Curious Minds

 Last Tuesday our principal funder Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) supported us in holding the second in a series of seminars hosted by Creative Partnerships Schools of Creativity. These seminars aim to bring together classroom based examples, academic reflection and experimental practice in a twilight CPD session, and are designed to be of interest to leading practitioners, Creative Agents and experienced teachers from both within and beyond the Creative Partnerships programme.

As is always the case, Accrington Academy were excellent hosts and worked closely with us to deliver a session that was designed to promote dialogue and debate on the theme of developing cohesive and connected learning communities. We wanted to explore how key elements of practice developed within the CP programme could be transferred to other programmes and how this transfer can impact on the development of innovative practice. The particular subject focus was on work related to the Government’s Preventing Violent Extremism (Prevent) strategy, and community cohesion initiatives, both of which are being proactively addressed in highly original ways by Accrington Academy. An idea we wanted to test in the seminar was whether building ‘connected and cohesive’ schools – that is schools where authentic connections based on genuine dialogue between pupils and their peers, teachers and pupils, teachers and other teachers and the school and its community, with these connections facilitated by rich programmes of creative learning – is realistic in the current educational context. We started the seminar with a provocation from students at the Academy in the form of an audio presentation – they asked four questions which reflected the subjects they want to talk about and that they feel are perhaps not given enough space in education. They asked:

Culture, what culture – does Britain have a culture?

Community – what is our community?

Safe, how safe? To feel safe in our community should we take risks?

 Us, who us? Do you really know us and are you really ready to let us decide what we talk about?

And we added a fifth – How can schools build connected learning communities?

Following this, seminar participants moved into a large space where they were invited to participate in a couple of short creative workshops designed to generate interesting responses to the questions posed by young people.

• William Titley’s workshop explored the nature of community through devising a happy families style card game.

• Sean Creagh delved deep into a surreal world exploring risk, using a mixture of children’s toys, a risk questionnaire, an expression of losses and gains arising from risk and an encounter with the ‘kiln of fear’.

• Our good friend Abbas Shah, (he touchingly brought with him his Passport to Creativity which was sent to him as an invitation to our original Creative Partnerships launch event five years ago!) explored connections by encouraging people to build interconnected 3 dimensional structures.

• Matt Davies provoked discussion about listening to young people, inviting guests to paint significant words on gigantic sheets of wall-mounted paper.

• Shahida Ahmed explored ‘does Britain have a culture’ by constructing a large outline of Britain on the floor and inviting participants to construct simple structures symbolising their ideas and the connections between them.

The atmosphere in the hall was terrific and much conversation was generated in a spirit of playfulness and fun. After sharing a few reflections on the experience, we moved back into the discussion room and listed to three short presentations about Prevent-related practice.

Superintendent Andy Pratt from Lancashire Constabulary (funders of The Art of Prevention project that we ran in Lancashire schools last year), shared his thoughts on how creative approaches were helping schools engage in an agenda which is fraught with difficulties and complexity. Briefly setting out the evolving nature of extremist threat to our society (which increasingly features attacks or attempted attacks from far right fascist groups), Andy urged school partners to make Prevent their business and extolled the value of creative approaches to this work.

Andy O’Brien, Deputy Head at Accrington Academy and Jez Dolan, their School of Creativity Creative Agent, then told the story of their involvement in the Art of Prevention and subsequent linked projects. It was clear from their narrative that, difficult as this work is, there is a real appetite among young people for engaging in challenging conversations and that generating an authentic dialogue in the school and with the surrounding community is generating exciting opportunities for learning.

I rounded off this session setting out what I feel are the key principles that we apply to all our projects, many of which we’ve learned about from our delivery of Creative Partnerships. Other ideas in this list are grounded in our philosophy of growing cultural capital through community development while growing social capital through cultural development. I shared a draft version of this in an earlier posting, but here is the latest version of these principles.

The Curious Minds approach

All projects are designed in response to the specific needs of our funding partners and are grounded in principles of partnership and collaboration. We do not offer ‘off-the-shelf’ packages, preferring instead to co-develop programmes with the people with whom we are working, in order that the results lead to sustained change. Our approach is characterised by the following stages:

1. We approach every programme with an attitude of respect, humility, care and sensitivity
2. We develop our understanding of the context in which we will be working, consulting with partners to be aware of political and social drivers, local histories, demographics and dynamics.
3. We map existing assets, researching the area in which we are working to better understand the physical and social infrastructure, aiming to identify and value those assets.
4. We identify and recruit local champions and leaders, aiming to develop the capacity of existing leaders, grow local assets and empower community members.
5. We establish a meaningful presence by being creative, interested and interesting.
6. We develop relationships, focus on listening and demonstrate the ability to connect, engage and involve.
7. We work with partners to identify gaps and barriers to progress, and find ways for the community to overcome these themselves.
8.  We co-create needs based programmes of activity tailored specifically to the context.
9. We work in a purposeful manner which leads to tangible outcomes that everyone can understand. We constantly broaden the range of partners involved, the types of activity on offer and the breadth of experience available.
10. We carefully evaluate impact, learning, change and distance travelled. Ensuring objectives are shared and fully owned. We encourage everyone to see everything as an opportunity for learning and build quality by reflecting on success and failure, constantly adapting and changing in response to changing needs and informed feedback.
11.  We celebrate progress, welcome visitors, share learning in networks and publicise successes widely.
12.  We ensure developments and changes are sustained and sustainable.

