The Unmattering Museum

‘Unmattering’ is a word dreamt up by Pae White and woven into this installation at the South London Gallery. The threads give the word the appearance of matter but it remains as unsolid as the word itself. The artist suffers from insomnia and this word came to her in the early hours. It seemed to have great significance but she couldn’t pin down its meaning.

There’s a vogue for putting Un- in front of words to suggest a not-negative disruption, or a reinvention, of that thing. I’m involved in the Uncivilisation festival, which seeks new (or old) stories for rethinking civilisation at a time of crisis. At the MuseumNext conference in Amsterdam in my talk about future scenarios for museums I posited the idea of an Unmuseum. This could be a museum that would thrive by not being a museum as we know it.

The word ‘unmattering’ is slippery. It’s either, ‘relax it doesn’t matter anymore’; something losing its relevance; or a process of dematerialisation and remaking. I wondered, is unmattering happening to museums, perhaps in several different ways?

This question floated around through themes at the conference, through my walks round the city and visits to museums. Virtuality seemed to keep cropping up, partly because some of my visits didn’t quite happen, partly because there were so many dimensions of unreality in the experiences I did have.

I managed properly to get to four museums: the Van Gogh, the Eye, the Stedelijk, and Re:mbrandt – All his paintings.

I didn’t visit the Amsterdam Museum because three people on my route there (including the museum’s own shop staff when I was just on the threshold of going in) said ‘Are you sure you want to go there? Go to the Rijksmuseum instead!’

So, full of expectation of seeing its revamped facilities recently opened with spectacular fanfare, I set off. However, they wouldn’t even let me in the door with my small travel bag. So, of the real Rijksmuseum, I only have this virtual museum in my mind built from social media buzz about the opening and from hazy memories of carrying a grizzling tot into it in 2001. On the other hand, I have its amazing website to enjoy. Peter Gorgels spoke at the conference about their innovative approach to presenting the collection online. I love the way you can interact with each work, by selecting a portion to like, tagging the image, downloading it, getting creative, finding works by a colour code and so on. It’s brilliant. Why would I want to go to the museum? But, actually, it makes me want to go even more and I’m so frustrated I didn’t get in.

I’d long wanted to visit the Van Gogh Museum because I have a soft spot for his vivid paintings. I know something of that feeling, from childhood, of seeing wind throwing leafy branches, cornfields and clouds around, and knowing that it’s all alive. I had tried to visit the museum in 2001 but by that stage of the day my daughter was in full temper tantrum mode. I made it there this time due to conference drinks. The director, Axel Ruger, spoke about the emotion in Van Gogh’s work and I felt quite simply moved to see the paintings directly. And because of technology, I was given evidence, if I needed it, that he was really there painting what he saw. One painting, of women mending nets in sand dunes painted en plein air was accompanied by a close-up photo of the windblown sand caught in the paint.

The Van Gogh Museum is the quintessential museum experience. We have built up this man as a legend. We see him looking at us everywhere in Amsterdam, blown up as a giant on building hoardings, and tiny on fridge magnets. The museum gives you what you expect but enhances it with unfamiliar works and varied displays to surprise you and contextualise his life and work.

The museum has decided to let visitors take photos of the works, although, because they receive 5000 visitors a day, they are worried about the proliferation of these images online. Also, there are concerns about a sense of devaluation of the real experience. Perhaps you look at the ‘flesh’ of the work less and feel less emotion when you’re intent on taking a photo.

Some of us took photos of ourselves by ‘the sunflowers’, just to play with the expectation that we would. Also, sunflowers had been on the agenda from a presentation by Erin Maochu of MOSI about an amazing participatory project on sunflowers, Fibonacci and Turing. That, alongside Tony Butler talking about the Happy Museum Project, made my day.

The next day I went to The Eye. This is a new Netherlands Film Institute building with cinemas, exhibitions and in the Basement are free interactive displays about the history of film.

It’s a really stunning white building jutting this way and that, with a big glassy cafe overlooking the water. It’s a landmark building on the riverfront of North Amsterdam, reachable by a free ferry. You get the sense that there is a hope or plan for other cultural developments to accrete around it. However, given that so many Dutch cultural organisations were recently cut by the Government, these are not going to be publicly funded very quickly.

This really is a building out of a mind, designed by Delugen Meissl, and supposedly making many connections with ideas in film. More and more these days, new cultural buildings are like computer graphics come to life, as if sprung out of a giant 3D printer. In this phenomenon, the building is part of the marketing, designed to look good in photographs. Yes, attention is given at design stages to the flow of people around spaces but it’s all so optimised. I sense that they don’t think how it feels when you’re crossing a vast empty museum square with a hungry or bored child. Or how when you’re climbing an excitingly ziggy zaggy staircase you feel dizzy with your exhaustion. What I most felt was missing here was nature, whether in reality in greenery or in imagery of living things and bodies. It was like being in a set from a sci-fi film.

I was a little bit disappointed in the interactive displays. They were hard to find, if you didn’t know that ‘Basement’ was their name and location. The pods were nice to sit in and I enjoyed watching an old documentary about Holland in the 50s. I did enjoy the main room too, with a neat system for allowing you to choose clips of archive film.

But I did want more for the general visitor. I imagine it’s great if you go regularly, are a member of its club and can use the cinema. Film is an inherently virtual medium but there are also so many possibilities for creating spatial and immersive cinematic experiences with film heritage. They have succeeded in their experiment in the central room, a little less so in the pods, but I would have liked more richness, variety, information, more to play with and more human interaction.

