In December I spoke at a Colloquium of the Experts Group (OMC) managed by DG Education and CultureSynergies with education, in particular arts education on learning in different forms of media edcuation. The event took place  the Genshagen Castle

I edit a series of literature reviews for Creativity, Culture and Education. The latest report by Ken Jones offers an historical and theoretical overview of the idea of culture as it has permeated policy-making, public debate, practices in schools and in more academic writing by scholars and cultural commentators. The idea of culture has been central to the Creative Partnerships offer, and as Ken Jones explains here, this is not a simple idea that can be turned into programmes as it encompasses a range of beliefs about heritage, modernity, the role of schools in mediating national and formal cultures and the cultural experiences of the young themselves. It examines changes in the political landscape and shows how deep changes in English society since the Second World War have re-fashioned notions of public, elite and popular cultures in contested and complex ways.

This article explores the term ‘learning lives’ by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo-based research group TransActions. By stressing the term ‘learning lives’ within a range of social ‘educational’ contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning and re-positioning of learner identity across these different ‘locations’. We emphasise how the individual learner relates to other people and objects, drawing on deeper trajectories or narratives of the self as its exists within and outside the immediate learning contexts, where we pay attention to processes occurring between people which we find significant for the ‘individual’ identity, literacy and learning. By doing so we hope to make explicit the mobilisation of resources within and across specific contexts, in the ‘learning lives’ of Norwegian youngsters.

I am speaking at this event in June outlining different models of media education I have been involved in: at school; youth centres’ expressive/creative youth looking especially at the role of parody and authenticity as different but complementary ways to support (and define) critical awareness. I will show examples from my work over the years and talk about the impact of digital technologies on this project and how/why future interventions are more challenging than those simply based in a school model.

The project brings together colleagues from Chile, Argentina and Peru.

In May I worked on a seminar as part of the Transactions work bringing together different perspectives on Learning Lives. We are now trying to develop this into Book proposal. Click here for a more detailed account of the the event.

This is the name of the 4 year research proposal I am working on as part of my work with the Transaction research group at the University of Oslo. We have just heard that we have received 4 year funding from the Research Council of Norway. More here as it unfolds

I have completed two pieces of work for Beyond Current Horizons. managed by Futurelabthis is a DCSF programme trying to imagine the future of Education through a series of research-based activities.

The first essay is located within the theme of Markets. It explores the relationship between the IT industries and the education system with a view to understanding how the mix of private sector interests and public provision might influence one another in the future. It considers the issues involved in looking at the role of markets in education and theorises the relationships of IT industries between and across education sectors. It draws the shape and structure of the IT marketplace in education looking at current trends. It then examines market drivers and looks at the implied teacher/lecturer; models of technological control versus aspirations for technological transformation; issues of supply and demand and tensions created by the relationship of capital versus revenue funding considering questions of market failure, key policy drivers and some of the issues relating to the differences between the development of open source and commercial growth. The final section explores questions for policy offering levers for change. These include evaluations of and responses to change models, the meaning of our interest in private and public relationships as a binary opposition, the role of the techno-elite and questions of market growth, failure, saturation and normalisation. A concluding section lays out possible directions for future scenarios focusing on the tensions between diversification and integration in the marketplace and an understanding of how this model impacts upon change within the education system.

The second essay is located under the theme heading “Creativity, Culture and Education. It considers the role of context and site in common understandings of learning in general and describes models of learning that exist as complement, supplement or remediation with ‚Äòstandard‚Äô versions of schooling especially those invoked by the idea of informal learning. It then looks at the ‚Äògeo-social‚Äô relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy trying to tease out what may or may not change in future scenarios to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities in all of these domains. The essay concludes by reflecting theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning -socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites.

I spoke last week at an event run by Some Other Way Forward which is a network of Arts Organisations based on the South Bank in London. The event brought together Schools in the local borough of Lambeth and Southwark to develop ways of continuing to work together in the face of possible cuts to the Arts/Education interface.

I am just off to the University of Oslo for a seminar with the research group Transaction. The programme aims develop common insights into learning across different social sites and brings together a diverse range of research interests.

Creative Partnerships have just published a booklet I edited about creative learning. The booklet takes the idea of creative learning at face value. Although the term is perhaps not widely used, perhaps like the idea of creativity itself, it is a kind of common-sense summing up an aspiration if not a precise scientific understanding. Whilst the essays interrogate the idea of creative learning seriously, the authors also acknowledge a necessary looseness to the term. My contribution tries to bring together three traditions:first, are the distinct and conjoined traditions of learning within discrete Art forms (Drama and Visual arts mainly) and how such separate traditions have become entwined in a more general notion of Arts education; secondly, is the current attention to the presentation of the self in schools and how creative learning supports the making of a different kind of students; and thirdly are those psychological traditions which focus on developing the mind.