is the grades and scores that they get at the end of the process. As Ken Robinson says:
"School reforms always emphasize standards and standardized testing, as if it's akin to a McDonald's franchise. But standardized testing demoralizes teachers, demoralizes students, and incents people to teach to the test. Standardized testing is based on the idea that we have to make education teacher-proof and I think we have to do the reverse".
6. We need to consider the psychological and health effects on learners and teachers of their exposure to this intensive audit culture. It could be regarded as a form of psychological warfare. The government talks about ‘partnership’ with the teaching profession but there is a lot of fear, anxiety and stress in the system which is inimical to fostering effective learning communities. We should be asking the question – what kinds of ‘ideal’ subjects – learners and teachers, young people and adults – do these kind of performativity discourses construct? And how do these performative identities play out in the social and pedagogic relations within schools and colleges?
7. Part of this is to do with how qualifications and forms of assessment which boil outcomes down to grades work. This is especially acute when 'outcomes' are measured by pen and paper tests or multiple choice examinations. Such forms of assessment, unless handled carefully, are blunt instruments that don't really measure anything other than students' drilled ability to pass such kinds of tests. They’re also often based on a pseudo-scientific paradigm that there are clearly right answers and wrong answers, correct and incorrect ways of doing things. That’s a much more difficult thing to show in the arts and humanities than it is in maths and the sciences. This is partly how maths and sciences get their reputation for ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’, whilst so called ‘expressive outcomes’ of the arts, other than when students are being asked to recall facts or perform analysis, get labelled as fuzzy and blurry and imprecise. It goes back to a mechanistic model of education in which ‘delivery’ is built on the notion that there are best practice models of efficient transmission of knowledge which can be effectively measured by outside authorities; paradoxically, a very 19th century way of thinking about knowledge and learning, which doesn’t really acknowledge just how complicated it has become to really prove any knowledge is likely to have longevity or legitimacy. In fact, enabling learners to apply and use a piece of knowledge (or a skill) is the key issue, not simply testing their ability to recall or reproduce it.
8. There’s some evidence that what has happened in the last ten years is that schools have become more adept at getting 'borderline' students to pass tests, which hasn’t necessarily impacted on the wider quality of educational outcomes. What is needed is a much more high quality approach to assessment which draws together a whole range of skills and abilities – the vocational curriculum is one attempt at this, the use of longer assessments which involve students using a whole range of skills another, the RSA's "Opening Minds" curriculum a third.
9. The biggest ‘risk’ that schools face is that they might try a new approach or change their curriculum and that this will somehow negatively affect their ‘bottom line’ – i.e. students’ test or exam scores. So performativity makes schools risk averse. Partly this is because schools are exhorted to guarantee an ‘entitlement’ for young people so that they all reach the required standard – ‘No Child Left Behind’, as the slogan from the US goes – but the flip side of this agenda is that focussing on children’s performance on a really narrow set of measures in literacy and numeracy runs the risk of leaving everything else that school could be about in the shade. There may be some grounds for optimism: the agendas around creativity, innovation and inclusion at least ‘mediate’ the standards agenda, as Dyson et al (2003) put it, “schools can and do open up spaces in the standards agenda”. There is plenty of evidence that a rich learning environment where attention is paid to relationships and informal learning is much more likely to lead to improved outcomes even in formal assessments. But if the central purpose of education is always expressed as if it were about narrow outcomes, or as Lyotard says elsewhere, based on demonstrating ‘skills’ rather than ‘ideals’, there’s always a risk that the debate gets polarised into which ‘teaching method’ leads to the ‘most effective outcome’, as if those terms haven’t always been the subject of centuries of debate, scholarship and contestation.
10. The pseudo-market created by a performative ‘standards’ agenda also has all sorts of other distorting effects – as Frank Coffield (2007) has pointed out it means that schools put huge attention onto the so-called ‘borderline’ learners – those who are likely with coaching to reach the 5 A – C standard, which may well negatively impact those young people who are either very ‘high achievers’ or very low achievers. Coffield points out that every year in the UK there are 300.000 school leavers who fail to gain places in any further education or training, who simply fall out of the system.