I’ll be quick in describing my visit to the Stedelijk. It felt comfortable, like slipping into a warm bath, which is exactly what the new extension to the building looks like! Many of the works are familiar to me from my years of studying Art History and because so much is similar to the Tate’s collection. The contemporary displays seemed rather etiolated, as if the curators were afraid of putting too much in the space. It was a peaceful wander in cool beige light, windows veiled from the outdoors, taking in modernist artworks reducing reality down to its forms and concepts within a minimalist space.

The fourth museum I got to wasn’t a museum, it was a permanent exhibition. This was Re:mbrandt: All his paintings. This is an extraordinary collection of ALL his ‘paintings’ together, so you get a great sense of his working output over time. They are large high quality digitally restored reproductions, combined with a good deal of interpretation. The restoration means that there’s no effect of raking light distracting your gaze, and many of them are supported by x-ray images to show pentimenti and so on. Now, sometimes when I’ve seen real Rembrandts, I’ve gasped and then had this feeling of a kind of settling melancholy. There is such a presence of a person, although you know it’s an effect of shadow and despite the visible texture of paint. With this experience, I gasped often, but it was more at the abundance of images and their clarity. After my quick visit, I would have loved to see all the digital images online so I could return to study it some more.

Despite its location in a shopping mall in the city centre and despite this enticing image, recalling the famous Amsterdam sight of an unclothed woman behind window bars, the exhibition was pretty empty. This is a private enterprise, part of the Rembrandt Research Project. I think they should put all of the same content on a high quality website, and charge for access or provide free access for those who have paid to see the exhibition.

There was also an exhibition in the Beurs van Berlage, of screen-based and digital reproductions of Van Gogh’s work. I didn’t see this, which is odd because it wasn’t promoted to us although our conference was in the same building. But Mia Ridge and Suse Cairns wrote a blogpost about the issues that arose from it, in response to Jasper Visser who had helped organise it (?) and they hadn’t seen it either!

Part of the conference fringe was a talk by Maaike Roozenburg about her Smart Objects projects. She works with museums to ‘reverse engineer’ museum objects (such as ceramic teacups) to see if they can be returned to use and therefore better understood. The finished outputs bear the traces of both the original history and of the processes of scanning and reproduction. They are very beautiful and it’s a very thought provoking project. I felt though that they remain ghosts of the past, much more about the technology now than about the material and contextual history then. To ‘reverse engineer’ a historic object, you must also somehow recreate the webs of social and material interaction from its original time.

This talk was part of an event called Heritage Sells. In Holland, it seems, there is less coyness about the commercial enterprise of heritage. Local heritage inspiration is everywhere in the independent shops and cafes (see the photo below for a typical display). This is perhaps more so than in London or Paris retail and design, which are perhaps more internationalist or colonial in their heritage references. I loved walking round Amsterdam’s canals and streets, which were designated a World Heritage Site in 2010.  I also went on a bike with locals to visit a demo garden of urban permaculture and to find out how people were coping with change in the city.

In the end, much as I liked the museums, exploring the past and present of the city was so much more fun, informative and exciting. There was fresh air, yet there were always cyclists to dodge so it felt like being in a computer game. You can peer into people’s homes as there are no curtains, so you are almost living in their world.

I wonder what digital tools can do to really enhance this experience and deepen your learning of a place as you go? And what role do museums have to play in helping us explore the real world? Is that how museums can matter more?

Tony Butler reflected on MuseumNext that ‘Much of the talk I hear from museum leaders is how do we keep going, at MuseumNext the tone is how do we go some place else.’ On the last night of the conference, I had a great chat with Lone Hedegaard Kristensen from Meaning Making Experience, a digital support organisation for small museums in Denmark. We talked about how there are two tendencies in the museum digital sector: One is to enhance and extend the museum as brand/box/experience. The second is to enhance and extend the ‘whole internet’ through more museum-like experiences, or exploiting museum assets, or to deliver museum functions in alternative and perhaps more efficient ways. The first tendency occupies the great majority of time. It leads to lots of innovation that may be scary for non-digital people in museums, but in fact it’s incredibly tame compared with what is possible if we fully unleashed the second tendency. This is all about a positive ‘unmattering’ – showing how heritage really matters today and keeping it alive.

One final word: The organisers of the MuseumNext conference should be congratulated on always managing to conjure up such a convivial event, everything of such a high standard and such inspiring case studies.

Learning Planet progress

I’ve managed to find a day or two over Easter to do more research and planning for my book. I’ve produced a questionnaire, and I’m really keen for this to spread far and wide so I can get a general sense for what people think is effective learning and so that I can source some really interesting case studies. Please take a look, fill it in and/or spread it around:

I’ve reconsidered the structure, so that it will highlight the key principles of effective learning rather than make artificial distinctions between different kinds of learning organisation. Below is a short summary outline. Each of the main chapters will include three main case studies, and I’m very keen to hear suggestions of what groups I should be telling stories about.

Prologue: Why read this book?

This draws in the reader by asking them to reflect on their experiences of learning, both formal and informal. I articulate my own passion for this research, how I came to the point of writing this, including why I think the acceleration, the scaling up and ecological orientation of learning are so essential. The reader is invited and guided to apply what they learn from this book to their own lives and organisations.

Chapter one: How have people come to learn as they do?

This is a very brief overview of what is known about social learning. It covers human evolution as hunters spreading across the planet then agrarians, basic knowledge about learning in the brain and neuroscience, and explaining what is meant by cultural evolution and social learning, using examples in history such as the challenges of forced migrations over centuries, or the role of innovative centres in the Modern Age such as Coffee Houses in the Enlightenment and the Pioneer Centre in Peckham.

