As promised here are a few images from the workshop in the school in Alcala, near Madrid, where my daughter Ella teaches. The children did pretty well considering none had done anything like this before.
An example of work
Another example
Another example
Without prompting, all classes eventually discovered flicking
More joy of flicking
An instant exhibition - not bad for a morning's work
My daughter Ella lives and teaches in Madrid and while visiting her a week or so ago, she persuaded me to do a day’s teaching in her school. I delivered five basic abstract painting classes to children aged between 6 and 10. It was hard work, working with a range of inadequate brushes, some large sheets of paper and bright poster paint. At first the children were pretty mystified as to what this was all about and it was obvious that they had done very little painting and certainly nothing of this sort. But after being guided away from the shackles of representation they soon relaxed into a spirit of free expression. Interestingly, the younger the children were, the easier it was for them to let go and experiment. All the classes eventually discovered the joys of flicking paint and the adventurousness was a joy to behold. When asked why they had enjoyed it, one child said ‘because we have never painted before in school’ .
Whatever we may feel about the limitations of the English Education system, my foreign travels have taught me recently that the opportunities on offer in English schools include great richness of opportunity. Perhaps we don’t spend enough time celebrating just how much progress has been achieved during the last ten years. In that Spanish school, creative teaching and learning seemed a world away. I’ll be posting some photos soon, if I can work out the mechanism.
Chris May
It has been interesting (and at times unsettling) adjusting to being back in the UK, but great to catch up with friends and colleagues. Last Friday I met up with the team that are working on plans for year three of the Find Your Talent programme in Liverpool. During the conversation it struck me that for Find Your Talent to have any real lasting legacy it has to be all about capacity building. I see this as having four strands.
1. Building, individual, family and community capacity to participate in cultural activity – improving access and inclusion, information and advice, developing knowledge and skills and fostering the habits of participation and production.
2. Building organisational capacity to inform, provide, engage and include children, young people and their communities in culture – enabling active participation, rich learning and cultural production through the provision of quality assured activity to nationally agreed standards.
3. Building leadership capacity among leaders from the cultural and other sectors to value and prioritise cultural development, collaborate, challenge, ensure entitlement to culture and develop new leaders.
4. Building network capacity to collaborate and achieve coherence, raise standards through sharing learning, enable progression and ensure inclusion.
I know there is nothing new here, but my fear is that far too many cultural organisations are so focussed on delivering activity that the trickier questions associated with long-term capacity building may not be being asked. We’re all so busy doing that we find it hard to stop for long enough to reflect on what really needs to change.
We’re trialling a development framework for arts organisations with the FYT partners in Liverpool at present. With the aim of raising the quality of cultural provision, it’s a self assessment tool that asks organisations to consider five aspects that we feel are central to the provision of high quality creative and cultural experiences for children and young people. The five areas are:
1. Policy, strategy ethos and leadership
2. Key principles that underpin the work
3. High quality experiences for children and young people
4. High quality integrated delivery mechanisms
5.Learning networks
We’ll happily share this once it’s passed through the initial testing phase. Do get in touch if you are interested in this aspect of our work or if you have ideas to share.
Chris May
It’s now five days since I returned from Oman, inspired by the warmth and hospitality of the people and determined to develop a more internationally focussed flavour within our work. It has been hard readjusting, not just to the cold, but to several days of catching up with e-mails and administration, so I’ve had little time to digest my experiences.
It would be far to simple to make direct comparisons between the UK and Oman and the ways in which we approach the challenges that are common to us all – our contexts are so different. Forty years ago, under the inspirational leadership of its leader Sultan Qaboos Bin Said, Oman started to emerge from a terrible period of isolation and stagnation. At the time there were only three schools in the entire country – now there are over one thousand. So there has been much catching up to do, and the Omani people continue to demonstrate an admirable level of commitment and hard work to further developing educational provision. Their philosophy is straightforward – to look around and take the best from wherever they spot excellence and innovation, while maintaining their commitment to Islamic and National values. I was fortunate to meet with senior Government representatives who were very interested in developing more creative approaches to teaching and learning, having concluded that there are many lessons to be learned from our experience of the Creative Partnerships programme as well as the other areas of work in which we are engaged. So let’s hope for the best with regard to a long term partnership with this wonderful country. Do get in touch if you have experience of working in the Gulf region or have ideas for collaborative activity – we’re hoping to set up exchange programmes for artists and young people sometime in the near future.
I feel very fortunate at the moment to be participating in Community Exchange programme organised by the British Council and VSO, between Pennine Lancashire and Oman. A group of 13 people from a variety of professions related to education and social care are visiting the capital Muscat and living with Omani Families for 3 weeks. While we are naturally concerned about our friends back in the UK who are experiencing so many problems with the weather, we have to be honest and say that it is wonderful here and about 28 degrees (it’s the coldest time of year in Oman).
There is a huge amount to be learned from these wonderful friendly people and you’ll become accustomed to me singing the praises of Oman. My main learning is about about Islam and how this faith is practiced here with a spirit of openess and modernity that is truly inspiring. I am learning that so much of what we know in the West about Arab culture is filtered by a worrying Islamophobic bias and that we can only really understand the nature of others’ faith my travelling and meeting with a wide range of people from different countries. It’s a statement of the blinding obvious of course, but the experience is very powerful and inspirational.
So what does this mean for Curious Minds? Well, I hope we can develop a wide range of contacts with international cultural partners. This link with the Gulf region is only a beginning. Most importantly I hope we can create opportunities for young people and cultural practitioners in the North West to participate in exchange programmes so that we can explore what global diversity really means. These people love education and the children are hungry for it – can we learn from Oman how we can generate that sort of appetite among our young people?
It’s two days before Christmas and just before I finish for the year let me welcome you to this new feature within the Curious Minds website. I hope to develop the discipline of sharing thoughts and ideas with you on a regular basis and would like to think that we might generate interesting discussions between us from time to time on a number of issues that interest us all. For the first three weeks of January I’ll be in the lucky position of taking part in a British Council Community Exchange programme with colleagues in Oman. This is a great opportunity for me to learn more about Education in a forward thinking Islamic country andhopefully to develop opportunities for exchanges between young people and artists from our two countries. I’ll try to provide updates while I’m there.
This has been an incredibly busy year for everyone at Curious Minds, as we’ve established ourselves as a new independent charity. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my incredibly hard working staff team for all their efforts, our funders for their continued support and all our partners in schools and in other settings across the North West and beyond for working creatively with us to achieve our shared aims. The year ahead presents us with many challenges and opportunities and I very much look forward to exploring them with you.
With my very best wishes for the festive season and the new year.
Chris May