Framtidsförmågor i fokus genom kultur

Professor Anne Bamford är internationellt erkänd för sin forskning om kreativitet, livslångt lärande och teknologi. Hon är verksam som strategisk chef för utbildningsfrågor vid City of London Corporation i England och har forskat om bland annat estetiska lärprocesser och hur de kan ha en positiv inverkan på elevers lärande.

Under sitt Malmöbesök föreläste Anne Bamford bland annat för rektorer och gav dessa inspirerande infallsvinklar till att arbeta mer med kultur i skolan. I juni 2022 antog grundskoleförvaltningen en förvaltningsgemensam kulturplan (för 2022–2025), en plan som ska vägleda till hur förvaltningarna ska leva upp till skolans kulturuppdrag.

– Om du inte arbetat så mycket med kultur i skolan tidigare är det en god idé att starta med och fokusera på ett område och kanske även göra det under en tidsbegränsad period. Gör det bara under en vecka och gör det som ett projekt. Jag är ett stort fan av ”pilotprojekt”, eftersom det då ger dig en ursäkt att sedan bara fortsätta utifrån devisen ”vi bara testar, det är ett pilotprojekt”. Då blir det heller inte så laddat, säger Anne Bamford.

Arbeta med lokala kulturaktörer

Hon rekommenderar också att man som skola samarbeta med lokala kulturaktörer och institutioner, som till exempel kan hjälpa till med att boka och bjuda in konstnärer till skolorna.

– Se om du kan samarbeta med lokala konstnärer eller andra skolor som varit framgångsrika med att jobba med kultur i skolan. Gemensamt för de skolor som lyckas med det här är att de håller det ganska lokalt och utgår från vad barnen är intresserade av. Ta med barnen och se en pjäs eller en konstutställning, men se till att förbereda eleverna innan ni går dit och arbeta med det även efteråt. Om det är en pjäs kan du fokusera på drama eller om det är en pjäs om identitet kan ni arbeta med det som ett tema, säger Anne Bamford.

– Varför är det så viktigt att arbeta med kultur i skolan?

– Först och främst för att det är ett barns rättighet. Alla har rätt att få delta i kulturella aktiviteter, det står i FN:s deklaration om mänskliga rättigheter. Det handlar om att vara människa. Bortom det handlar det om att vi behöver ha de ”fusion skills” (de ”framtidsförmågor” som tros bli än viktigare framöver, som samarbete, problemlösning, muntlig och skriftlig kommunikation och initiativförmåga, red anm.) som man lär sig genom att delta i kulturella aktiviteter, säger Ann Bamford.

Fokusera på framtidsförmågor

Anne Bamford kommer också med några radikala förslag på hur undervisningen i våra skolor kan anpassas för att mer fokusera på dessa “fusion skills”, det vill säga de kompetenser som tros bli än viktigare i framtiden.

– Det som måste försvinna är indelningen i ämnen, för vi arbetar och tänker inte så längre. Under en vanlig arbetsdag måste jag till exempel vara en forskare, matematiker, författare, konstnär, kreativt geni, problemlösare, konsult, kommunikatör…även om vi arbetar inom en specialiserad industri, så är det väldigt komplicerad. Genomsnittspersonen måste ha nio olika karriärer i sitt liv. Skolämnena kommer att försvinna och vi måste vara redo för det, säger Anne Bamford.

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Transkribering av avsnittet:

This episode of Podagog Malmö will be a little different. We interviewed Professor Anne Bamford when she visited Malmö in November. It was a talk about what role culture can play in school and how one can become a creative leader as a rector who embodies the power of creative work. Towards the end of the conversation, Anne Bamford also came up with some radical suggestions on how teaching in our schools can be adapted to focus more on fusion skills, that is, the competences that are believed to be even more important in the future.

Professor Anne Bamford is internationally recognized for her research on creativity and lifelong learning and technology. She is an executive chief of education at City of London Corporation in England and has researched, among other things, aesthetic learning processes and the use of digital technology to develop and develop new technologies. Professor Anne Bamford is an executive chief of education at City of London Corporation in England and how they can have a positive impact on students’ learning.

Okay, I think if you’ve never had a lot of art and culture in your school before, that it’s a good idea to start with just having one area that you’re going to focus on. Or even sometimes just for a short time. So you say, let’s do this just for a week.

