The School Looks Around
I was short listed for this – The School Looks Around – project being run by daisi. I’m very interested in this project and the possibility of being lead artist, so fingers crossed. But met the other short listed artists and it is a tough call.
The idea for The School Looks Around originated from General Public Agency’s rediscovery of the 1948 book, which promoted the idea of the local survey as an adventurous and open-ended process, a “voyage of discovery into the life, history and organisation of the locality”. “The local survey can help to bring the individual into sympathy with his/her surroundings, not passively, but as an active unit”. The book is amazingly contemporary in its holistic consideration of the environment and in empowering young people to protect and influence their environment.
The aim of the original surveys was to make the local area and issues of society and citizenship come alive for children, whilst establishing new and lasting connections between schools and their communities.
The School Looks Around is a one-year programme of environmental surveys carried out by young people and directed towards capturing the realities of contemporary urban and rural life in Britain. The programme will run over one year in four different secondary schools – two in an urban context and two in a rural context – with the aim of developing a national model. It will be galvanised by significant new partnerships between the schools, cultural institutions and library services. The findings of the action-research will form a usable archive resource, to be housed either within the school or within a local history archive.
March 9th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
That book looks fantastic! I hope you get the job.
March 18th, 2010 at 9:58 am
Thanks Felix, & yes the book definitely looks interesting
& YES I got the gig!