I love working on my website. It's like re-arranging the living room shelves.
Very satisfying, frustrating, full of options and free.
Sometimes contrived and unbalanced, too much colour and slightly confused, other times enticing, joyful and full of expression.
In both cases I had a vision of stylish, contemporary calm until the unsophisticated reality of being me burst in and the random stuff appeared.
And I love it.
Another great learning experience this evening courtesy of Curious Minds as agents and practitioners came together to learn the jargon, explore the purpose of and our role in pupil tracking and assessment.
Of course, as well as the facts and figures there was collaborative creative activity - Can you tell what it is yet?
Or.......stuff I have learned about photographic documentation.
I love taking photographs. I have no great skill and don't entirely understand how to use my camera (ok, don't understand at all once it's not on full auto) but some people tell me that I take good photos and I am always chuffed to see how many people have used shots I have taken of them as profile photos on facebook.
These photos were taken yesterday at a wonderful CPD session at Cedars Infants. Dominic Kelly, a storyteller from Lancaster, will be working with welfare staff, TAs, parents and teachers over the next two terms on a whole school storytelling project which we hope will inspire a love of story, a passion for language and will raise the confidence and self-esteem of both adults and children. Yesterday's 3hr session provided all the school staff with an opportunity to play with stories, learn a little about the techniques of storytelling and build their confidence in anticipation of the project.
I hope that the photos capture some of the fun and energy of the day and that they communicate the beginning of our storytelling adventure together. Someone said yesterday that they were an example of how easy it is to document activities, and they were right. If I can do it, anyone can.
So, here's what I know (inspired by the lists of @marcusromer) - please feel free to add to the list!
There must be loads more - please, please add bits!
Oh, and I'll keep you up to date with the Storytelling Project. It's going to be a goodun!
It's been a fab couple of days and the common theme running throughout has been partnerships - particularly between people from diverse disciplines and sectors.
Essentially, the past two days have been full of really useful and inspiring conversations and plans with people from education, arts organisations, business, heritage and local authorities. I continue to be blown away by the wonderful things that happen when you put a group of people with different skills and experience together and start to talk about the things in life that really matter - about fairness, belonging, love, hope, rights and learning.
Yesterday, I sat in a room with a teacher, storyteller and head teacher and we talked about what we value and what we do and the connections we made were powerful. Together we formed the foundation for a fantastic Creative Partnerships project which will help to extend young children's vocabulary and consequently their life chances. I didn't know until yesterday that a child's vocabulary aged four can be directly linked to their future success as adults, and Rachel and Jackie told us that many of the children who start at their infant school aged four have a vocabulary of a two year old. The school invests incredible time and energy into ensuring that their children have the very best chances in life and this project will add to their work by bringing a new set of skills and experience to the mix. Over the next few months we are going to work with storyteller Dominic Kelly to help teachers, welfare staff, TAs, SSAs and parents to become confident storytellers enabling children to access the magic language of stories that many of us take for granted (me included).
Those two hours we devoted to sharing philosophy and practice and opening up our minds to new possibilities mean that this project will never be just about storytelling. This is about changing children's lives and about ensuring they have equal access to a rich and diverse vocabulary which will help them to express themselves, understand other people, engage more fully with learning, understand jokes and conversations, form and espress opinions, contribute to groups and to the world. As we said to each other many times yesterday 'No pressure then!' but it's that pressure that will ensure that we each fully contribute our skills, imagination and heart to the project. It's that important.
And #artsfunding made it happen.
Well, that's not quite how it happened. I did some drawing and enjoyed it (I will upload some tomorrow), but most of the week was spent enjoying valuable time with the family and I loved that. Drawing is quite a solitary pursuit for me and it just didn't feel right to remove myself from the group.
My most creative moment during the week was putting my three year old niece to bed. She starts pre-school tomorrow and has spent the week role-playing different situations she might encounter and persuading the adults around her to take on different roles (particularly that of her new teacher, Mrs Williams).
As I put her to bed she said 'Mam sometimes tells me a story about a school trip with Mrs Williams' and off we went on a school trip to the zoo.
All that mattered in those moments was the story, and with a huge pair of eyes staring expectantly over the duvet I drew on all my experience, imagination and creativity to improvise a story which would keep her engaged without over-exciting her, help her visualise school without being too prescriptive and would give her opportunities to contribute and influence the story. As someone who doesn't have children this was a first for me and I am now full of admiration for parents who improvise stories every day. Eoin told me that when he was a child, he and his brother thought their Dad was magic because every night he would ask them what they wanted a story about and whatever they said he could tell them a story on that theme. Magic, really magic.
