05Oct
OK, so I heard Amal Rajan's Radical with Amal Rajan podcast the other day, and it was about the educational innovator Katherine Birbalsingh and her work on child-centred learning - and suggesting the radical changes I think we need in our whole education system - the shift we need from top-down (teacher-centric to bottom-up (student-centric)- from teacher-centred to student-centred. From Teaching to Learning.
By this I mean we should shift towards people learning by doing rather than doing what teacher says. This type of educational theory has a track record that has its roots in how young mammals learn - by playing and doing and following examples - and more recently in lessons from all the radical educational practitioners of the last couple of hundred years, including Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget and many others, including John Dewey, László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus and Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and El Lissitsky at the VhKutemas arts-centre in Moscow. These student-centred approaches - including the 19th century impact of the Government Design Schools, and the Arts & Crafts Movement in the UK. The first Government Design School became the famous Royal College of Art - and provided the basic model for further and higher art and design education in the UK.
(Katherine Birbalsingh: apostle of child-centred education strategies. - and below: the Walter Gropius designed curriculum diagram for the Bauhaus Basic course - the 'workshop' as the basis for for a modern craft/design education)
So, in the last 100-200 years or so, the success of student-centred, project-based learning in our art and design schools has resulted in Britain's Creative Industries growing into a sizable revenue-source for the UK, as indicated by this 2016 Government chart:
And of course our creative industries are constantly expanding, innovating and evolving to embrace new forms of content-creation, new media-technologies, new skills, revived old skills, and recognition of the importance of some craft-based skills long ignored or under-valued.
So, from more or less traditional craft-skills (hairdressing, make-up, dress-making, cooking, pottery, fabric-making, hospitality, woodwork, brick-laying, agriculture, forestry, jewelry-design, catering etc) to the more recent tech/cyber craft skills like Influencing, Content Creation, Blogging, Streaming-software design and distribution, expert-system design, VJing, DJing, Augmented-Reality, Video-projection,Virtual Reality, Large-Language model construction and application, Chatbot-design, and related network content design...
What has this to do with West Wight CultureFest? - Well its a methodology we will use to explore content-creation for the CultureFest - its what I mean by creating a bottom-up festival of culture and creativity. In other words we will set student projects (problems) to small groups of young creatives for them to solve as a team - we will want them to come up with ideas, develop them into public performances, shows, parades, competitions, extravaganzas, musicals, plays, stories, etc etc for inclusion in our CultureFest.
These people are just some representatives of our West Wight cultural heroes - we want students to explore, examine, illustrate, exhibit and performatively celebrate these great creatives - in as wide a range of mixed-media, theatrical, musical and digital-social media as possible. We will be recreating the idea of a cultural festival - come and join us.
We will be focussing on young people's creativity, not celebrity superstars - so come and help us create this bottom-up festival of the future,,,
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