Thereafter, the book will be organised in five substantial sections based on the five factors (Five Ps) that drive successful learning communities (four Ps), weaving in findings from interviews and research. Each chapter will contain around four sub-sections, including an introduction and three stories.

Chapter two: Plurality

Learning in ways and situations that are plural, or diverse

Plural models of learning assume a culture of acceptance of others, as opposed to ‘identity thinking’ (i.e. being identical). Learning in a diverse culture is likely to be seen as opening doors to infinite possibilities, deviating from normality, rather than instructing and moulding a person to be the same. A plural approach encourages learning through diverse experiences, from diverse resources and people. It aims to produce diverse ideas and outcomes, including generating biodiversity.

Chapter three: Peer to peer

Learning by sharing between peers

Peer-to-peer models are not mainstream in formal education but many educationalists recognise the motivational benefits of various ‘paragogic’ approaches. People learn more enthusiastically when their teacher is a little more able than they are, when the teacher demonstrates that they are still learning and when there is a relationship of equality. This kind of learning develops emotional and relational capacities. This goes hand in hand with an open commons, where knowledge is freely gifted in the hope of mutual returns.

Chapter four: Play

Learning through open-ended experiment, joyful exuberance and imagination.

Play is how children learn if they have their will, which means that it is also how adults learn too, if they have their will. However, in the conventional mind, play is the opposite of learning: Being ‘ready to learn’ means that children are physically able to sit still and to focus on symbolisation of word and number. Freedom to play means to allow learners to act without fixed outcomes, accepting failure. Ideal settings for play are full of diversity, whether cultural or natural stimuli, but they balance these stimuli with provision of free time and open space.

Chapter five: Praxis

Learning through practice in real and meaningful situations

Praxis is a familiar idea in learning theory, but as schools become more protective and results-driven, and work places become more abstracted from nature, we see less and less praxis in effect. Praxis is increasingly hypothetical or replaced with highly artificial games. Effective praxis has three dimensions: Creativity (opportunities to take risks, produce new ideas etc); Co-operation (working with others to solve real problems for mutual outcomes); Contextualisation (especially referencing local and global ecologies).

Chapter six: Planet

Learning in order to restore and sustain life

Most thinking about the purpose of learning doesn’t go nearly far enough, including most alternative socially-oriented thinking. In both conservative and socialist models, the purpose is individual achievement, whether to generate economic capital (usually for a nation state) or general wellbeing and flexibility for the individual. I believe the purpose of learning should be to generate biosphere capital, through the generation of cultural and economic capital.

Chapter seven: What next?

What can we learn from these stories of learning? What was surprising to me? What gives me most hope? What can educational organisations and policymakers take away from this? What can we do now to increase learning to transform our communities so that we can restore the biosphere?

Questions about One Object Per Child

Nick Poole has just proposed this idea on the Collections Trust blog. In a nutshell, it’s the idea of giving plastic reproductions of iconic museum objects to all schoolchildren, using 3D printers. I can see why the idea got under Nick’s skin. I tried to leave a comment but it wasn’t sticking, so I’ve pasted it here for the time being:

I love these kinds of big experimental proposals – I’ve been missing them in my life. I’m not objecting to the idea, but I am raising a few more questions to which I don’t have answers. 1) The most important – what is the environmental impact of producing and shipping 7 million plastic objects which haven’t been requested? 2) What is the educational value of a not-to-scale reproduction in one material, compared to the possible value of exploring a range of objects in authentic materials in museums, in the natural & built environment and well reproduced online? 3) What is the value of having a small selection of 10 objects, which may become over-familiar – compared to what they have now which is potential access to millions of interconnected objects online and in the real world? 4) What is the value of having an object that is very likely static and uninteractive – compared to toys or craft materials etc that they can manipulate and reconstruct?
Some other concerns:

How you would ensure that the selection represented a broad enough range of cultures and ideas? How would you select and use these objects to explore contexts and connections? How you would ensure that it wasn’t seen to suffice or replace broader exploration of cultural collections? Does giving plastic reproductions enhance a sense of value of the original, or cheapen it by its multiplication and possession? Given that museum artefacts are already decontextualised by being in a museum, does this create a further remove? Is there too great an emphasis on having, holding and claiming heritage into your own place, rather than stewarding what is ours in common but leaving it in its own place? How does the idea of giving objects/tools that haven’t been created or chosen by children (with the hope that they will be transformed) fit with progressive notions about education, that children need to find their element and be actively involved in making choices?

It’s interesting that this has come at the same time as news that Google is giving a Raspberry Pi to every school in the land. Much as I believe in the value of children learning programming, I suspect they may gather dust and would prefer that Google paid tax properly so that we could fund schools effectively.

So, perhaps, it would be more creative and sustainable to team up with Google and DfE to ensure that masses of schools can obtain a 3D printer (if they want one and can prove good use of it), combined with good access and advice on using cultural collections online, as well as model projects to explore all the ways that children can programme, interpret and recreate cultural heritage with 3D printers.

When is the right time?

This is a very brief post because I want to know what you think. I’m very interested in the question: At what age do we start talking with children about the unfolding environmental catastrophe? Do we cover it up and make life as good as we can for now, or do we start to prepare them, in a combination of therapy, practical survival skills and enlisting them in active resistance? How do we overcome our own denial, however constructive it is, and listen to the alarm bells ringing with our children?

Please comment below….I have no clear answers. I do have some thoughts which can partly be seen in this post Children and the Olympic Century.

Also, click on the Comments link to reveal them and read them, as they are all really interesting.

The photo is of an adult & young child watching one of Feral Theatre’s Funerals for Lost Species, which mourn irretrievable extinctions of iconic species.