11. So long as the ‘standards’ agenda continues to be the dominant way of thinking about education and learning, we are in trouble. Innovation in schools is locked down by the obsession with measuring attainment, so that the power in terms of defining what constitutes ‘effective learning’ for young people, even if they have powerful experiences of social learning along the way, is reduced to very crude measures of attainment. When everything that a school does has to be justified in terms of its impact on attainment, the first question that springs to my mind at least is, what sort of attainment are we talking about anyway? I am not arguing that we shouldn’t have a qualifications system or a defined curriculum, but we need to teach and assess a much broader range of skills and expose young people to a much wider range of contexts than simply classroom based learning with a single teacher at the front of the room. If QCA’s proposals for a new approach to the secondary curriculum or the new 14- 19 diplomas are to succeed, they need a real focus on pedagogy and thinking about teaching and learning beyond preparation for performance in examinations.
12. In fact, there is tons of evidence that students become more confident learners and more highly skilled when they are nourished in a rich, varied and stimulating learning environment, in which they feel cared for, listened to and valued; in which students and staff are given opportunities to participate and lead, and when the whole school is configured as a learning organisation – a form of social architecture - in which enquiry and creativity are valued. But it is very hard to do this when there is such pressure to cover massive amounts of pre-determined learning content which is assessed in pre-determined ways under intensively timed and controlled conditions. These social textures are the stuff of learning, and failure to address this leads to a failure of imagination.
13. Is technology is an issue here? Probably, but too often it’s about being a ‘learning aid’ – i.e. about endorsing predetermined outcomes without really considering what the creative potential of ICT might be. Without really engaging with how culture and society are changing and shifting we will end up in a mess. Communications technologies are enabling new organisational and institutional forms and patterns to emerge. Ironically the debate about curriculum and assessment seems to be locked into a 19th century model of subjects and standards. If the government is serious about innovation then it needs to send a message to practitioners that it values experimentation and professional learning. Schools would be very different kinds of spaces and places if we really explored what a 21st century learning environment could look like. It certainly doesn’t have to be about the idea of a a single teacher in single classroom with a single group of students all of one age, rather it could take a much more networked and distributed form, just like learning does in the rest of the world...
14. More optimistically, schools and colleges are sites of contestation and in spite of the neat grids of central policies classrooms are messy and pragmatic places – so there’s always space for exploration and possibility. After all, isn’t that what learning is for? So the current situation could be perceived as a major opportunity for innovators, if they could just grab the agenda, wherever they are. To be fair, programmes like Creative Partnerships, some of the work formerly done under the banner of the NESTA Learning Programme, some of the SSAT's efforts to get schools to do peer-to-peer learning, some of NCSL's work and the Innovation Unit have all provided pointers, help and support for schools seeking to innovate. Not to mention the role of local authorities. But even that partial roll-call of overlapping agencies (and that's just for schools, never mind FE or HE) shows how unbelievably tangled, confusing and complex the English education system is.
15. Nothing less than a total rethink of how we measure attainment and approach teaching and learning will deliver a high quality education system. At a time of significant curriculum change in Scotland and England, there’s a real need to focus on teaching and learning, not just standards and outcomes. There are lots of curriculum prototypes and great projects from round the world that are attempting to broaden the agenda and open up learning to more imaginative approaches, but we need a more sophisticated way of articulating this rather than the very tired rhetoric of 'standards'. I'm not suggesting for a minute that we should disregard indicators of educational quality, or not ensure that qualifications provide learners with meaningful certification of what they can do, or make sure teachers learn from expert practitioners, or strive constantly to improve what we do, but we need a much more intelligent debate about how to do this than we are currently getting...