Let’s, you know, so that you can start to establish those things. So I think it’s always good to have a good idea of what you’re going to focus on. It’s always good to start with a sort of small project. I’m a great fan of what I call the pilot project. Because if you do a pilot project, it gives you the excuse to then continue it on once it works. And often you can try something new by just saying it’s a pilot. You know, oh, we’ll just try it. It’s a pilot. It seems less threatening to people. And then once it’s successful, and it will be successful, you can then just continue it on and people soon forget. So I think that that’s a good idea. I think that’s a good way to begin.

The other thing is I think that’s really crucial is that you work in partnership. There’s lots of people who can help you. So, for example, your cultural institutions, inviting artists into the school. There’s lots of ways you can get more resources. So if you’re not very, you know, you’re not sure, oh, we’re not very good at teaching art, we’ll get some artists in to partner with you. Speak to your cultural institutions, your orchestra, your museum. Yeah. What can you do to help us? So I think partnerships is really key. Don’t try and do it all on your own. And also, if you know another local school, that’s a good school that’s doing it. See if you can partner with them. Can we both work on the music project together? So you can start working together. I think it’s a really good way to get started.

Yeah, you were at, I heard you were at the Kirseberg School. Yes. Maybe a good example.

They’re doing really good work there. And they’ve, they’ve. And I think it’s really, in just four years, it’s really helped the school turn around. Like it’s really given the school a whole different way of being and very empowering to the teachers and to the head and the community. Like it’s really made the school more popular with parents. So, yeah.

Do you have any practical examples of pilot projects that were successful from your point of view?

Well, the ones that are usually successful are where you keep it quite local. So think about the interests of the children. So what, what are they, you know, what would they be interested in? So start from the local and start from the interests of the children. And then usually that it doesn’t matter what area you go into. I’ve seen a successful projects that look at, for example, design and technology. They’re successful projects. They’re projects that are started with music. So at the school today, they’re part of the Sistema project. So they’re part of that program.

So you can be around music or it can be around just even just beginner with one activity. So you say, for example, take the children to see a play
or take the children to the art gallery. And from that start, you can then come up with lots of ideas of things you can do. So. So. So really, anything’s possible.
And I’ve seen successful projects across the board. But don’t try and start with a whole big thing. Just start with something small. So it just so it doesn’t just start and end with visiting, doing a play and then doing nothing more. Yeah, no, no. Use that as a motivation both before you go and then after you come back. And you can take it in lots of different directions. You can. You can focus on the methods so you can focus, for example, if it’s a play, you could say, well, let’s focus on drama or you can take it from this was a play about issues of identity so you can say, well, let’s focus on identity for our arts theme and look at how this is done, you know, so you can take it lots of different ways.

This is a kind of a big question. Why is it important to incorporate the arts in the curriculum? If you really have to summarise it. Why is it core?

OK, first of all, it’s because it is a child’s rights. It is something that everyone has the right to participate in the arts and enjoy it. That’s in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. So first of all, for no other reason than because it’s about being human. But if you take beyond that, then I think it’s also that we need the fusion skills that come from participation in the arts to help us cope with what people describe as the wicked challenges of our time. Quite complex problems that cause us to change very rapidly.

And we know that the more you have experience and exposure to the arts, the better you are at coping with having those fusion skills that enable you to cope with rapid change. And the one certainty we have going forward is there will be change. Yeah. What do you think is it in the cultural aspect, so to speak,
that make it work as a bridge to the fusion skills? You can get the fusion skills in lots of ways. But the thing about the arts is it’s like there are 12 fusion skills and the arts usually concentrate them. It’s like getting a super dose of all of those skills you need.

So you could do you could get them all separately through lots of different activities. But if you take those fusion skills, if you do a simple thing like you do a school concert or you put on a performance or you go and go to the gallery and talk, you do all of them because you have you have collaboration, you have communication, you have problem solving, you have critical thinking, you have creativity. You have written expression, writing. So all of those things get pushed very much. So if you just do one art experience, you can cover all of your fusion skills in that one art experience.

And that’s why it’s like a concentrated dose, you know, a super vitamin. So it seems in a kind of natural way, you know, several of those skills they will be training on at the same time. And of course, it’s fun. And so you’re you’re getting all those skills in a way that’s fun, that’s engaging, that entices you into it.
And, you know, the more you can do that throughout your life, because you also with fusion skills, you can’t just get them. Oh, you can’t just do them in year three or something.