A final quick note: It looks as if this organisation, the Climate Psychology Alliance, may add some useful resources on how not to overwhelm children but to give them agency. They are calling for resources and articles so if you have anything to share with them, get in touch.

Learning on the edge

Yesterday I went to the London Festival of Education. It kicked off with Michael Gove being questioned on ‘what does an educated person look like?’ and that was the main theme for the day.

Many 100s of teachers and people otherwise interested in education packed into the Institute of Education. In our goodie bags was a mug, which I assumed was provided for us to drink from in an environmentally responsible manner. It turned out I was the deviant, but nobody else was copying me. I found only one other person all day not using throwaway cups. (Incidentally, that was David Rycroft from the Mind with Heart charity, which develops mindfulness and compassion in education.)

I was there to talk and discover about the potential to promote positive deviance in education and to discuss ideas for how the Council of Europe/EU Edgeryder‘s initiative could support learning for resilience, in the coming crisis. Positive deviance is an approach to development work, started by Jerry Sternin, that identifies nonconformist behaviours with successful results (e.g. parents giving children food not normally considered suitable for children, during times of famine). The model encourages communities to share their positive deviant behaviours to overcome challenges. Deviance isn’t about being weird, it’s about being responsive to changes in the environment and trying out tactics to see what works.

Michael Gove purports to give teachers freedom to be positively deviant (though he doesn’t use that term), which is his main lure to schools to leave local authority control and become academies. At the same time, he is creating a wholly new framework of curriculum, assessment, inspection and funding that encourages conformity to a very traditional and academic paradigm. Although Gove had a surprising amount of applause in his interview at the Festival, there is a growing movement in the educational establishment (not just the deviants) criticising Gove for being out of touch. For example, Louise Robinson of the Girls School Association (private schools) said that schools should prepare pupils for the ‘Star Trek society’ not the bygone days of the 1950s.

Although I agree that education needs to be future-facing, in my session, I questioned this sparkling vision of a Star Trek society. I pointed out that exploiting people and natural resources to accumulate wealth have spawned a comprehensive disaster that is not so much imminent as unfolding now. Although we might be able to imagine the most educated people of the future with lovely resilient, peaceful, benevolent and creative qualities, it might be more accurate to say that in 20-50 years time, we will identify the most educated people by the fact that they will still be alive. The utter priority for those of us who care about how children will become these still-living people is how to engender resilience, how to help them get the means to thrive in a world where there may not be jobs or ready access to food, and when the default mode of relationship may be conflict over few resources.  The utter priority for our leaders will be to create safe spaces for humanity and biodiversity to thrive.

This process will be full of tension and uncertainty. In the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, the teacher talks about a coming flood due to melting ice caps, telling the kids they’re going to have to learn how to survive. The survival teaching that follows swings between ‘beasting’ (being strong e.g. in hunting and killing animals) and ‘caring for anything sweeter and smaller than yourself’. They, as we all do, have to navigate both. We can misunderstand each other’s intentions when we decide to beast or to care. This relates to a bigger challenge to human identity: Are we beasts who depend on eating other beasts for survival, or are we animals with a distinctive responsibility as stewards to regenerate nature?

Edgeryders is a ground breaking initiative from the Council of Europe and EU, focusing on how young people can thrive in the economic and environmental crisis, given difficulties for Europe’s young people including rising unemployment and homelessness. It began with a social network and conference and is now widening its mandate, creating a ‘platform’ to support projects that develop resilience in areas to do with education, skills, social enterprise, technology and so on. This photo is from the first conference, at which there emerged two quite different political worldviews:

Social democracy: If you don’t give people jobs, houses and cheap energy too many people will suffer and there will be social unrest. (In this view, education is about preparing you to play a role in a functioning society.)

Radical: Yes, we need the means to survive but not if it involves privatisation and loss of freedoms. If you give people jobs and houses but in the process destroy green space, deplete nature and worsen climate change, that means billions of people dying and maybe all of us. (In this view, education as currently organised can’t hope to prepare us for a non-functioning society.)

The first worldview is the most mainstream, but is still often considered by Conservatives as radical. The second worldview, the ‘even more radical’, relates to what I think of as positively deviant behaviours, for example, reusing empty shops, growing food in forgotten pieces of land or educating children outside of school.

The challenge now is for an accommodation to be reached between mainstream social democracy and alternative radicalism, and Edgeryders is shaping up to be a vehicle for that process. Part of this work needs to address how educational institutions can support ‘learning on the edge’. In discussion with some other contributors to Edgeryders, such as Eimhin David, and based on my own research, described below are three dimensions of ‘learning on the edge’.

Just to clarify what is meant by edge, it has two aspects. One refers to crisis – it is the precarious edge of ‘business as usual’ that we are walking tentatively along, which we could cling to, clamber down from (managed descent) or jump off. The other dimension refers to margins of systems, the places between. It’s well known by ecologists that where ecosystems merge into another (e.g. sand dunes edging onto marshes) there is the richest biodiversity. So, edge is both critical and full of potential.

1. Emotional learning

Conservative (or neo-liberal) education policies seek to produce two groups of people (or people who can adopt both positions on demand of their employers): those who are compliant within the industrial system and those who are psychopathic – able to exploit human and natural resources without the interference of compassion. In response to this ‘learning on the edge’ promotes emotional intelligence.

An educated person would ideally have:

• Capacities of compassion (able to act with care and love)
• Bioempathy (able to empathise with other species of life)
• Emotional resilience (able to keep well)
• Constructive depolarisation (able to defuse conflict).

