Author: Paul Kleiman

Academic, researcher, writer, musician, gardener, narrowboat owner, dog owner.

The Elixir of Wonder

Yesterday I spent the morning discussing future strategies and scenarios in higher education. What struck me was that over the course of three hours the words education, teaching, and learning were never used.

In the evening I was a guest at the opening night of the Royal Northern College of Music’s production of Donizetti’s opera ‘The Elixir of Love’ to be sung in Italian and featuring – in the cast and orchestra – students from right across the undergraduate and post-graduate provision.

I have to admit that opera generally – and particularly early 19th century Italian comic opera – does not feature on my list of favourite ‘must see’ genres. In fact it’s probably well along the ‘must avoid’ end of the continuum. However, I’d been invited by colleagues I like and respect, and there was a pre-show dinner at the RNCM’s excellent restaurant.

There was a full house, so the building was humming. There’s something great about that pre-show foyer buzz as people arrive, meet, greet, drink, chat, etc. As Richard Schechner pointed out many years ago, the trouble with too many shows is that what happens in the foyer, bars and social spaces before, at the interval, and after a show is all too frequently the most interesting phenomena of the evening.

We took our seats as the orchestra tuned up. Again there’s that wonderful expectancy as the various instruments tune in to that plaintive A on the oboe.

Then it was curtain up and straight into what, from the start to the finish, was a hugely enjoyable, visually seductive and witty, brilliantly performed and played production. 24 hours later, as I write this, I am still smiling because of it.

However this is not a review of the production. But rather, thinking back to my rather dry and ‘education-free’ meeting – about higher education – in the morning, a reflection on how our much disparaged and ‘useless’ disciplines of dance, drama and music in education (all present in this production) provide opportunities for students and also staff to engage in the creation of truly wonderful work. This is something that too many of those who are in control of our education systems, with their obsessions with protocols and standardisation and compliance and conformity and league tables and graduate employability and sustainability and an infinite host of other -isations and -ilities, just don’t get!

I’ve written before how our obsession with the somewhat triumphalist notion of ‘excellence’ has blinded us to that which is so obvious about genuine, transformative education: it’s not excellence we should be pursuing…it is wonder-full education.

The RNCM show provided that Elixir of Wonder.

Sad, strange days…of comfort but little joy.

A few weeks ago we were standing by the luggage carousel at Malaga Airport waiting for our cases to arrive. Next to us, also waiting, were a middle aged man and a young woman. We got chatting – as you do – and it turned out they were a father and daughter, off to spend a long weekend at a villa he owned nearby. We had a lovely chat, about this and that, especially with the daughter who was in her first year at university. She was fun, vibrant, and immediately likeable.

It also turned out that they were Jewish and lived only a few miles from us in Manchester.

In a few days, while we were in Spain, it was to be the first anniversary of my mother’s death, when it is customary to go to synagogue to say memorial prayers. We knew there was a synagogue in Malaga, and as he was sort of ‘local’, I asked him if he knew anything about it. He said he did, and that he’d text me the details. So we swapped names and numbers and, when our luggage arrived, we said our goodbyes.

He never did get back to me, but we found the synagogue anyway.

Yesterday, in Manchester, we heard through a close friend that the daughter of someone she knew through her work had gone to a beauty salon, had suffered a severe asthma attack, and had died. She mentioned the devastated family’s name, and I knew immediately that it was that lovely, vibrant young woman at the airport.

We’ve just returned from paying our respects to the family at their home. A heartbreaking and heartrending scene, but also one that showed the strength of community as well over a hundred people waited patiently, both inside the house and outside in the rain, to pay their respects.

We approached the father to say the traditional words of comfort. Even in his grief he looked at us that way you look at someone who approaches you as if they know you, but you haven’t the faintest idea who they are. I told him who we were, and how and where we met. He stood up from his low wooden ‘mourning’ chair and hugged me, and smiled, and thanked us for being there…and he asked me if I’d found a synagogue and apologised for not getting back to me. I said I had, and thanked him for pointing us in the right direction. His wife said it was the first time she’d seen him smile.

They both seemed genuinely touched and overwhelmed that a couple of complete strangers should make the effort to visit them and to say words of comfort.

Walking away from the house, we met a couple we knew. He said “It’s just crap, isn’t it? But it makes you stop , doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does, and it also reminded me of something I wrote some years ago, also at a sad time:

‘We forget at our peril just how thin and fragile is the layer of everyday normality, and how easily that layer can be torn and ruptured, sometimes in a matter of seconds…and just how important small acts of kindness are: the smile, the greeting, the helping hand, the thank you, the small talk before getting down to business, are all, in their way, small acts of kindness that bind us together and strengthen the fabric of our lives’.