You have to keep developing them throughout your life. So you need to have fun ways for humans to keep developing those skills. And the best way. The best way is the arts. And I see there’s a lot of benefits. But what do you think is some of the biggest challenges in trying to incorporate this that you have come across in your career? Yeah, even though it’s in the curriculum, even though it’s in the laws of the countries, most all countries, it’s still treated often the biggest challenge is it’s treated like a special project. Yeah, it’s not treated. We don’t expect children to to do literacy as a series of special projects.

We don’t have to get funding for children to do literacy. But unfortunately for the arts, it’s often not seen as being core and central and compulsory.
And so it becomes seen as something nice. What’s what’s the word like? Call calls. Cozy. Yeah. You know, it’s not something that’s that’s. And yet it’s in the laws. It’s in the and we know that it’s important for children and it’s important. It’s done well and it’s important that it’s done well across time, not just in a few years.

So I think the biggest challenge is to change the attitude that it’s like a project will do a project in this. We wouldn’t expect children to learn to read or do mathematics or understand science if we did it in that way. And I don’t think we should do that for the.

So what why do you think that is this attitude that you’re describing that you’re viewing?

I think because you’ve always had an issue of you have one ministry that deals with arts and culture and you have another ministry that deals with education, because in countries that do this very well, they have the same person who’s in charge of both. And so the problem is you have. You have the culture side trying to do to sort of do this as an extra thing in the education world, whereas it should be being properly dealt with in the education world and by all means in partnership with the culture. But it shouldn’t be the culture have to do this in the schools. This should be the work of education.

This is maybe not a big part of the education. The teachers in when you are education teachers. No, that’s a really important point you bring up there because the teacher education in the last decade especially has really reduced the exposure to aesthetic processes as a valid way of learning. And this is a real, real pity. It’s something that makes me very angry because if the teachers have not experienced aesthetics and the arts. It’s themselves and they’re not exposed to it. It’s very challenging for them to try and do it for the first time in front of 30 children.

You know, so we have to have this in the teacher education and we have to have high quality arts education in the teacher education. We should not expect that a teacher knows how to teach this if we’ve not taught them how to teach it. And I think that’s a really important point.

You talk about letting the pupils flourish today and not just managing through school. What is it, do you think, in education, through the arts particularly, that lets them flourish, I should say?

Yeah, I think I think it’s in the humanness of education because the arts allow the child to bring their full self to the school. And it’s probably one of the few areas within the curriculum that they really can bring themselves. And I think it’s that humanness and that affects a whole lot of things because it
affects their attitudes, it affects their values. It also affects their well-being, how they feel inside themselves. And I think those things, if you get those things right, then the child begins to to flourish and through that process of flourishing, they start to do well in all the other subjects. And so all good things go together. So, hard question, but what do you think, how do you become a leader of flourishing, as you say?

That stands for, you know, this culturally responsive leadership. Yeah. How do you begin that journey as a school leader? Yeah, I think it’s about,
appreciating that the arts have a unique contribution to make in unlocking the humanness of the children and the teachers in your school community. We have the arts in our lives because it makes our lives better. We play music when we’re cooking because it makes cooking better.

You know, we like the arts. We make our homes look lovely with design because it helps us to feel better as humans. And I think you start as a head by saying,
how do I make the humans in this place flourish? What are my values that I put forward to help this place flourish And if you if you don’t see the arts as valuable, I think you shouldn’t be in education because it’s definitely not your, not your job, you know.

What do you think constitutes a good creative leader then? You said something I saw on your PowerPoint this morning. Only I read half of it and it’s changed.

But sorry, someone you don’t have, you don’t necessarily have to have all the ideas, but maybe create and enable an environment to let new ideas grow. And be positive in your attitude towards the value of the arts, because we know with everybody, it’s not what you say, it’s how people see you act, right? So you can say anything.

So you can say, oh, yes, the arts are important. But if you don’t leave any timetable time for the arts, people go, oh, she doesn’t really think that, you know, that’s. So you have to live it out. And, you know, it’s it’s bring bring the arts into your school environment. You know, like music can play in the school. There can be opportunities for children to perform. There can be, you know, paintings up on the wall, the children can be given the materials to respond creatively to questions that they’re being asked in history or in science or whatever.