There are lots of articles and activity over at NESTA about the need to encourage risk-taking in the public sector, particularly education, if we’re going to have an education system that produces the kinds of ‘creative citizens’ that are needed in the 21st century knowledge economy. Leaving aside some of the problems with the idea that we really are in a knowledge society (or at least, whether anyone other than ‘knowledge and policy entrepreneurs’ and the bloggers really are) here are some thoughts in relation to this:
1. Schools, colleges and universities (particularly schools and colleges) are under tremendous pressure to continually improve their 'results' - i.e. the quantity and quality (measured in grades) of the qualifications that their learners obtain. Education Minister Ed Balls’ recent speech just underlines this further.
2. In a climate in which educational outcomes are measured by league tables, institutions have to repeatedly demonstrate through internal planning and external reporting and inspection how they are performing. Those that appear to be doing well are rewarded with ‘status marks’, brands, logos etc. Those that do badly are ‘named and shamed’ as failing schools, targeted for intervention and pilloried in the popular press. There’s an understandable concern at the heart of this that no child should be in a school that doesn’t give them an entitlement to high quality learning; it’s not the concern to give equal opportunity that I object to, more the preferred method of achieving it. Michael Fullan, in a recent Newsnight Scotland interview pointed out that the evidence is that collaborative approaches, in which professionals share and collaborate across schools according to particular strengths, and get involved in learning together, is more likely to lead to ‘raising standards’.
3. In my book I also pointed out that there is a central contradiction in exhorting schools to ‘collaborate’ when in a performative system they are pitted against each other, particularly in their competition to attract and retain the best kinds of students (i.e. the least risky in terms of their likelihood of failing qualifications). This prejudices the entire system against young people who, for reasons outside of their own control, are particularly challenged in the performance stakes.
4. So what is ‘performativity’? The phrase originates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 report The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. He argued that, with the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, the collapse of 19th century ‘grand narratives’, and the ending of a consensus that a cadre of elite, expert professionals could determine what counts as valid knowledge, (in part driven by the challenge to ‘normative’ knowledge mounted by the new social movements and by radical politics), instead the value placed upon knowledge is how it performs a function: “in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures.” (1979, p. 46). In other words, knowledge, rather than being based on abstracted laws is validated – legitimated – insofar as it fits the stated aims and purposes for which it is being used.
5. In education performativity leads to an obsessive focus on 'attainment’, as measured in test scores and grades. Anything that is not seen as directly impacting on attainment measures is regarded as less important in the life of the school and harder to justify spending any time or money on. It also sends a message to children that the most significant part of their education is the grades and scores that they get at the end of the process. As Ken Robinson says:
"School reforms always emphasize standards and standardized testing, as if it's akin to a McDonald's franchise. But standardized testing demoralizes teachers, demoralizes students, and incents people to teach to the test. Standardized testing is based on the idea that we have to make education teacher-proof and I think we have to do the reverse".
6. We need to consider the psychological and health effects on learners and teachers of their exposure to this intensive audit culture. It could be regarded as a form of psychological warfare. The government talks about ‘partnership’ with the teaching profession but there is a lot of fear, anxiety and stress in the system which is inimical to fostering effective learning communities. We should be asking the question – what kinds of ‘ideal’ subjects – learners and teachers, young people and adults – do these kind of performativity discourses construct? And how do these performative identities play out in the social and pedagogic relations within schools and colleges?
