I was surprised when I heard a surgeon talking about her work. She said she wouldn’t want to change the fact that people need serious operations. Her point was that having to deal with our mortality can cause us to ‘rethink’ our life and values. I agree, but I think it’s sad to wait for a life threatening moment before reflecting on how amazing life is.
I think this reflects a serious issue in our culture. A lot of us take things for granted so much that we never question how incredible our situation is! In the west we live a life only attained by kings and queens just a few centuries ago!
By cultivating gratitude we can become more aware of how lucky we are, get perspective, and take renewed pleasure in the essential things like running water, food, friends and sun.
You don’t have to wait till you lose your mobility, vision, family or friends to appreciate them fully now!
I was inspired by the did you know video I posted a while back. I want to make a similar kind of video, but focussed on education rather than the larger view of the world as a whole.
- The top 10 predicted jobs of 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. We are preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet!
- Today’s learners will have 10-14 jobs before the age of 38.
- It’s estimated that 1 weeks worth of the New York Times contains more information that a person was likely to encounter during a lifetime in the 18th Century!
If anyone has any similar facts or figures that we could use, please let me know!
A few years ago I was trying to find a way to save a bunch of old phone chargers from being thrown away. We were having a leaving party so I thought I could make them into cool moodlamps that we could use instead of candles.
I made a ‘howto’ which has been viewed over 10,000 times on instructables.com, and I’ve been collecting photos of the best ones.
I’ve since started running it as a group workshop for young people, learning about resuse and basic science and electronics. You can download the details here: moodlamp workshop.
Creative graffiti projects are a great way of engaging with young people. Every session is different, and I like to work with you to organise the best fit possible. You can download the basic details here: graffiti workshop.
My regular youth group really enjoy it, and I’ve had great success running it for Southwark Volunteers Centre, Hackney City Farm, London Southbank summer school and Catch22!
We can photo document your event and provide photos on a CD or published in a nice book!
I have public liability insurance to £5million.
You can see some photos of art created in our workshops here. Or you can look at some of my personal work here.
I ran a great teambuilding workshop for Southwark Volunteer Centre. From the blurb:
Spray painting is new to most people, consequently this workshop offers opportunities to overcome fears and try something new. Technically difficult, spray painting is an art that requires concentration and patience. Materials are expensive, so working in groups is necessary. Groups are required to come up with designs together and then paint them as a team. Communication and people skills are required for a successful outcome.
And we got some great feedback too - people felt they had fun, learnt new skills, and that those new skills would be useful to them. We even had an outbreak of spontaneous dancing!
After reading the DCSF commissioned literature review of work done in the field of parental investment, I contacted Charles Desforges to see if he was interested in the workshop based intervention we’re planning with St. Martin’s School.
Charles has very kindly offered his time to help us make sure that any data we collect will be useful in the bigger picture of educational psychology.
I’m hoping that we can contribute to the evidence that shows that intervention (as opposed to spontaneous parental involment) is valuable in increasing children’s achievement and adjustment at school.
Education is so important because it is the children in schools today and in the future who will be dealing with our accelerating world! Self knowledge, confidence, resilience, curiosity, creativity, passion, teamwork, communication. These are what we need to be fostered and rewarded at school.
How will education change in the next 20 years? If we keep trying to catch up with change we’ll always be behind. Somehow we need to turn things around - unleash children’s incredible learning ability on the exponential changes and support, facilitate and guide the learning that occurs.