I was with a student on Tuesday who reminded me of that old phenomenom - when you learn a new word you suddenly see and hear it everywhere.
We’d just finished a TV Production masterclass by a wonderfully inspiring Producer called Jayne Brierley who I brought into a project I’m managing for a group of 14 year old Creative & Media Diploma students. Emily’s word was ‘vox-pops’ which having freshly learned meant the popular voice, from Jayne, she saw again during break time in Heat magazine. It happened to me too. I’ve started managing some action research projects with primary schools, taking on the role of part broker, part critical friend, part provocateur. One of the teachers I’m working explained she wanted to use the Bloom’s Taxonomy model to explore children’s thinking skills and independence. I nodded for a while before working up courage to ask what she was talking about (because sometimes when you’re brought in as the external consultant people assume you know more than them, and look at you oddly when it turns out you just know differently, not more). Luckily my group of teachers are wonderful and sharing and not at all judgemental; she showed me some templates she had and so I learned about Blooms Taxonomies. One week later I happened to read a friend’s blog, someone who is at the starting point of creating a new business which marries education and corporate social responsibility, over in Calgary. As part of her work she’s taking a course which was linked to on her blog, so I clicked through and hey presto - there’s that Blooms Taxonomy stuff again. As it turns out, on further exploration, I already knew about the Bloom’s Taxonomy model, I just didn’t know that was its name. It happens to me fairly often that what I know from experience turns out to have a theory, theorists and framework already quietly backing up my own findings. There’s something in there about the balance of theory and practice - for another day…
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Umbro Industries is a new initiative from Umbro geared towards giving potential Manchester based creators the financial backing they need.
"You know how it is: you've a great idea for an exhibition, a gig, a club night or project, you've got the contacts and you need to make it happen, you just need a little helping hand. That's where Umbro Industries comes in. If your idea is fresh, and your drive and devotion to create is infectious, then we'll get behind you". I recently met one of the Umbro team involved in this programme and they're really fired up and passionate about support the cultural and creative development of young people across the city. I believe they mean business, and it's great to see a private company putting their money where their mouth is in this way. I'm always interested in new ways to present information. People often don't have the time or inclination to read text heavy pages. Wordle is a great online application for creating visualisations of words known as Word Clouds. This illustration shows which terms become prioritised out of a number of different definitions of public engagement. As a tool for instantly starting to draw out key themes I find it works really well.
An introduction to evaluation with some examples of how to avoid too much form-filling and tick-boxing, thank goodness.
Image:Jan Stadtmann from ‘Quatre Mains’ Andrew Dawson & Sven Till for ‘The Articulate Hand’, Wellcome Trust public programme
In order to create and lead some workshops / training about Public Engagement, on behalf of Flow Associates, I put a quick call out to the GEM (Group for education in Museums) list which came up trumps with a wealth of resources streaming in from some kind people who took a minute out to share what they knew.Thanks - here’s what was collated, hope it’s useful to others too: |
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...BlogI'm most interested in how the public, your public, whoever that may be, engages with culture and creativity.
And if it nurtures creativity and develops personal, social or professional skills I'm absolutely all ears. Categories
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