Welcome to the Bonfire

In this session, Stephen Reid will explore the landscape of education through the lens of game-based learning and in particular, Minecraft. From curriculum toy boxes that bring Pompeii, the Vikings and WWI to life, to mathematics in a zombie apocalypse, a digital field trip to meet Claude Monet, and life as a refugee.

But to teach in this way takes bravery. To develop and deliver your subject matter in a digital world where your students are the experts means taking a personal and professional journey only equalled in its learning curve by the rewards it delivers.

Being brave is not easy. It should be challenging and complex. We have invited some brave teachers and school leaders to lead a Bonfire conversation around what it means to be brave within the current education system. These educators will offer their unique perspectives before we open the conversation up to those attending.

Louise Scott-McKie, Teacher, Glasgow

My resource is to create a teachers’ collective that encourages, inspires and supports one another to make creatively brave decisions in their roles in the school sector. Aiming to have less people who feel like ‘lone wolves’ valiantly making small changes in their schools, and more groups that make bigger changes through collective action.

Kathleen Shiels, Head Teacher, Glasgow

Trust and let go. The school community will and must be bigger than anything you can create on your own. It must move and grow as a result of all that the community invest. You might place a few pieces of the puzzle but you are only a part of the whole that will grow, change and evolve. You can try to control or you can ride the wave.

Laura Kerr, (Newly Qualified Teacher) Glasgow

Bravery is about being ok with tolerating uncertainty. Changes – either big or small can throw you off and make you feel unbalanced, but if you go for it and deal with that uncertainty it will create more opportunities and you never know what the outcome may be until you deal with it. It is about believing in your gut feeling and following your heart.

A quote I love – “What if I fall? Oh but what if you fly?”

Join Briana Pegado – Executive Director of Creative Edinburgh, to explore bravery in creative contexts that means taking risks and having uncomfortable conversations.

Whether that is from challenging a client brief that does not have the end user and its humanness at its heart or having a challenging conversation about an abuse of power you have seen in your workplace or the wider sector – join me through sharing my experiences of having brave, pivotal, and important conversations.

Biana is a co-founder of Povo, a creative conductancy and the founder of the Edinburgh Student Arts Festival (ESAF). Briana is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Vice Chair of YWCA Scotland – the Young Women’s Movement. She also sits on the Governing Body of the University of York. Her work focuses on socially conscious business, financial sustainability for creatives, supporting young people seeking a career in the creative industries, festivals, and human-centred design processes.

Join Dr Anne Bamford, Strategic and Education Skills Director at City of London Corporation in this session that focuses on the value of ‘piloting’ ideas in schools to bring about change.

In education, our assumptions are constantly challenged yet the fear of change and failure often stops us doing something different from what we ‘normally do’. We try to work within the structures rather than thinking whether these structures, such as school timetables and subject boundaries, actually prevent us from doing our best work and having the greatest impact.

Agora is a secondary school without schoolbooks, classes, or timetables. Started 6 years ago in Roermond The Netherlands.

At the moment there are 11 other schools in The Netherlands and Belgium using their basic principles. when kids start at Agora they ask them a simple question: What do you want to make, do or learn? And they go from there. At the end all kids do the national exames. Please join us for an introduction film, followed by a Q&A with some of the young people from the Agora school.

Everyone has magic, seeds of brilliance. How to reveal this magic from within? What are the conditions that enable creative abilities to flourish? 

Sometimes our attempts to foster creativity can actually stifle it. Author Peter Gamwell, a former teacher and superintendent who has spent more than three decades studying creativity, working closely with such renowned creativity experts as Sir Ken Robinson, has a fresh perspective on how to nurture creativity, innovation, leadership and engagement in education.
This Q&A session allows you to ask Peter questions about his experiences and thoughts on creativity in education.

www.petergamwell.com

Tune into this bonfire session to learn about AIME’s reimagining of education globally since 2005, using the 3 most critical skills of our time – imagination, mentoring & principles of organising change.