7. Part of this is to do with how qualifications and forms of assessment which boil outcomes down to grades work. This is especially acute when 'outcomes' are measured by pen and paper tests or multiple choice examinations. Such forms of assessment, unless handled carefully, are blunt instruments that don't really measure anything other than students' drilled ability to pass such kinds of tests. They’re also often based on a pseudo-scientific paradigm that there are clearly right answers and wrong answers, correct and incorrect ways of doing things. That’s a much more difficult thing to show in the arts and humanities than it is in maths and the sciences. This is partly how maths and sciences get their reputation for ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’, whilst so called ‘expressive outcomes’ of the arts, other than when students are being asked to recall facts or perform analysis, get labelled as fuzzy and blurry and imprecise. It goes back to a mechanistic model of education in which ‘delivery’ is built on the notion that there are best practice models of efficient transmission of knowledge which can be effectively measured by outside authorities; paradoxically, a very 19th century way of thinking about knowledge and learning, which doesn’t really acknowledge just how complicated it has become to really prove any knowledge is likely to have longevity or legitimacy. In fact, enabling learners to apply and use a piece of knowledge (or a skill) is the key issue, not simply testing their ability to recall or reproduce it.
8. There’s some evidence that what has happened in the last ten years is that schools have become more adept at getting 'borderline' students to pass tests, which hasn’t necessarily impacted on the wider quality of educational outcomes. What is needed is a much more high quality approach to assessment which draws together a whole range of skills and abilities – the vocational curriculum is one attempt at this, the use of longer assessments which involve students using a whole range of skills another, the RSA's "Opening Minds" curriculum a third.
9. The biggest ‘risk’ that schools face is that they might try a new approach or change their curriculum and that this will somehow negatively affect their ‘bottom line’ – i.e. students’ test or exam scores. So performativity makes schools risk averse. Partly this is because schools are exhorted to guarantee an ‘entitlement’ for young people so that they all reach the required standard – ‘No Child Left Behind’, as the slogan from the US goes – but the flip side of this agenda is that focussing on children’s performance on a really narrow set of measures in literacy and numeracy runs the risk of leaving everything else that school could be about in the shade. There may be some grounds for optimism: the agendas around creativity, innovation and inclusion at least ‘mediate’ the standards agenda, as Dyson et al (2003) put it, “schools can and do open up spaces in the standards agenda”. There is plenty of evidence that a rich learning environment where attention is paid to relationships and informal learning is much more likely to lead to improved outcomes even in formal assessments. But if the central purpose of education is always expressed as if it were about narrow outcomes, or as Lyotard says elsewhere, based on demonstrating ‘skills’ rather than ‘ideals’, there’s always a risk that the debate gets polarised into which ‘teaching method’ leads to the ‘most effective outcome’, as if those terms haven’t always been the subject of centuries of debate, scholarship and contestation.
10. The pseudo-market created by a performative ‘standards’ agenda also has all sorts of other distorting effects – as Frank Coffield (2007) has pointed out it means that schools put huge attention onto the so-called ‘borderline’ learners – those who are likely with coaching to reach the 5 A – C standard, which may well negatively impact those young people who are either very ‘high achievers’ or very low achievers. Coffield points out that every year in the UK there are 300.000 school leavers who fail to gain places in any further education or training, who simply fall out of the system.
11. So long as the ‘standards’ agenda continues to be the dominant way of thinking about education and learning, we are in trouble. Innovation in schools is locked down by the obsession with measuring attainment, so that the power in terms of defining what constitutes ‘effective learning’ for young people, even if they have powerful experiences of social learning along the way, is reduced to very crude measures of attainment. When everything that a school does has to be justified in terms of its impact on attainment, the first question that springs to my mind at least is, what sort of attainment are we talking about anyway? I am not arguing that we shouldn’t have a qualifications system or a defined curriculum, but we need to teach and assess a much broader range of skills and expose young people to a much wider range of contexts than simply classroom based learning with a single teacher at the front of the room. If QCA’s proposals for a new approach to the secondary curriculum or the new 14- 19 diplomas are to succeed, they need a real focus on pedagogy and thinking about teaching and learning beyond preparation for performance in examinations.