2. Contextual learning

Conservative education policy places great emphasis on knowledge that is abstracted from real contexts: from particular places and ecosystems, from what matters here and now, from the variabilities and uncertainties of existence, from young people’s passions…and so on. (My thoughts on this were reinforced in a session run by Anthony McCann, who proposed that learning is all about increasing awareness of ‘being here’.)

So, in response, ‘learning for the edge’ would be supported by a greater emphasis on the contextual.

An educated person would ideally have solid experience of:

• Peeragogy – or paragogy, learning horizontally between peers
• Praxis – Learning from practical experiences
• Heutagogy – or creative, self-managed reflection on your own learning
• Learning through ecology and place
• Connectivity – connections with many others enhanced by technology.

3. Playful learning

Conservative policies on education promote a single and fixed canon of knowledge. Very often these canons don’t admit the blurring of boundaries between disciplines or between taxonomical categories.

The Govian revision of the Primary Science National Curriculum is much more didactic than the previous iteration, stating more definitely what facts should be taught. It sets clear boundaries, leaving little space (if you follow it to the letter) to explore the grey areas between categories, for example, animals that perform photosynthesis or rocks made from sedimented marine life. Moreover, Gove places little value on the arts as a means by which to live and learn. At the Festival, when questioned about why the arts are to be excluded from the EBacc, Gove only talked about music as an important enrichment. Education is most effective in generating resilient capacities if a) all the arts practices are valued, including design, digital creativity, film, visual art, drama, dance and literature/poetry and b) if learning across the curriculum is enlivened with play and creativity.

An educated person would learn through the following dimensions of play:

• Enjoyment with others
• Making
• Rapid prototyping
• Freedom to imagine
• Flipping dilemmas and thinking creatively about problems.

In my session, we followed this introduction with some discussion about whether ‘learning for the edge’ would become inevitable or whether it is too radical to get any purchase. My belief is that these ideas about learning are not common currency, and in particular, not understood or supported outside the education profession, so they may be too radical for purchase without strong encouragement. We need policy programmes that will encourage ‘learning for the edge’, which is why Edgeryders is a very positive move. If you have ideas on what they can support and how they can tap into existing initiatives, please do join the Edgeryders community and get in touch.

Overall, I enjoyed the Festival. I was riled by Claire Fox who abhorred schools dealing with ‘the state of the planet and other fashionable issues of the day’ and who ‘hates social and emotional learning’. I was amazed at a teacher who said she was offended to hear that children were suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder. I was encouraged by Munira Mirza, Deputy Mayor for Arts & Culture in London, explaining that the London curriculum would enable greater access to heritage and culture. But I also found her classical humanist vision of education, inspired by Greeks and Jesuits, promoting discipline and canonical knowledge, very dispiriting and regressive. I was disappointed that there was so little embrace of ecology and recognition of the planetary crisis in any of the talks I saw, apart from in Anthony McCann’s session. I was frustrated that education is heading in a direction in which it is more about assessing skills for employment than about nurturing happy people.

My final summation would be: Let’s educate for wisdom (the conscious, ethical application of knowledge) rather than for the performance of intelligence.

An educated person looks positively deviant

I’m going to be speaking, or running a workshop rather, at the London Festival of Education 2012 on 17th November. There’s an amazing array of speakers, with Michael Gove at one end of the spectrum, and probably me at the other end. To do all the other speakers justice, most of them are some way away from Michael Gove’s end. This weighting may have something to do with Keri Facer‘s involvement in shaping the event. It seems a great value day, only £50.

The reason for my post is that it looks like you’ll have lots of choice and I’d like to be workshopping with more than two people. So, if this topic interests you, please sign up for my session at 3.20pm.

My provocation is: An educated person looks positively deviant

First I will reflect on Edgeryders, a Council of Europe initiative which drew together a community of educators and young people using very social and dialogic methods. It has asked how European policymakers could help young people respond to emerging environmental and economic crisis by shifting thinking about education and employment training. The workshop will begin with a description of some of the provocations and tensions which emerged from the Edgeryders’ discussions, for example about the roles of ‘positive deviancy‘, artistic play and autonomous action by young people, and then open these to debate…

Is positive deviancy (or radical resilience) something that can actually be nurtured? Is it right to do so? Can European education systems and policies prepare people for crisis or will ‘resilients’ emerge?

Comments welcome in advance to help me prepare, so that it meets your interests and needs.

Children and the Olympic century

I’ve had blogger’s block. I’ve been brewing a post, waking up with fully formed phrases ready to write here. But my own words make me choke and I don’t know that you’ll want to hear them either.

I’ve been thinking about children and their future, after their abandonment by the politicians at the Rio+20 Summit. When even scientists like Stephen Emmott give their considered opinion that ‘we’re fucked’, how can we say we love them and carry on destroying their world?

It’s the kind of thinking that raises hackles a little because it can seem sentimental. There’s too much love in it. I’ve started this with a picture of my lovely daughter, her hair all caught in a burst of sun, and a picture like that can only convey a tiny fraction of parental care. That kind of warm expression can make some people feel uncomfortable, mainly because they think we should protect children by keeping those feelings private and certainly offline. Or maybe there’s a sense that if you express love for your child too openly that you’re somehow expressing negative emotions about other people’s children. There’s also a strong established belief that we best love our children by not loving them, as it were. (Or rather, that we should formalise relations and prepare children for a challenging world by withdrawing affection tactically. There’s an element of effectiveness in this approach but the emphasis is usually too weighted on control and also affection can be withdrawn too early. This early withdrawal is part of the damaging notion that if children need to learn anything we should start teaching them as early as possible.)