You may also have opportunities to partner with us, as we evolve into the next phase of AIME’s journey with the launching of IMAGI-NATION{University} in October 2020, to fast-track human development & to enable a whole ecosystem of change-makers to learn from each other and the collective knowledge we’ve amassed through the years to solve the greatest challenges of our times, and together build a fairer world.

You may even have the chance of meeting one of our puppets aka Professor HOPE :).

Remake Learning convened educators, advocates, and stakeholders to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of learning post-pandemic.

Gregg is the founder and co-chair of Remake Learning.

While much work remains as the pandemic continues to change and deepen the needs of children, caregivers, and educators – particularly those who were previously underserved and harmed by inequitable systems most exposed to its impacts – Remake Learning is committed against quick fixes, one-size-fits- all solutions and a return to any “normal” that was siloed and unjust. Three aspirational focal points guided our thinking: justice, methods, and relationships.
Remake Learning is a “creatively brave” learning network supporting more
than 500 schools, museums, libraries, early learning centres, afterschool
organizations, and other sites of learning to ignite engaging, relevant, and
equitable learning opportunities.

Visit the website: https://remakelearning.org/

We have had the industrial Revolution, Electric Revolution, Tech and Data Revolution. Now we are entering the Connected Intelligence Revolution.

We will start by looking at real world examples and cases studies from brands and businesses where this is already happening and how these might apply to our schools and education.

We will then look at a vision of what a day in the life of a pupil at school could look like in the next 10 years, and how data and connected intelligence might impact how they learn and interact with learning, schools, friends and teachers. We also want to explore the next few years looking at emerging technology, data and other trends, as well as bringing ideas and predications that might both excite and scare us.

One of the original Brave Team Ve Dewey will be joined by John S. Couch for a fireside chat.  Within this fireside chat John and Vanessa will explore creativity and the art of creative rebellion and how more than ever we must embrace creativity from education to one’s every-day life. We are at a cross road within our world’s history and we creative thinkers more than ever.

Widely recognized as one of the great creative minds of our modern world, John S. Couch is a prolific artist and designer working as an Entertainment and Technology Specialist focused on cross-platform content strategies.

He is currently Vice President, Product Design for on-demand video service Hulu, where he lead its successful 2017 Hulu Experience redesign across mobile, living room and web platforms. His first job out of college was curating an art show in London of Beat writer William Burroughs’ “Shotgun Paintings” (as implied, shotguns and exploding cans of spray paint were involved). In classic young starving artist mode, he ambulated to Paris, Vienna and Tokyo before finally settling in San Francisco. He launched his design career at Wired Magazine, where he shared an office with Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”) and developed a love for technology, design and tech. Fluent in Japanese, he helped launch Wired Japan before moving to LA, where he took on leadership roles at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), CBS and eBay, finally landing at Hulu. Couch lives with his wife and daughter in the Santa Monica Mountains, California, where, in addition to his day job, he writes every morning before sunrise and paints every evening.

This is the space to visit the events you didn’t have time to attend during the week. It’s also the space to take time to slow down and  reflect on those you attended: a  time for wandering and wondering what all of this means for you, your colleagues and education.

You can do this on your own but we also invite you to connect with another and go for a Dialogue Walk. The instructions are in the Creativity Toolshed in the Walking Classroom, and we would love it if you could use Instagram or twitter to post a reflection on your #wonderwondering for #CreativeBravery and we’ll share these at our final Bonfire on Sunday at 4 pm.

Join Garrett Jaeger to explore how every creative act is one of bravery. Even when ideas flow, we owe this to a courage to play with new ideas and by pursuing a meaningful path that others may not.

During this Campfire Dialogue we will play with ideas and discuss a variety of topics that the LEGO Foundation finds relevant on our journey to redefine play and reimagine learning. Some of our recent efforts focus on the bravery of welcoming uncertainty–via Learning through Play–as a catalyst for creativity. Because children are our role models in learning, we see how one can play without necessarily being creative, but one cannot be creative without play.