It’s still, you know, they can make models, they can do sculptures, they can. There’s so many opportunities. So I think it’s about opening yourself and trusting because people once you let them give them permission to do the arts, people love doing it. You know. You can open up to that. And don’t be worried, because sometimes I think heads think, oh, if we have a lot of doing the arts, the parents will worry about whether the children are learning enough maths and science and so on. It’s not the case.

Their learning will be even better because you supercharge it with the arts. So trust yourself and and don’t worry about, you know, if you’re doing a really good job of the arts, you’ll find all of your curriculum areas will be very strong. There’s of course education in the arts is one thing. Maybe how about education through the arts? Have you any good examples or success stories about maybe teaching mathematics? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I’ve seen some excellent going really practically down to some lessons. Yeah. So I saw some really excellent lessons where a teacher
used finger paint, so they put paint and detergent on the desks of the school. And this is in the secondary school. And this was with children who were very reluctant about mathematics. And what’s lovely about finger paint is you can do it and you can make a mistake and you just go like this. And then you and the children solve mathematics problems using the finger paint on their desk. Right. And what it straight away did was it gave them the chance to talk through what they were doing.

And if they made a mistake, they just wiped it off in the desk. But also what they did was when they finished the lesson, they then made prints from what they’re done on the desk. And those prints lined the classroom walls with these beautiful mono prints from this maths lesson. So every time then the children came back into that room, instead of thinking about maths and all the issues and the psychological blocks they had to maths, the children remembered the fun of that occasion. So there’s one really practical one.

Another was a class that used dance to teach about angles. So they would say they used choreography and they would plan. They say, OK, you have to have a dance and you have to plan it using obtruse and acute angles. And you had to, you know, so these are really practical examples. OK, excuse me, the secondary school, the children are 10. In England, they go from, in both those cases, they were 14, 15 year olds.

But the school in the UK, the secondary school starts from children, usually 11 or 12, and it goes through till 18 or to 16, depends on the school. Another example that I heard you talk about, maybe I think it was in Karlstad, maybe. Yeah. In architecture. Yeah.

About the example you mentioned, maybe today also Guernica. What can an artwork can teach you about history?

Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s we describe that as use as art as education. So you asked the question was when you have using education through the arts. That’s where you’re trying to teach. For example, you’re teaching about maths and you use aesthetic processes to help you learn that thing. Yeah. And in the example of like using Guernica to teach about war, the art becomes the form of education. So instead of using a textbook, you’re using an actual piece of art or it could be a play or a film.

So, for example, you know, if you watch a lot of films or you you look at designs, it can teach you a lot of things about other. So it’s like enlightening about that other thing. So the art is because often art is used in human society to teach, to express something very complicated. So, for example, music, for example, often talks about love. That’s because words struggle. But music can do it, you know.

So everyone likes a love song because when you’re talking about something as complicated as love, it’s better. But art can often capture most complicated things. Yeah. You know, for example, even when there’s a funeral, when someone dies, we use a lot of art because it’s such a human time. We need to have something to help us get through it. And the arts come in at those really complicated things. Then you beautifully described not so common, but maybe if you’re lucky, you’re going to experience it sometime in your career.

That’s the education situation itself becomes an artwork. Yeah. But it’s the stuff that gives you goosebumps up your back. Yeah. We if you’re lucky, if you’re lucky, you’ve had a teacher who in your own life has given you that moment. And if if you’ve had it, it transforms you forever. It’s the best long lasting thing. Because you remember, you know, I’ve often asked, especially teacher education students, I say, do you did you ever have that experience? And do you remember that teacher? And tell me about the moment.

And even they’ll say, you know, they might be 50 or 60 years of age and they’ll say, yes, it was my teacher in this moment and they did this. And then suddenly,
maybe made me meet someone interested in the subject. And they often. They spend their whole life influenced by that one point. Or they that person that sees that that somehow touches your potential, you know. And that’s when it’s really incredible. And also from the teacher’s side, it’s when a child just completely surprises them because they’re not aware that that child has that ability. And then the child can just do something that’s like, you know, that that’s amazing. You know, and surprises you. And it’s always much, much, much further than you thought that child could do.

And then they go, oh, my God, look, look what that person can do. You know, you know, potential. Yeah. And it’s it’s life changing. It’s really life changing.
And so that, you know, it’s not common. You know, you might teach a whole year and it doesn’t happen. Or you might teach three lessons and it happens every time. But you can’t guarantee it. Mm hmm.

