Posts tagged with "community"

No More Clip On’s

The Natural Change Project and its associated experiences continues to play a dominant role in my thinking and action, particularly in my professional life. The workshops on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and creating a social change/citizenship model have been the most influential. The need to belong and have a sense of identity and care for your neighbourhood and community has come through so strongly and has had a tremendous impact on the design of the Personal, Social and Health Education Curriculum and the way we carry out or Citizenship and Environmental projects in our school. In fact the Natural Change project has enhanced my ability to develop a structure/framework to aid the development of the Curriculum for Excellence initiative in PSHE.

Over the years I have been involved in many outdoor and charitable projects which have greatly benefited the young people involved in them. Most of these projects were in addition to the formal school curriculum and often attracted a certain type of pupil.

So what has changed? I guess I look back at these projects now in the light of the Natural Change experience and see them as “clip on’s”  They achieved much but the skills, concepts and life long learning within them was never utilised to its full potential. They seemed to focus on short term outcomes and achievements. For example, the pupils worked on disabled paths at a local castle. They made a brilliant job and were most moved when a visitor in a wheel chair came up and thanked them for their work. The atmosphere on these castle days was brilliant but then these pupils would leave and be replaced by the  next group of children who would come along, do the castle paths or gardening work and leave also. Great project but did those involved continue their volunteering? Where were the opportunities to develop this work further? Could some of these skills be recognised and taken into work experience or future employment? Could work of this nature continue at University? It struck me that we need to see these projects in much wider terms and create the “real pathways” for life long commitment to sustainability and citizenship. The castle project now includes much more climate building amongst the pupils before we go out. Another essential ingredient l learned from the NC project! Skills being developed by the project are made clear to pupils in advance eg team building, awareness of health and safety etc.  The National Trust have supported this work and through their community partnership scheme have obtained  BAA sponsorship which has paid for travel costs to the castles.. One of the strongest features of the project has been that we all achieved John Muir awards for our work. I was delighted with my award as were the pupils. Workers from BAA (Dyce Airport) join the children on our castle days and our School Police Liaison Officer also comes along. We hope to extend this to include other members of the community to enable the young people to access positive adult role models, thus aiding relationships and opportunities for further community work and partnership.       

So where do we go from here?     The new PSHE curriculum now has an active citizenship focus which is rooted in its community. The progression of skills and experiences are key features. This work is now part of the formal curriculum. Talks have taken place with the John Muir Trust to extend this type of work into Bucksburn, our school community. The construction of a wilderness area in Bucksburn was one idea which community learning staff were interested in pursuing. Here we hope to develop the John Muir Award scheme to include community groups as well as school children. Aker Solutions, our school business link, are very keen to work with the school and BAA to develop this initiative. A lot of meetings and discussion has been taking place over the last few months to bring together all those involved in learning within the community. We are gathering many group documents on social responsibility and community involvement with a view to forming a group of people who would like to work at creating a social action/citizenship model which incorporates life long learning between all groups and sectors within the local community. We require to identify a common vision and draw from the knowledge and experience of the group.       

Clip on projects were fine to begin with but actually effective sustainability and citizenship work should be a journey that starts early in life and continues throughout our lives just as learning should. In education we have to provide those opportunities to make the links to support our young people in their leisure time or when they leave school. We need to inspire our young people to want to make a difference and see it as a life long process.  The community should be at the heart of the process, supporting, caring, valuing and appreciating its young people and their efforts to “make a difference”. Feeling you belong and are valued by your school and community is where the motivation and inspiration begins.

Posted: May 17, 2009 | Author: Roseleen Shanley | Comments: Add 

10 things I didn’t know….

Natural Change has happened.  To all of us participants and also in some respects within me. The project will make its report and will also live and grow in our testimonies. Yet there will be untold impacts, as yet invisible, person to person, seed to seed.

What has changed? Am I really any different? I haven’t become uber-environmentalist-world-peace activist.  But that wasn’t the purpose.

The purpose was to experience, learn, reflect and act.  Action learning that would help find the way over the value-action gap. It’s a bit of a bamboo and rope bridge at the moment.  No zip slide.

But 10 things I have learned, things I didn’t know about me:

  1. I had a relationship with the earth.  How could I not know that?  Its always been there sustaining me but I just had never ‘felt’ it before.
  2. I needed to become ’super-sensitised’ to nature. This sounds ridiculous.  What I mean is that I have a heightened awareness of nature I didn’t have before.  I see, and want to see, the detials, the intricacies, budding, lichens, colours, the birds, ’smell the roses’ I suppose, nothing earth shatteringly new.
  3. I considered myself an outdoor person but actually I realise I have been consuming the experience and not relating to the environment.
  4. That the natural world can converse with you and I would hear its voice one day.  (Hope you’re still with me)
  5. That a good way to reconnect with my hidden intuitive and creative self would be through an immersion experience in nature.  I’m revisiting poetry, music and art in ways I have long laid down.
  6. I need to practice presence.  This is about being less distracted by the tyranny of time, sorting out work life balance.
  7. Being silent for a sustained time would lead to a crescendo of inner clarity.  Sounds pompous but I really mean it.  And I vouch for its effectiveness.
  8. How much I need the bonds of community to really be me.
  9. I can’t pursue an exclusively individual path anymore.
  10. I really enjoy change!