Whatever the reason, we’re uncomfortable talking about loving our children. But beyond the discomforts around love, and much more critically, given that our planet is on fire in parts and slippery with melting ice already, there’s too much fear in what I need to express. There’s just far too much of both love and fear in the topic of children and their future to discuss it comfortably in front of other adults, let alone the children. I thought it was about time to discuss it, gently. So we hosted a house concert as part of a European tour of Transition Towns by a friend from Canada, Michael Holt. His own blogpost about the evening is here. He combines live music and cabaret with a conversation about Transition. We decided to focus on the question of what children need from adults to help the transition. We invited some families from the home education community and Transition New Cross and had a full house. We talked in fairly gentle terms about some future threats – scarcity of resources, rising sea levels and extreme weather. The adults in the room generally felt we shouldn’t lay anything frightening or gloomy on children’s shoulders and focus on being happy and well here and now. They agreed that we should talk about a different future, not a difficult one. We asked the children what they thought about that. One of them very strongly said ‘tell us the truth’. Another said ‘you should lighten up’. We’re prepared to accept that telling the truth is the correct thing to do but we don’t admit the truth to ourselves or between ourselves as adults. And maybe that depresses us.

I talked a bit about the Leysdown tragedy, the centenary of which was on 4 August this year. Nine boys drowned heading from Southwark to the Isle of Sheppey for a summer scout camp, overturned by a freak storm wave. They were poor boys from Walworth scout troop, learning how to sail. Their deaths touched a nerve for the public, due to the impending build-up to the 1st World War, and allegedly over a million people turned up to their funeral procession all the way from Leysdown to Nunhead Cemetery in Southwark. I did a memorial walk and photography exhibition/book on 4 August 2010. The coast of Sheppey is very fragile and eroding as storms cause more damage due to climate change. Old Second World War military buildings are being tossed onto the beach, making a playground for (older) children. I also saw younger children being overly protected, shouted at not to take their shoes off in the mud. It all raises intractable questions about how we prepare children for a difficult future, with eroding certainties and lands, whether we prepare them through protection or challenge, or a careful balance of both.

In the run up to the 1st World War, there was a build up of anxiety about impending war because of the naval arms race between Germans and British over the new Dreadnought warships. There were worries too that young people lacked the right skills and fitness for modern warfare. In response there was Baden-Powell’s publishing of Scouting for Boys from 1908 and the introduction of the Sea Scouts in 1909.

London hosted the Olympics in 1908. Baron de Coubertin had been mortified by France’s defeat by the Prussians in 1870, had looked at the lack of sport in French schools and dedicated himself to creating a highly motivational international games as both a preparation in case of, and an alternative to, war. The Olympian values are paradoxical: developing fitness for war and a strong emphasis on competition between nations, while promoting peace. I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t more direct ways of promoting peace, like reducing dependence on fossil fuel supplies and a more active implementation of the International Crimes Against Peace. But, perhaps there is a good deal of symbolic power in having face to face challenges with people from different cultures, which get such a mass of spectators? Perhaps that spirit will be significant in its effects? See this defining image of an Iranian and an American, embracing, for an example.

As TeamGB chalked up more and more medals, we’ve heard Cameron and Hunt capitalise on their success by denigrating schools for their (supposed) ‘all shall have prizes’ culture. We’ve heard them think on the fly to cancel their cancellation of a compulsory amount of sport in schools, and to announce a new school sport scheme.

It’s 100 years since the Leysdown Tragedy and the obsession with youth fitness of the 1908-1914 era. We are still hearing the same kind of anxieties via the media and Government about young people. Are they fit, skilled and disciplined enough to ensure that our nation can compete on a global stage? To ‘compete on a global stage’ means to grow the economy at the expense of others and protect our global resource supplies, through war if necessary. Parental worries are stoked by these public discourses, by the insidious messages of an achievement culture in schools and by a celebrity culture in the media.

To nurture this national competitiveness the Coalition Government is following the last regime in investing in many schemes all about ‘pegging’: GDP measures, Key Performance Indicators, streaming by ability, League Tables, schemes to promote social mobility, awards for individuals, Performance Related Pay in public jobs. The list goes on and on.

Then there are endless debates about how fair, evidenced and inclusive these measuring systems are. Of course they aren’t fair on the whole. Applying success measures to most activities is extremely difficult, because most things in life are so very contingent and interconnected. Seeing semi-arbitary rewards for a few leads to demotivating feelings for the rest of us. The measures of success can be too narrow. Adulation can focus on too few characters. Certain skills (football, money hustling) are overly rewarded while others (design, caring for others, growing food) are neglected. Success is usually built on access to resources (which can be sourced unethically e.g. a country that has grabbed land or oil, a male rower who has been given a BMW etc) making the factors of talent, innovation and hard work less significant than they may seem.

Sport is one area where measures of success are pretty clear, so we can genuinely celebrate it. There’s uncertainty in not knowing who will win, but the chaos is well constrained within limits. Because judgement of success isn’t based on our subjective preference (unlike music, say), we can feel at one with the whole crowd. The more formalised and official the sport system, the more certain we are that there has been fair play. There isn’t a media channel in the UK right now that doesn’t have at least one article saying that our Olympics success shows that we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. They are asking ‘what can we learn from sport to apply to culture/economy/education etc?’ But sport and these other domains are just not the same.

Those of us who raise critical questions about the Olympics or about competition are not being cynical, but rightly critical. Those of us who are impressed and pleased by excellent performances while asking those critical questions are not being hypocrites either. Most of those who raise critical questions are hardly being critical enough in my view. It’s right to ask about the legacy, the sponsorship and the cost but we mostly need to ask: Is winning lots of medals going to make a material difference (outside continued investment in sport) for the UK? How is practice and prowess in sport actually transferrable to other domains in ways that will ensure continued human thriving?