12. In fact, there is tons of evidence that students become more confident learners and more highly skilled when they are nourished in a rich, varied and stimulating learning environment, in which they feel cared for, listened to and valued; in which students and staff are given opportunities to participate and lead, and when the whole school is configured as a learning organisation – a form of social architecture - in which enquiry and creativity are valued. But it is very hard to do this when there is such pressure to cover massive amounts of pre-determined learning content which is assessed in pre-determined ways under intensively timed and controlled conditions. These social textures are the stuff of learning, and failure to address this leads to a failure of imagination.
13. Is technology is an issue here? Probably, but too often it’s about being a ‘learning aid’ – i.e. about endorsing predetermined outcomes without really considering what the creative potential of ICT might be. Without really engaging with how culture and society are changing and shifting we will end up in a mess. Communications technologies are enabling new organisational and institutional forms and patterns to emerge. Ironically the debate about curriculum and assessment seems to be locked into a 19th century model of subjects and standards. If the government is serious about innovation then it needs to send a message to practitioners that it values experimentation and professional learning. Schools would be very different kinds of spaces and places if we really explored what a 21st century learning environment could look like. It certainly doesn’t have to be about the idea of a a single teacher in single classroom with a single group of students all of one age, rather it could take a much more networked and distributed form, just like learning does in the rest of the world...
14. More optimistically, schools and colleges are sites of contestation and in spite of the neat grids of central policies classrooms are messy and pragmatic places – so there’s always space for exploration and possibility. After all, isn’t that what learning is for? So the current situation could be perceived as a major opportunity for innovators, if they could just grab the agenda, wherever they are. To be fair, programmes like Creative Partnerships, some of the work formerly done under the banner of the NESTA Learning Programme, some of the SSAT's efforts to get schools to do peer-to-peer learning, some of NCSL's work and the Innovation Unit have all provided pointers, help and support for schools seeking to innovate. Not to mention the role of local authorities. But even that partial roll-call of overlapping agencies (and that's just for schools, never mind FE or HE) shows how unbelievably tangled, confusing and complex the English education system is.
15. Nothing less than a total rethink of how we measure attainment and approach teaching and learning will deliver a high quality education system. At a time of significant curriculum change in Scotland and England, there’s a real need to focus on teaching and learning, not just standards and outcomes. There are lots of curriculum prototypes and great projects from round the world that are attempting to broaden the agenda and open up learning to more imaginative approaches, but we need a more sophisticated way of articulating this rather than the very tired rhetoric of 'standards'. I'm not suggesting for a minute that we should disregard indicators of educational quality, or not ensure that qualifications provide learners with meaningful certification of what they can do, or make sure teachers learn from expert practitioners, or strive constantly to improve what we do, but we need a much more intelligent debate about how to do this than we are currently getting...
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Screenings roundup
Kerry McLeod's For all the tea in England, with snatches of music by Graham, is screening at
Marbella Film Festival 5-7 Oct 2007
Cinema Verite Documentary Festival, Tehran, Iran 15-19 Oct 2007
Roxy Bar and Screen, London, 9pm, 16th Oct 2007
And four short films from The Seafront are being shown at English Heritage's Seaside Heritage conference in Hastings on 16th and 17th October.
Marbella Film Festival 5-7 Oct 2007
Cinema Verite Documentary Festival, Tehran, Iran 15-19 Oct 2007
Roxy Bar and Screen, London, 9pm, 16th Oct 2007
And four short films from The Seafront are being shown at English Heritage's Seaside Heritage conference in Hastings on 16th and 17th October.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
on channels...Fame 2.0?
Staring at the computer screen with my eyes sagging and my neck aching, mid-afternoon, with the sun shining brightly outside, made me reflect on how many personal channels of communication we have to manage and maintain...and working simultaneously on multiple projects and with multiple teams of people just intensifies this sense of being informationally and emotionally challenged....for example, in the general praxis world, just for one individual (graham), the list includes:
all the daily face to face interactions, meetings and conversations..
which are facilitated by and supplemented by
3 email accounts
1 land line
1 mobile phone
text messages
1 skype account
1 phone at work
this blog
social bookmarks
Myspace
Websites in which work I am doing features...