 Following these presentations, the final session of the seminar was a group discussion where participants shared ideas that the provocation, workshops and presentations had stimulated. The pressures that schools are constantly under from government, which commonly make it difficult to generate the necessary time for authentic dialogue in schools, inevitably were at the fore. I rounded off proceedings with a list of the factors I feel are necessary to bring about the sort of changes that will enable schools to become connected and cohesive learning communities.

• Determined and distributed leadership

• A long-term and whole school commitment to change

• Creative teaching and learning across the school, based on dialogue and co-constructed learning

• A shift in power and control – young people’s voice respected, valued and acted upon

• An outward facing school – connected through rich and diverse partnerships

• Activity fully integrated into curriculum planning

 The detail of this conversation can be found soon at CCE’s website where a report of the seminar, together with a podcast of discussions and presentations will be available.

So what did we learn? Time will tell, but hopefully participants went away with a clearer sense of the ways in which creative learning techniques can stimulate discussion about difficult issues and how schools can become more cohesive and connected in their approach to teaching and learning. At times there was a degree of reticence from some of the teachers present, which may of course simply be a reflection that this event took place at the end of another busy day’s teaching – but I wonder whether, in the current climate, that the challenge of talking about contentious issues, with young people’s views really at the heart of the conversation, is still just too difficult to do in school.

Many thanks again to Accrington Academy, CCE, all our other partners, practitioners, visual note takers Jennie and Claire and all the seminar participants for making this event a success.

For more information about Curious Minds’ work on Prevent please go to: www.curiousminds.org.uk

For details of this and other seminars in the series visit CCE’s website at: http://www.creativitycultureeducation.org/

Chris May

Core2

An opportunity to visit the Whitworth Gallery is always very welcome, and on Tuesday it was the venue for the second Cultural Offer Regional Event. I’m a member of the Regional Cultural Offer Development Group and alongside colleagues from the Arts Learning Consortium, The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, North West Vision & Media, MLA, The Centre for Urban Education and Arts Council North West, have been involved in planning this event for some months now. Building on the success of last year’s event at Haydock Race course, representatives from cultural organisations and local authorities gathered to find out about the progress has been made in Find Your Talent pathfinder areas in the North – Leeds, North & South Tyneside, Liverpool City Region and Bolton – and in the non-pathfinder local authorities who maintain a commitment to developing an entitlement to rich cultural provision for children and young people. It’s fair to say that the cultural sector was very well represented while local authority support, especially at a senior level was pretty thin on the ground. But at the same time it was equally apparent that a huge amount of work needs to happen for the cultural sector to be fully capable of delivering a universal cultural offer that fully puts the needs of children and young people at its heart.

A group of inspiring young people involved in projects across the region kicked off the event with a superb provocation. Their message resonated with my long held belief that access to high quality culture is a rights issue and as professionals we should concentrate our efforts on empowering young people to make active choices about cultural participation – thereby building their capacity to make other choices in their lives.

Their key messages were:

• Simple is good
• Do less, but better
• Develop effective central information points
• Recycle and renew ideas
• Communicate brilliantly

Sarah Gbeleyi, a young woman from Manchester who is involved in a number of arts projects and who has been ably supported by Community Arts North West, worked with me in the two breakout groups in which I was involved and made a really valuable contribution to proceedings. Sarah was really good at reminding us that it is really important to carefully capture starting points within evaluation processes, in order to fully understand any gains that take place and that young people need to be helped to progress onto further activities once their enthusiasm has been stimulated. It’s too often the case that projects achieve great things but then leave young people stranded, with expectations raised, together with a confusing sense of what might be next. Throughout the conversation Sarah challenged us to keep young people at the core of our thinking – it was invaluable for us to have her in the group.

In the breakout group that I helped facilitate, there was a very real sense that the cultural sector needs to work much harder with partners to measure and report impact more effectively. We’ve all known about this for a while now and its frustrating that progress seems so slow. Curious Minds has a wealth of experience in this area that we are happy to share with others – do get in touch if you want to share thinking.

…and if you’ve a chance to get to the Whitworth, check out their fantastic exhibition on wallpaper – Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture The first major UK exhibition of artists’ wallpapers with work by over 30 artists including Andy Warhol, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. It is fantastic.

http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/wallsaretalking/

Chris May