- Venue
- Wunderbar HQ
- Location
- North East England
A School
Wunderbar Festival, Newcastle, 31st October – 6th November 2011
Lesson One: Utopian Cheer-leading
I’m looking at the curriculum, pasted on the notice board just inside the colourfully decorated Wunderbar School. As I read the daily lesson plans ‘…Martial Arts… Build your own Go Kart… Explosions… Develop a film…’ the hidden child in me enters a sort of reverie. As I’m quietly contemplating a school life relived a small, assertive voice breaks through my daydreaming
“Excuse me, your name please?”
Two of Burnside College’s year 9 pupils sit at the front desk, pens, registers and sticky labels at the ready. Whilst one of the boys writes out a neat name tag for me in blue marker pen another pupil eagerly gathers tea and coffee orders.
When I met Harriet Plewis a couple of weeks earlier to discuss her project A School at Wunderbar Festival she was full of enthusiasm for a project she described as being as much an exercise of utopian ideals; the creation of “the school you would have wanted to be at” as a student-lead learning experience which would test “how to effectively share ideas without power or lies about power getting in the way”. This equilibrium between students and ‘practitioners’ was developed right from the projects outset with teachers, students and practitioners working together to develop a curriculum based on what they all wanted to learn and achieve over the duration of the festival.
The emphasis on A School being essentially a dynamic, empirical experiment in teaching and learning became apparent very immediately as we were introduced to the language of signs and gestures the group had developed for making consensus decisions. As we sat on the gym mats, cross- legged in a large circle, Harriet and the students demonstrate for us new pupils the raised Jazz hands which indicate agreement, lowered jazz hands complete disagreement, and various actions that signal changes in the conversation.
Our first lesson began with a spray of home-made pompoms and an energetic warm up exercise with various leaps, whoops and waving of limbs. Though some of the students hovered at the fringes of the classroom, not quite prepared yet to engage in the ridiculous display the adults were performing, the collaborative discussion on “What are Utopian concepts?” followed by the Cheer-leading displays of those concepts cemented their interests with shouts of “Liberty!” “Love!” and “Freedom!” (one of which their head teacher, on a flying visit, took part in with remarkable gusto).
Lesson Two: 9/11 and The Economic Crisis
One of the interesting, and potentially problematic, aspects of A School is that no one in attendance is an expert. The emphasis of the project is not test scores, league tables and the dichotomising scale of success and failure but on collaborative, creative approaches to learning and teaching. Students and practitioners alike are encouraged to admit to not knowing, to ask big questions and to work with failure not as a negative consequence but as a potent means for learning. Lesson Two: 9/11 and The Economic Crisis was based on connecting two separate suggestions for lessons (on 9/11 conspiracy theories and Bankruptcy) along the lines that, if it’s true we’re all connected by 6 degrees of separation, our cumulative knowledge may travel much further than that of any one individual or even the group itself.
After a “pomodoro” break (an interlude which happens after 25 minutes of lesson, the equivalent time scale for cooking the perfect Tomato Pasta Sauce apparently, hence the name) I’m sat on the floor next to another of today’s new students. The student, Paul, turns to Christo (one of the creative practitioners on the project) and, describing how he had seen him with the group yesterday testing their home made Go Karts next to the bowling green, asks whether he’s a teacher. Christo laughs warmly and explains that he is learning just as much as the students are.
Pasted on one of the classroom walls in large, friendly letters is the school logo “With brains like ours, it’s easy to improvise”. Beneath this we work in pairs (selected at random) to brainstorm everything we know about the two lesson topics and any correlations we see between them. I’m paired with one of the year 9 students whose knowledge of fire fighters and conspiracy theories can only be described as encyclopedic and very quickly we have filled our quota of postit notes. The pooling of knowledge as a means for learning and forming a common consensus on a topic raises a lot of questions about the nature of learning and on the teacher-student relationship. On the one hand it’s a very egalitarian and democratic approach to the enrichment of shared knowledge and experience. On the other hand, there is a nagging question of practicality; how can you (or can you?) quantify the learning which takes place through this process?
Once everyone’s multifarious, fragmentary knowledge of 9/11 and The economic crisis has been accumulated in a smattering of postits across the classroom walls, we sit in silence for a while pondering the possible connections or correlations between these two events. Christo invites suggestions from the class and one of the students volunteers ‘Freedom’ as an issue to discuss here. And then, quite quickly, I find the lesson developing into an unexpectedly sophisticated, metaphysical conversation pondering these decade-defining issues from a position I previously had never considered…
As we break up for lunch I find myself feeling both excited by the possibilities of an education not limited to the usual hierarchical strictures but also slightly anxious that the tendencies of the classroom dynamics – e.g. of boisterous students to be fidgety and then ostracised, for teachers to be leaders and then superiors etc – not to be allowed to eventually creep into this organic project of learning.
Iris Aspinall Priest©