Post at home
Post at work
Publications
occasional work on film,TV, the radio or in recorded media
Plus all the travel and mobility, a weekly 400 mile commute, tickets and keeping track of timetables...
As a freelancer, I don't have the luxury of any administrative support for the core business of managing my work, rather, as well as doing the work I have to do all the admin myself...
But is the 'new work paradigm' that we are all now disembodied, nomadic, multiskilled multitaskers? Perhaps it's the case that the higher up the economic ladder one is, the less one has to be like that, as you get more admin support and can, if you choose, 'outsource' more of the mundane tasks involved in everyday life...and for those largely excluded from the networked world, all of this communicative decadence is a distraction from the business of economic survival... for those of us in the 'lumpen intelligentsia' it's a delicate tightrope between a 'play ethic' and a tyranny of information overload in which sorting the wheat from the chaff, the core focus from the distractions, is a daily struggle. As Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised, and all this social media helps people construct identities in which they can easily become "a legend in their own minds..." Our identities (or at least the bits that we choose to share) are increasingly on 24-hour public display, networked globally through electronlc media...
is it any wonder that it all gets a bit overwhelming and stressful sometimes? I remember an edition of Newsnight when Jeremy Paxman referred in an offhand way to blogs as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder and perhaps he got it right...Certainly there's a need to prioritise which channels of communication to use for which purpose, and to have days when everything is just left switched off...perhaps we need a national Switch It Off day? I quite like the idea that social media enables us to become our own broadcasters and publicists, etc, but is anyone actually paying any attention? We still need high quality face to face communication. The networked and collaborative social and digital environments that we inhabit are very double-edged and may be as close to panopticons of spectacle and surveillance as they are liberating.
Monday, September 03, 2007
distracted by the politics and urban geography of parking
Here's a great little film from the USA about the politics of parking lots. Chatting with my friend David Pinder in NYC earlier this year, we agreed that how the cultural geography of parking (and the way in which accommodating the car in general) affects the spatial dynamics of the city needs some serious analysis and investigation. Increasingly through software sorted geographies' (eg the congestion charge) all of this is creating radically splintered urbanism (one of my favourite books of this decade so far)."Parking Public is an investigation into the realities of utopian thought as materialized in the mundane and pragmatic spaces of parking lots. Parking lots, one of the most visible, yet overlooked, artifacts of American mobility reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of utopian ideals. Parking Public is a mapping of these literally concrete spaces in an attempt to locate the utopia they serve. Underneath both the empty spaces of parking and the empty promises of utopia are real economies and structures of power."
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Creative contradictions, constructive tensions...?
Graham is giving an (academic-ish) talk at the University of Exeter school of education on the 9th of October. Summary below:
Teaching (in) the arts through partnerships and collaboration: constructive tensions or impossible contradictions?
Arts education is currently bearing the burden of a frenetic policy rhetoric which emphasises ‘creative skills’ and collaborative work, even as other tentacles of policy squeeze educational institutions to sustain their positions in league tables, enable all students to succeed, and manage relationships with an ever-increasing number of stakeholders. There are numerous unresolved contradictions and tensions: between rhetorics of creativity and student ‘empowerment’ and a highly stratified, competitive assessment and accountability regime; between traditions of liberal arts education which may be at variance with more (post)modern discourses of creativity; and between a meritocratic, popularised vision of ‘talent’ and the socio-economic realities of learners’ lifecourses.
Professional artists and teachers of the arts (many of whom have professional histories as skilled practitioners of the arts in their own right), are being exhorted to collaborate, and in pragmatic and messy ways are attempting to navigate through this landscape. Such collaborations often start at the level of individual curriculum initiatives, but they are also being scaled up into complex, longer-term institutional partnerships between the formal education sector and professional and voluntary arts organisations, enabling students’ learning to spill over from the orderly containers of qualification systems into a broader ecology - of the creative industries, the cultural economy and arts institutions.