Its seems clearer to me now than ever that the path of individualism is a congested motorway, strewn with diverting roadworks, but the community is a interchange of journeys and shared spaces.  The former is one buttress of the gap and the latter the other side.  We’ll get there, naturally, hopefully quicker than we realise.

Wake up and smeel the ecological coffee

Wake up and smell the ecological coffee

I found this diagram which chimes with the experiential learning on this project, and also happens to be grounded in some science too.

Posted: March 25, 2009 | Author: Gavin McLellan | Comments: Add 

ideas anyone?

 

 

 

Posted: March 12, 2009 | Author: Emily Yates | Comments: 2 

Natural Change - Inspiring Partnership

Almost two weeks since our last Natural Change residential weekend in Cambusbarron.

How did it go?

A combination of wilderness experience and amazing academic stimulation which provoked creative thoughts and quality discussion.

Sunrise over Cambusbarron

Sunrise over Cambusbarron

 On my way home I sat on the train scribbling down all my ideas in a journal.

I had spent my solo time in the woods where I could escape the icy conditions and enjoyed watching the birds as they flew and hopped around me. The Robins came so close I thought one was going to eat some crumbs out of my hand. However, a passing tractor scared him and he flew off. I made a little bird table for my feathered friends who entertained me and made the time “fly” past. A tree stump and some crumbs would provide a feast for my friends and a welcomed break from searching for food in the icy conditions. I left the wood with the happy thought of the birds eating the crumbs. My thank you to them for the happy experiences they had provided.
The wood where I spent most of my solo time

The wood where I spent most of my solo time

 Once more the solo experience provoked thought, creativity and fun. I had once more felt like the child. This time I was exploring a wood with the heightened senses of childhood. Magical.

On the way back to the farm where we were staying, I was very aware I had been on a very privileged journey and the symbolism of the walk through the ups and downs of the paths and the journey through the darkness of the woods and the bright open spaces, appeared quite symbolic of human life.
That weekend in one of our group workshops we examined  historical and contemporary models which had brought about social change. We then created our own social change model. I found this such a stimulating experience which seemed to pull everything about the Natural Change Project together.
Supporting people to live in a more sustainable way through a model for change really inspired me. Vital to this I thought, would be the ethos and relationships within a community of people who sought change. Like the Natural Change participants who had built up strong and trusting relationships.
On my return to work I wrote a paper for my Head Teacher on my thoughts on how we could build school / community partnerships within the school neighbourhood to promote life long learning and active citizenship. My mind has been racing with ideas. Many brought on by the Natural Change Project but also by its relationship to The Curriculum For Excellence initiative in schools.
Is there a school/ community model out there to inspire communities to live in a more sustainable way?  I will share with you some of the thoughts and ideas that are coming through in the next blog.
Posted: February 19, 2009 | Author: Roseleen Shanley | Comments: 2 

Stranger in a strange land

“To sleep under the stars, and drink nothing but well water and to live chiefly on nuts and wild fruit, was a strange experience for Caspian after his bed with silken sheets in a tapestried chamber at the castle, with meals laid out on gold and silver dishes in the anteroom, with attendants ready at his call.  But he had never enjoyed himself more. Never had sleep been more refreshing nor food tasted more savoury, and he began already to harden and his face wore a kinglier look.”

‘Prince Caspian’, C S Lewis, 1951

Seeing the Prince Caspian movie again last Saturday with my kids reminded me to find these words. The description of finding himself taking refuge in the simpler, hardier world of the forest after being expelled from his familiar comfortable world, resonates with the solo experience on this project.  We all recently had a catch up together to check in, and all of us spoke of a point of departure.  We’ve left some old self behind and now find a newly hardening self forming.

But its confusing. Its troubling.  It’s not yet refreshing or enjoyable as Caspian found in the deep forest exile.  Although there are foretastes of it.  It feels that I am more open and tolerant of nature yet maybe more intolerant of those who dont.  I feel that my sense of time has shifted a little. Took me a while to grasp this notion of ‘being present, be aware.’ Yet what a gift of time it bestows. Things that would have troubled me a lot more in recent times have less power over me.  So my sense of time and pace has expanded, and maybe actually my ’sleep is more refreshing’ after all.

Simplicity beckons.  So much more attractive than ever before.  The Apostle Paul wrote to a young Timothy of having ‘just food and clothing’ and being content with that.  I am not yet anywhere near that.  Not ready to be the sojourner, itinerant, unsettled, living by my wits, in extreme faith and wing and prayer. No do I think that is what’s needed.  But some kind of transcendance is.  An elevation from excess want, finding satisfaction in ‘well water…nuts and fruit,’  There’s quite a few things I cant be bothered buying anymore. Not feeling the pinch in the recession because the wants reduce themselves to needs.