So my creativity has definitely been re-ignited on this holiday, not by drawing but by using my imagination to help a three year old get ready for school.
I have spent three days this week sitting in lessons at St Mary's in Blackpool drawing and photographing creativity in the classroom. The idea of the project is to explore, record and share creative teaching and learning in the school to inform the Creative Partnerships planning process for next year, an integral part of St Mary's vision for a creative future. It's been a fascinating process and I think will inform my practice as much as I hope it will contribute to St Mary's.
What's really moved me has been the response of both teachers and pupils to having their activities drawn. My presence has been welcomed and people seem appreciative of both that and my efforts. The feedback has been positive and people seem genuinely touched that someone has taken the time to come and draw their activities, and as I have sat and listened, observed and interpreted, my drawings have provided an opening for many conversations.
'What are you doing Miss?' 'Are you an artist, Miss?' 'Is that Miss, Miss?' 'Shannon, Miss has drawn you, come and look', 'Do you have to go to college to do your job, Miss?'.
Had I sat in a corner with a clipboard I am sure no-one would have voluntarily come and talked to me about their lessons and creativity, what they love to do and how their Aunty is a great artist, but sitting and drawing prompted curiosity and friendliness and I now have pupils chatting to me in the corridor and shouting 'Hello Miss' as I pass (generally lost in the corridors between technology and science).
I have chatted to some of the quietest children in the classes (particularly boys) who stand next to me and generally comment on the pens I am using before telling me how much they love to draw or teach me how to draw hands (I used to be quite good at hands, not any more) and we talk about art and anime and the best fineliner pens. I have really enjoyed our conversations and I hope they have too.
I also loved that, as I was leaving school yesterday, one of the louder girls shouted 'Hey, Miss, you should be an artist' and as I walked to the car I walked just that bit taller. and thought, 'Yeah, maybe I should be.'
One of the activities during the day was 'Looking Back' with each group presented with a box of objects which would be discovered 100 years from now and which tell the story of how St Mary's became the most creative school in the country in 2014. The objects were random, some had a clear use others quite abstract and it was fascinating to see how the groups of young people coped with taking an abstract concept (imagining a truly creative school of the future, transporting themselves 100 years into the future and looking back) and then taking their ideas and exploring how objects could help communicate that story.
I was also really interested to see how this group of students managed working in a much more open, collaborative and exploratory way - with support and guidance from teachers, but working very much independently. Throughout the day they coped well and everyone found a way to contribute, but at times groups and individuals struggled and needed far more input from adults. I was really impressed by the way the teachers stepped back and assessed when they were needed and when they should let young people find the way themselves. This is a really valuable skill and the approach enabled young people to take risks and express themselves within a safe and supportive environment.
We aspire to create learning environments which provide space for exploration, curiosity and risk-taking, and sometimes it is a real challenge for both pupils and teachers to adapt to this way of working. I did reasonably well in school, and a contributing factor is that I worked well and felt comfortable in a traditional classroom environment. Had I been put in the environment the young people found themselves in on Tuesday, how would I have coped? Would I have sat quietly, worried about getting it wrong and feeling lost, or would I have contributed to the sessions? I hope I would have participated fully, and looking back I think the skills that I needed to do so would more likely have been developed outside the classroom (at Guides, at the local church youth club, from being in a community opera or the netball team) than sitting in the classroom, listening to information and being tested on my knowledge. I wonder what I would be doing now had I not had the opportunity to be part of these groups and had I not been fortunate enough to have parents who did everything they could to support my interests.
Changing how we teach and learn is not going to happen overnight. It is going to require hard work, imagination, resiliance, collaboration and support and I suspect will be an ever evolving process as the world changes and young people have to be ready to take on the challenges of adult life. You only have to watch shift happens http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNutcmyShW4 to see how different the world is now than when any of us left school (and this is a presentation which is a couple of years old now - who knows what has happened since).
I still have more time to spend with the school and will be sitting in on lessons, drawing, photographing and chatting and I will probably keep blogging about the process. I am really enjoying being part of the St Mary's story and am currently wondering what archaeologists might find on the site in the future and how they would interpret those objects.
I have an urge to plant something really obscure just to confuse them!