The only one transferrable outcome I can see is that it may result in more people doing physical activity (recognisable sports, unrecognisable sports, and just moving your body in work or dance). Better fitness means a more resilient population as food becomes scarce and challenges increase.  I’d rather see people get fit by using their own bodies for transport and growing food, though.

There will come a year when we will have to consider reducing the Olympics. There will also come a year when we will have to consider cancelling the Olympics. We’ll look back on the 20th as the century of Oil and Olympics. The 21st will be a century of chaos. We may love to watch sport ever more as it creates a utopian world of certainty. But also it will become less relevant. The games children are forced to play in compulsory school sport will seem less and less relevant.

So if we do love our children enough to prepare them for a difficult/different future, what training do they need now? What would a new Resilience Olympics look like? What activities would be included?

Here are some suggestions:

Aikido – it isn’t an Olympic sport (yet) maybe because it’s key principle is concern for the wellbeing of your attacker, and its second principle is chaos, or coping with the uncertainty of unknown attacks from any direction.

Maybe we need extreme road cycle safety and competence, to cope with increasingly aggressive road conditions.

I also found out about this new game called Switchball, being developed by Play for Change, which helps you cope with changing rules.

The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World played forest football and other games during their FluxOlympics this summer, linked to their Games People Play exhibition.

I’d like to hear your ideas. Could we make a Resilience Olympics happen?

Radical edgeryders

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve just come back from Strasbourg where I was at the Living on the Edge conference at the Council of Europe. This was part of the Edgeryders programme which explores issues of younger generations, education and employment in the Europe that we know is in crisis. It was fascinating and great to meet people I’ve connected with on the edgeryders online platform. This platform is moderated in an incredibly amiable way so that everything you share is appreciated and amplified, and links are made to the thoughts and experiences of other members. It’s like a slow sustained speed dating session online. Also it’s a collaborative learning platform, with particular enquiries on reinventing education, making a living and so on. But meeting people in real life, and in the offices of the heart of Europe was something else.

The conference was fairly formal because of the involvement of some politicians and the use of the Council building. The formats meant that only the confident or the prepared spoke much and the debate skipped around a little. However, there’s an unconference called edgecamp following now which is taking the debates and making tools for transition, which might have some impact on policy, perhaps.

I say perhaps. Did this project feel like a CSR exercise for the Council of Europe? Did it feel more of a research exercise than an opportunity for young people to affect policy? Some might say yes. My feelings lie more on the side of ‘grateful but in general fearful’. It was clear that this felt comparatively radical, and is surely a unique effort to bring young people together from across Europe, to meet policymakers and to open the debate to anyone online. Where we couldn’t find common ground there are still ways we can use the platform to contest and explore issues with each other. We may even feel empowered to address some of the politicians we met more directly, and we should.

This unique pooling meant that there was a good deal of divergence, with several variants of position held by different edgeryders and a much stronger distinction between all the edgeryders and the politicians/officials. I personally felt uncomfortable when the politicians referred to us as a tribe, as ‘you Edgeryders’ as I would have preferred to be referred to as a colleague on a more equal and individuated basis. (The badges calling us all experts were a nice touch though.) I was a little perturbed by the Chair of the Committee for Youth & Sport (an MP from near Glasgow) saying that we were too utopian and an elite self-selecting group. He was probably picking up on our demographics, that there was a skew to people older than the ‘youth with no prospects’ target. He said we mustn’t forget that the majority of disadvantaged young people are out on football terraces xenophobically kicking the hell out of each other. I think he felt that, ironically, we were out of touch, that he was closer to the real issues of his constituents and that we were talking at a far too abstract and educated level. This was an expression of two political viewpoints simmering away, each perceiving the other to be less concerned with social justice:

Social democracy: If you don’t give people jobs, houses and cheap energy too many people will suffer and there will be social unrest.

Indignants: Yes we need the means to survive but not if it involves privatisation and loss of freedoms. If you give people jobs and houses but in the process destroy green space, deplete nature and worsen climate change, that means billions of people dying and maybe all of us. We can’t rely on you to change so we’re doing it ourselves and hope you will follow.

The vocal majority of edgeryders were in the latter group and the majority of politicians and some Council officials were in the first group. I think there will need to be a great deal more conversation to bottom out what we each mean and find common ground. In my breakout session on Caring for the Commons, the Council wanted to know how to shift to a more Commons culture without harming equalities, especially the long-fought-for rights to own property and the need to grant such rights to migrants. Our solutions were to increase cultural education for stewardship and to protect equalities by protecting the Commons, by shifting property laws and the financial system from favouring those already with excessive capital and more strongly forging inalienable human rights which don’t revolve round ownership.

I’d like to see the Edgeryders platform evolve to reflect more strongly the solutions that emerged. I’d also like to see politicians engaging on the platform. Even if the Council of Europe can’t enact change, it may be possible for regional and city governments to nurture some of these ideas.

Here are key things I’d like to see explored further:

Critical period of rapid change: we’re stressing about young people’s access to jobs and homes now but in a very short time (some said by 2014 even in Europe) we will be stressing about everyone’s accesss to food and water in some places.

Currency: recognition that a job, paid in money by an employer, is not the only or inevitable route to future thriving. The Edgeryders want to reinvent work to mean purposeful activity that brings wellbeing not wealth. Alternative currencies were seen as a key solution to this. If you can change the currency you change the relationships between people to be less transactional and more symbiotic.