Being hardier isnt that hard at all.  Just do without..that CD, that IKEA item, garment, thing, and things for things!  Find other comforts, discover, look around, walk, cycle.  Feels corny but as Mother Theresa said, ‘live simply so that others may simply live.’

A kinglier look is harder.  Its about our dominion and responsibilities.  Finding a way to discharge them fairly, with no entanglement with injustice, no taint of compromise, seems a way off.  We kings and queens of the new strange world are hemmed in by structures that we try to resist Canute like.  Caspian overcame it through new alliances,  a new community, but before that a period of living in the exile of the stranger.

To sleep under the forest.. (although we didn't! accommodation was fab!)

To sleep under the forest....

Posted: January 22, 2009 | Author: Gavin McLellan | Comments: 2 

Valuing the source

Met a woman yesterday who asked the normal question “but what do you do on these workshops?” 
 I explained one of the things we did was a solo dawn till dusk experience outside in “wilderness”
 She would probably have looked less shocked if I had said that we trapezed naked through the streets of Edinburgh.
 But that’s’ such luxury! She claimed
 Well it’s a day I said.  One day.  We also did a shorter solo of a few hours this weekend
 ”Alone?”
 Yes

 ”Ah you could just take a book and read,” she said, clearly relieved as she recognised that activity as “getting away from it all”. 

 Well you could, but that’s not what people tend to do.  To allow something really different to happen people tend to de-tech completely and leave behind what would be distractions like books, phones, cameras etc and only take a journal to write in.  Actually a lot of people choose to fast as well.

 There was a visible struggle in comprehension and a short silence.

 ”Well it’s just like a walk then”.

 Actually we stay in a small area like 10 metres square so that we don’t turn the solo into a physical activity.  It’s not about climbing mountains, traversing, challenging, travelling, “getting there” or “having it all”.

 

It’s about letting the quiet voice speak up and listening to what it says.  It’s a journey inside.   

 

That is probably THE most important journey any of us as a human being can, or will, ever make.  It is the SOURCE of all our externalised actions, journeys, relationships, behaviours, careers and activism.  We need to take care of the source.

 

So how?

 

On a personal level I think it’s about acknowledging and valuing the source.  About finding the place where our gladness and the world’s hunger meet, trying to help, live and work with others authentically.  And really, really trying not to do it alone or feeling alone in this process…community.  Finding a place to share in a community.

 

On a Meta level it’s about creating real Values within structures.  If we as a society don’t first value the mental and spiritual health and well being of ourselves/our people/our communities how will we value the health and well being of other living things/systems - or vice versa?  

 Some folk have said this project is a bit touchy feely - I think that speaks volumes about what is “acceptable” today in our society.  In my mind, if we don’t attend to a wound it only goes septic - and spreads infection.  Is attending to the wound touchy feely?

The woman also asked “but what do they get out of doing this?” in a deeply puzzled way

 

Read the blogs I said.

 

 

Many thanks to “the woman” for inspiring this blog and no offence intended

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted: November 13, 2008 | Author: Jules Weston | Comments: 2 

What do I see and what does it mean to me?

A simple question but how often do we give ourselves the time to properly look and ask?

I can see stunning colours and contrasts; beeches and birch trees standing out against the deep green of the Scots Pine; bright oranges and yellows, deep russets, luminous and translucent greens, grey, browns and blacks. I can see the trees and the ground all covered with a rich carpet of mosses and trees covered in lichens.

I can see a deer fence along the line of an ancient moss covered dyke. I can see and hear the River Tilt thundering down the gorge with rivulets jumping up above the waterfall. I can see two grey Atholl ponies, I can see the rain drops falling off the trees. I can see up through the black branches of the middle aged beech tree I’m sitting under and I can see glimpses of the white sky beyond. I can see thriving life and I can see decay. The mountain looms behind my back but I’m not looking that way.

 

 

What does it mean to me? Not so easy to answer. I ‘m thinking about how the woodland I am sitting in appears to be a harmonious community; each tree has found its roots and found its space among its neighbours to grow towards the light yet acting together to form the mutual shelter they need.  The rich colours of the different species seemingly so complementary. Then I think about the Scots Pine and birch being Scottish Natives but they look so spectacular against the backdrop of the non Scottish native beech trees. I’m that English beech, naturalised but not native.

I’m very fond of beech trees. We had two magnificent beech trees in the garden where I grew up. Standing between them as a child I could touch both trunks, one was a copper beech and one a green. I thought of them as my wishing trees. The contrast of colours through the seasons was stunning. That makes me think about family and belonging and how if nature can adapt to change then why can’t we? That leads to talking about work life balance or the lack of it. And so the cycle goes on.

Posted: November 11, 2008 | Author: Emily Yates | Comments: Add