You had also said that many school subjects is in need of a change, maybe a new design, so to speak, has that what role could the arts play in this
context, maybe is that connected to the environment of the skills? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, is that for the for the future, we need these fusion skills
and the current models of education are not suitable for developing them. The models of education we use now come from the Industrial Revolution.

So it’s really, really out of date. And we have to quite majorly think what we need for the future. Now, this is not just my point. This is happening globally.
So the OECD have got their big education 2030 initiative because they’re saying, we need this by 2030. I mean, actually, we need it. We started it 10 years ago, but we’re catching up.

UNESCO has got education 2050. So they’re trying to take the education for all work, which was about basic level and say, actually, it’s not fair.
If people only get the bare necessities, we have to give them something much, much better and the way we deliver education is going to change because we
have such a huge need for people to learn throughout their entire life. And our current system, our system of universities and vocational colleges, and it’s not working.

Our current systems of training are not working. So this is going to be a huge, huge area. And I worry because we don’t have enough people with the level of training needed to be able to satisfy what we have to do in the next five years. It’s an enormous job. We have quite a bit of a challenge, maybe in England, too. In Sweden, we’re school leaders.

We are working in the same place a long time. And teachers, there’s a lack of teachers, too. Yeah, it’s exactly the same. There’s a shortage of teachers.
Teachers, young students are not going into the teaching profession. We also have a lot of the school leaders are due to retire. So they’ll be retiring in the next couple of years.

And that’s only the school system because a lot of this is going to happen outside the school system. And you’ve got exactly the same problem in the broader network. So it’s a huge and we’re going to have to think of very creative solutions very quickly because we haven’t got a lot of time. Talking about again about the new design in subjects and there’s a lot of things, of course.

Do you see any big picture, something that really needs to change if you have to pick something that needs to have to change?

I would be really radical here because I think the thing that needs to disappear is subjects and disciplines because we don’t work like that anymore. We don’t think like that anymore because, for example, in any one of my days, I might have to be a scientist, a mathematician, a writer, an artist, a creative genius, a problem solver, a consultant, a communicator. We don’t think even if you work in a single industry, that industry now is very complicated. And the average person is going to have nine different careers in their life.

So you can’t think anymore about single subjects. Disciplines as we know it will disappear and we have to be ready for that. But instead, once again, the school is sticking. You do 40 minutes on maths. Now we leave maths. Now you do 40 minutes on craft. Now we leave craft. That’s not how the real world works. So what should we have instead? Is it problem solving?

Yeah. So we have, for example, in Scotland, they’re using what they call challenge based education. So they set the students a problem. The problem is a real problem. It’s not made up, you know, and there’s plenty of problems in the world to get real problems from. It’s not that we’re short on problems. But they set a challenge and then the children have to use whatever learning is needed. Now, if you say, well, come on, that’s a bit easy or something.

No, because if you think how a doctorate degree is done, it’s that way. You start with a problem or a question or a challenge and then you have to use everything. So our very highest level of learning is actually designed that way. And you’re not restricted to a discipline. You know, if you can solve, you know, like the guy who invented who got the double helix for the DNA, he actually said he learnt he couldn’t solve it through his.

He was doing maths and science experiments and couldn’t solve it. And then he thought, it’s got to be beautiful. I’m going to try and make a model of it. And of course, when he made a model of it, it is beautiful. It is perfect. And once he had the model, he could then go back and solve. The maths and the science. So without his capacity to use sculpture, he would never have got that solved.

So for difficult problems in the world, we need lots of thinking using all disciplines. And children from a very young age can work like that if you let them.
It’s only an imposition. You know, if you look at very little children learning, they learn with whatever means they can learn. They don’t think about what’s what.

They just do everything, you know, and that’s how we have to, you know. So it’s almost like, you know, very little children learn that way. And the very highest of high learn that way. But we’ve lost it in the middle somewhere. And a lot of visual learning, maybe when it comes to learning with music, learning with all sorts of ways of learning, you know, I mean, you don’t cut yourself off from the capacity to use your full human functions to be able to address the most complicated problem.

If you can address it better by moving, move. You know, if you’re not going to improve your health if you don’t move, you know, and we know that if we move more, we improve our health.

You have listened to the podcast Malmö, a podcast made by the editorial staff at Pedagog Malmö. Who do you want to hear in the podcast in the future? Email us at pedagogmalmo@malmo.se. We are also on Facebook and there we are called Pedagog Malmö.