Oklahoma update

I had a really interesting day yesterday but have been too busy to blog about about it until now. For starters, I met with two really interesting practitioners. Joe Walking came in to talk to us about Dance Spinner. We've agreed that one of his colleagues will come in for a week next half term to work with a group of 12 Year 7 students. They will get used to using Dance Spinner to create aleotoric choreography (dance created according to the laws of chance) which they will the perform at the Past, Present & Future events. I hope they'll also be able to show some of the process of their work during the week in unusual sites around school at break, lunch and after school. Next in was Guy Connelly from Clock Opera. He'll be in with Tangled Feet for a week but we've also offered him an extra week's residency to work with Sarah (Dance Spinner) and the year 7 students, composing aleotoric music to accompany the dance. We also want to experiment with other kinds of sound installation for the evening events at the end of the week. One special project involves creating a ghost steel band.

I spent the afternoon in Stormont House School in Hackney discussing our plans to attend the World Creativity Conference in Oklahoma next November. We will be able to take a total of 9 people to the week long event and need to decide who those will be quite soon. Our task will be to collaborate with some American students from schools that belong to the A+ network on a keynote presentation to the delegates at the conference. There are three UK schools involved - Tallis, Stormont and Gallions - each of whom are dedicated to promoting creative learning. As such, we all felt it was important to think about how we could make our presentation as interactive, engaging and challenging as possible. I remembered a presentation I saw at last year's Handheld Learning Conference from John Davitt who created a school in 30 minutes using Google Docs. Our theme seems to be something to do with regeneration (schools,communities, cities), 21st century skills and creative learning. This needs to be refined somewhat. Tallis is hosting the next group meeting on Monday 14th June at which we hope to Skype with one of our American colleagues - how exciting!

It would be great to have a few young people at this meeting so, if it doesn't disrupt your exams too much (Year 11) and if anyone else in the ARG can make the meeting at 3pm, we'd love to see you there. I'll post more information soon about the new website for the project. I'd also be grateful of any offers to help out with the Past, Present & Future events on the 15th and 16th July.