There are many opportunities for innovation and professional learning here. Equally, there are many pitfalls and risks: are professionals in schools, colleges and universities equipped to manage the contradictory demands made by performative audit cultures and networked learning communities? What sorts of professional learning experiences are needed if the idea of equitable creative collaboration is to become more rooted in the ‘knowledge pool’ of the education system? Is progress towards the adoption of ‘creativity’ as one of the touchstone concepts of educational and economic policy in England in danger of collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions?
Drawing on my experience in leading and managing complex institutional partnerships at the University of East London and Newham Sixth Form College, together with more recent work in enabling professional reflection and development for teachers and artists through the TAPP (Teacher-Artist Partnership Programme) in London, I will tell three stories which might help illuminate some ways through the mass of contradictions and difficulties in this turbulent landscape of policy and practice.
Teaching (in) the arts through partnerships and collaboration: constructive tensions or impossible contradictions?
Arts education is currently bearing the burden of a frenetic policy rhetoric which emphasises ‘creative skills’ and collaborative work, even as other tentacles of policy squeeze educational institutions to sustain their positions in league tables, enable all students to succeed, and manage relationships with an ever-increasing number of stakeholders. There are numerous unresolved contradictions and tensions: between rhetorics of creativity and student ‘empowerment’ and a highly stratified, competitive assessment and accountability regime; between traditions of liberal arts education which may be at variance with more (post)modern discourses of creativity; and between a meritocratic, popularised vision of ‘talent’ and the socio-economic realities of learners’ lifecourses.
Professional artists and teachers of the arts (many of whom have professional histories as skilled practitioners of the arts in their own right), are being exhorted to collaborate, and in pragmatic and messy ways are attempting to navigate through this landscape. Such collaborations often start at the level of individual curriculum initiatives, but they are also being scaled up into complex, longer-term institutional partnerships between the formal education sector and professional and voluntary arts organisations, enabling students’ learning to spill over from the orderly containers of qualification systems into a broader ecology - of the creative industries, the cultural economy and arts institutions.
There are many opportunities for innovation and professional learning here. Equally, there are many pitfalls and risks: are professionals in schools, colleges and universities equipped to manage the contradictory demands made by performative audit cultures and networked learning communities? What sorts of professional learning experiences are needed if the idea of equitable creative collaboration is to become more rooted in the ‘knowledge pool’ of the education system? Is progress towards the adoption of ‘creativity’ as one of the touchstone concepts of educational and economic policy in England in danger of collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions?
Drawing on my experience in leading and managing complex institutional partnerships at the University of East London and Newham Sixth Form College, together with more recent work in enabling professional reflection and development for teachers and artists through the TAPP (Teacher-Artist Partnership Programme) in London, I will tell three stories which might help illuminate some ways through the mass of contradictions and difficulties in this turbulent landscape of policy and practice.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Pacific Quay
Just back from spending an afternoon at the very impressive BBC Scotland building at Pacific Quay. An attempt to fashion a 21st century workplace; part technohub, part five star hotel/business park, part performance space. It's designed so that the place can buzz with activity on the 'street' that rises in steps through the cavernous atrium, but the acoustic design dampens down the sound so that it doesn't sound like a shopping mall....Anyone designing a school or college could learn a lot from the place - I've yet to see anything as radical be attempted within schools or universities, unfortunately. More generally, that whole part of Glasgow is being re-branded as a media quarter, alongside Glasgow Science Centre; it would be good to see some of Glasgow's institutions of further and higher education get in on the act, so that ways in for communities and students can be found and the zone doesn't become totally dominated by the monied and the affluent...Glasgow has a spectacular 'riverside' masterplan heavily dependent on increasing revenues from tourism, retail and media/creative industries, but the amount of capital needed to develop the spaces will probably mean that the highest bidders will get the last word... A set of spaces to be watched carefully!
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