I know it sounds a bit soppy and clichéd, but give a hug to the people you love and care about, and tell them how much you love and care about them…and do it every day, or certainly whenever the opportunity arises.

Musings on a ‘monsterous’ conference call

Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness. . .

(Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”)

 

In the wake of the recent announcement and call for contributions for the HEA’s Arts & Humanities ‘Heroes and Monsters” conference, there have been a number of posts and blogs on various sites wrestling with what the call is actually about!One that caught my eye was by Susan Deacy.

Dr. Deacy writes “The particulars make clear that the event is looking for ways to challenge current ways of learning and teaching to ‘make strange’ academic practice and challenge what is taken for granted by its practitioners. On the conference’s definition, monsters dwell in realms just beyond our own; they can come into our world to ‘unnerve’ us and ‘innervate’ us, and thus a ‘monstrous pedagogy’ can ‘disrupt habits’ and ‘articulate…different ways of being’. But who are ‘we’?”

There is a strong implication in the conference description, that ‘we’ are the ones who are disrupted and unnerved. But ‘we’ are, or can be, or may wish to be also the monsters and/or heroes (heroic monsters? monstrous heroes?). The teacher as Theseus and/or the Minotaur?

What has struck me in recent weeks (and, before I proceed further, I need to declare my interest as a member of the HEA’s Arts and Humanities team) is that I have newly encountered and had conversations about not just our own ‘Heroes & Monsters’ conference, but also the influence of Punk and the punk aesthetic in learning and teaching (did you know there’s an active group of scholars called Punkademics?); the establishment of a university Centre for Gothic Studies; and a course entitled Vampire Studies.

I do wonder, as the significant pressures of standardisation, marketisation, consumerisation, etc. in higher education bear increasingly down on us (then again, who are ‘we’?), whether this is a form of resistance.

But we don’t resist change, per se. We resist loss, and we replace that loss not with the known, the common, the understood, the accepted. We replace it with ‘the other’ or, better, ‘an other’: one that has genuine meaning in an environment in which so many things have become de-referentialised, that strikes a chord, that ‘chimes with the times’.

It is also no accident that the ‘Heroes and Monsters’ conference call connects directly with the allure and fascination of the myth and the quest. As I’ve got a book chapter to write on key aspects of teaching and learning in dance, drama and music, I’ll end (I may return, hauntingly) as I began, with Ted Hughes, and this in his essay ‘Myth and Education’:

“The myths for [Plato] were not very different from what they are for us, imaginative exercises about life in a world full of supernatural figures and miracles that never happened, never could happen. Yet these, he suggested, were the ideal grounding for the future wise and realistic citizen. We can imagine what would happen if we proposed now that all education in England up to the school age of 11 be abolished and there be put in its place a huge system of storytelling.

If we think of that we can see how far the wisdom in our educational system differs from what Plato would have called wisdom. Our school syllabus of course is one outcome of 300 years of rational enlightenment, which had begun by questioning superstitions and ended by prohibiting imagination itself as a reliable mental faculty, branding it more or less as a criminal in the scientific society. And what this has ended in is a completely passive attitude of apathy in face of material facts. The scientific attitude, which is the crystallisation of the rational attitude, has to be passive in the face of the facts if it is to record the facts accurately.

Such is the prestige of the scientific style of mind that this passivity in the face of the facts, this detached, inwardly inured objectivity, has become the prevailing mental attitude of our time. It is taught in schools as an ideal.

The result is something resembling mental paralysis”.

Forget Excellence…we need wonder!

Paul Kleiman

(First published in the Higher Education Academy’s EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, Issue 7, 2008)

Excellence! Everyone is writing, talking, researching, obsessing about it. But what is it?

Some years ago PALATINE, the Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music, undertook an enquiry into the use of the full range of marks in assessing the performing arts in higher education. As well as provoking the centre’s biggest and most heated electronic postbag, a number of respondents described the distinct discomfort they experienced when considering the assessment of work at the very top of the range. One memorably wrote: “I feel the increasingly heavy pull of gravity on my pen as I get to 75%.”

The response supported research that found that the extremities of the percentage scale are perceived as insecure territory for the assessors of qualitative subject matter. There is a strong sense, in the arts and humanities, that nothing can be that good or, for that matter, that bad, and the research revealed that most marking in the arts and humanities ranged between c. 35% to 75% which, in the eccentric and esoteric honours grading system we use in the UK, still manages to cover everything from a Fail to a First!

Undoubtedly one of the assessment challenges we have set for ourselves in performing arts disciplines is requiring students to demonstrate achievement in a wide range of practical, scholarly and creative modes. High achievement in one is rarely sustained across the breadth of an assessment régime in our disciplines, and we have to work to ensure that ‘excellent’ achievement is reflected in the aggregated marks at module and degree level. This is a pedagogic challenge which is not shared by other, more traditional arts and humanities subjects.