Reclaimed not new infrastructure: we don’t need new roads, airports and offices to stimulate growth. We need to reuse what is being abandoned and reinvent what doesn’t work. Digital now means delocalisation and de-edification of work, learning and retail. Empty shops offices and libraries must be reclaimed for generating new kinds of capital and reclaimed as home or as Commons.

Open public culture is key: the vice mayor of Thessaloniki, Spiros Penga, told how culture was a route to his city thriving in future. Revolving around that are food, young people and the creative economy. We heard so many examples of creative people all over Europe leading the reinvention of learning, public services and shared spaces.

Learning is to give the means to thrive: there is an unprecedented need for people to rapidly accelerate their skills and capacities (for bioempathy, problem-solving, engineering, food production and cooperation). As it’s unlikely that schools and colleges will reinvent themselves en masse for this new economy, new networks and companies supporting connectivist and self-managed learning are emerging.

Generating biosphere capital: This is a critical moment when we need to entirely reinvent the notion of sustainability. Environmental sustainability is currently a tiny cling-on, like ‘Health & Safety’, on the great whale of what is called economic sustainability but is really ‘economic growth fast, now, sod the future’. The reinvention will be driven by a focus on generating biosphere capital as the root source of value, intermingled with cultural and social value.

The call is for the Council of Europe to listen, extend and amplify those ideas, while also supporting the fundamental policy changes that will lead towards ecosocial justice.

A digital engagement framework

I like this digital engagement framework (see below) for museums and the cultural sector, shared on a CC licence by Jim Richardson (Sumo) and Jasper Visser (Inspired by Coffee). I like the way it’s coherent and asks questions that really foreground the public impact of cultural assets.

As this has been put out there in the world, for attributed re-use but also (hopefully) for feedback, here are some things I might want to change.

As we (Europeans) read this as a process from top left to bottom right, I’d upend it and reverse it.

I’d start with Values.

Instead of Goals I would call the next step Vision (What does your organisation look like, thriving in the future? Where do you want to be?).

Then, instead of Ambitions, I’d call the next step ‘Digital goals’ (How will digital tools help you get there? Engaging people should be one of your key goals.)

Next, instead of Audiences comes ‘People’ (The word audiences is too passive and doesn’t incorporate service users. So, who are the groups of people you want to participate? Who will use your services?)

The next step is ‘Asset mapping’  (What expertise, collections, spaces, services, experiences can you offer? What is particularly distinctive? What is particularly untapped?)

Then, I’m not really sure about the distinction here between Outreach and Engagement. I’m guessing it has something to do with time, when people are drawn up your ladder of engagement. To be more precise I might show these two as connected on a spectrum or ladder:

‘Reaching new people’ ….to….’Symbiotic relationships with your supporters’

Then, HOW to draw people up that ladder:

I think there are more elements to tackle than Content, Activities and Platforms…

Platforms and Channels: Where are people’s eyeballs? What platforms currently serve their needs? How far can you stretch into those platforms, and not lose your distinctiveness?

Questions and hooks: What do people want to know? What motivates them? How can you enrich and serve their questioning? How can you develop understanding through dialogue with people?

Stories: How will you (and the people) create stories in what modes or media, using what assets (your own and those of others)? (Stories is intended to be understood very broadly as ‘engaging media’)

Services: What do people need to do? What do they need your help with? Can you collaborate with other organisations or platforms to serve them?

Tone, style and address: What terms, styles and registers will you use to engage them? What tone, styles and registers will you allow or invite them to use on your platforms?

World-changing: How can you work together with people, using your assets, to work towards changing the world for the better?

Next after MuseumNext

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I enjoyed MuseumNext in Barcelona. I didn’t get a chance to talk to nearly enough people, including people I know on Twitter who I still didn’t encounter in real life. I was there with family, so found the lure of being a cultural punter too great, so I also missed a lot of sessions. Because I can’t comment across the whole conference, I want to pick up on a particular theme which emerged in the session I was speaking in, alongside Koven Smith. This was that old recurring theme of Us vs Curators = radical vs conservative = digital engagement vs collections authority. Jasper Visser and Koven got into a teeny little friendly spat over it, so I interjected to say what they and we needed was some ‘constructive depolarisation’ and that we needed to make common cause with curators.

Now, on reflection, I would say this:

We should stop trying to define and critique ‘curators’ as distinct from those of us from learning, engagement, marketing and digital areas of work. We are all curators (even those of us who don’t work in museums) because we’re all stewards and interpreters of cultural commons (including natural heritage). What we should do is call out and critique behaviours that are damaging to the cultural commons and to any museum’s mission. Each of us will have a different position on what we feel is most damaging or most benign. For myself, I’m bothered by the following behaviours:

• Spending too many millions of $/£ on iconic collections, hoping to attract more visitors to see them, while neglecting more demotic and contemporary collections.
• Spending too many millions of £/$ on iconic buildings and exhibitions, hoping to attract more visitors, while neglecting how people engage and make meaning of collections.
• Establishing and continuing work traditions that bear little connection with the true meaning of stewardship, which is to care for things that don’t belong to you.
• Paying little attention to the changing and unstable meanings of collections over time (and between different communities). In particular, not recognising that NOW is a time of extraordinary upheaval, requiring a much greater focus on contextualisation and meaning-making.
• Resisting efforts to increase and measure the social and educational impacts of museum work.
• Believing that when money directly gained from ecocide or violence is given to a museum, it is washed clean.
• Concealment, covertness and corruption.

What’s the alternative, or what do I think is next for museums?

Here’s a model for how museums can become more effective as world changers, by seeking to be more symbiotic with their users:

Flow user org interaction model

or on this link