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Showing posts with the label Minneapolis

The Fantastic Binomial

During June and July I was travelling. My last trip was to the US to work with Dr Ingram at the University of Minnesota, advising her on possible methodology changes in the implementation and assessment of the Neighborhood Bridges Program used to analyse critical literacy in storytelling and drama. Here is a bit of fan fiction to illustrate the fantastic binomial at work in one classroom I visited during the trip. Fantastic Binomial Tegan was called up for the fantastic binomial. ‘Yes!’ she said, jumping out of her seat and seizing the white board marker. She usually never got picked for anything. Maria, the Bridges storyteller, bent towards her. Tegan was instantly aware of being the smallest in the class. ‘Choose a place where you could get lost,’ said Maria, ‘and write it on the board.’ There was already a list of prepositions that the class had generated on the white board. Tegan thought of a word and began to write it carefully in capital letters to the left of ...

Minneapolis Research Trip Sept 2014

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In September I was invited to Minneapolis by Professor Jack Zipes to participate in the work of Neighborhood Bridges. This involved presenting my research to staff, teachers and teaching artists of Neighborhood Bridges, meeting with academics, and going into a number of different schools to see the project in action.  A brief overview of Bridges Walker Sculpture Garden (Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburgh) Bridges is recognised by the US Department for Education as a national model for arts education. Highly trained teaching artists take storytelling and drama into schools and work with the teacher and their classroom from autumn to spring. The breadth of the work is impressive as Bridges works with almost forty teaching artists and teachers in schools across Minneapolis. I assisted four teaching artists in the class room during their first sessions. The teaching artist works with the teacher and a classroom of approximately twenty to thirty young people...