So what does excellence mean in this context?

Going by the result of the debate on excellence at an academic conference, there is a clear majority who feel that the term has lost credibility and value. When all institutions are either ‘excellent’ or, at the very least, ‘striving for excellence’ then we are witnessing a lot of sound (but hopefully not fury) signifying nothing. Excellence has become ‘de-referentialised’. Turning to the dictionary provides little assistance. In the Concise Oxford ‘to excel’ is defined as to surpass or to be pre-eminent (i.e. to be better than the majority), whereas ‘excellence’ is defined as ‘very good’.

Whatever meaning ‘excellence’ once had has become lost in a blizzard of hyperbole. The fate of excellence follows in the tradition of other terms such as ‘community’ and, more recently, ‘creativity’, whose meaning has become devalued and decontextualised through over- and inappropriate use.

In the arts, the term excellence is rarely if ever used as a descriptor except – and this may be relevant in considering educational achievement – in relation to the application or demonstration of skill or craft. Academics, students and arts practitioners tend to avoid the ‘E’ word. The theatrical cliché has never been: “You were excellent, darling”. ‘Wonderful’ is truly a much better word than ‘excellent’ to describe high artistic achievement. Rather than excellent’s rather hard-edged, triumphalist implication of being better than others, ‘wonderful’, i.e. full of wonder, has a sense of the remarkable, the extraordinary, the truly successful that is the mark of the highest quality work.

Excellence, it must be said, is much favoured by arts politicians and bureaucrats who use it both aspirationally and as a justification for funding. Excellence attracts rewards and prizes. But the use of the term has more to do with product branding (as it has in higher education) than with a real concern with the subtle complexities of quality and value.

Here is a typical example: one of our leading UK arts funding bodies, in its mission statement, states: “We believe the arts to be the foundation of a confident and cultured society. They challenge and inspire us. They bring beauty, excitement and happiness into our lives. They help us to express our identity as individuals, as communities and as a nation”.

Wonderful! But then they go and ruin it by reverting to corporate-speak and saying they are going to “serve the people … by fostering arts of excellence through funding, development, research and advocacy”. An external examiner I knew, having seen what was – by general consensus – a remarkable, successful, extraordinary, inspiring … yes, wonderful piece of final-year practical work was dismayed to find that the two internal examiners, who also thought the work was remarkable, successful etc had agreed a mark of 75%. He asked them to start at 100%, and argue persuasively for marks to be deducted. With the assessment criteria in their hands they struggled to get below 95%. To describe that work as merely ‘excellent’ would have been insufficient. It was beyond excellence.

That is perhaps what we should be striving for and, in doing so, we need to look beyond our obsession with trying to define, achieve, assess and reward excellence.

As the old saying goes: education is, or ought to be, a wonderful thing.

Where have all the conkerors gone?

There are several large horse chestnut ‘conker’ trees near our house. When we first moved on to the street, thirty years ago, and at this time of year, one would spot small groups of (usually) young boys collecting conkers for their conker fights – usually by throwing sticks up into the trees to dislodge the conkers, as those on the ground would have already been grabbed. For those for whom this is an alien pastime, October was the month for conker fights – in the school playground or in the streets around one’s home. Along with all my friends, I’d gather around the nearest trees, particularly those known to have the biggest conkers. Having collected a suffient number, I’d then select one that seemed to be the hardest – particularly if it had a sharp edge. Real conker afficionados would experiment with hardening techniques such as soaking them in vinegar.

Having selected what I reckoned was the most likely candidate, or even candidates, I’d make a hole through the conker, and thread through some string. Tying a knot that the conker would rest on. At which point I was ready to participate in the conker fights.

The aim of the fight was to destroy your opponent’s conker by hitting it with your conker, using the string to swing it like a hammer on an alternate ‘I hit yours, you hit mine’ basis.

If you were the victor, then someone else would challenge you. Those who claimed several victories with the same conker were able to say that their conker was a ‘fiver’ (five victories) or a ‘tenner’ etc, and slowly a sort of league table would organically form.

Naturally there were the occasional bruised knuckles when your opponent missed, but to use anything but bare hands was – by common assent – wholly unethical. (There was an interesting media furore a few years ago, when a school insisted that children playing conkers must wear protective gloves and goggles).

This is all a preamble to the fact that I’ve noticed, on my daily dog walk, that those once much sought after conkers now lie in their dozens on the ground around the trees. The only creatures interested in them are the local squirrels who either gnaw at them or squirrel them away somewhere to be stored for some unspecified time later.

So…
Where have all the conkerors gone?
Gone to computer games, every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?