I thought yesterday was stimulating on lots of levels. I guess a theme for me is how we facilitate 'a giving permission' to allow our slightly-less-to-the-fore-selves (or identities, as we are all multiply identitied) some fresh air, myself included. As an ex-art student and not-practising-at-the-moment practitioner, it was really great to re-engage with that aspect of myself and - yes I was swamped by role-envy! - but I loved looking at the work and truely enjoyed the dialogue we were having - the sort that I used to have a lot but not so much now - and what it made me think about when I got home. Its also made me introduce parts of the dialogue here at my work - with interesting take up - so now I am having that dialogue more even as we speak - result!

If 'perceiving the practical need' or worrying about what we should be doing (according to....?) boxes us into a default way of responding to the context, yet pushing ourselves to explore alternative values (thereby questioning whether the practical and operational has always got to come top of the hierarchy) proves fruitful (even if it feels a bit counter-intuitive and selfish compared with habitual ways of being) are we modelling a freedom, that, in the long term, actually serves the social good of freeing us all up?

Wouldn't it be great if the project incidentally resulted in teachers being inspired to use the loans collection in a different way than to support the teaching of history because the work gave them that permission? and even greater if we have no control over how they do that or that we discover that they do it in totally unanticipated ways. Wouldn't it be great if the academic community recognised that this work is, in fact, lifelong education in action, for the artists and researchers, and for anyone subsequently touched by the work, and that lifelong education isn't just mature students having HE done to them, that CPD can be many things in many different informal contexts -

anyway the most important thing being we have a green light for the pig tape measure and it is in the post to me and will send on to Kate G when UI get an address

so long, Lou

Welcome to our blog!

I thought we would get going by thinking about what Louise raised about the relationship between value and need.
In the gold case, for the Rotherham project, we realised that gold had a different value than we, as Westerners, associated with it.
In this project, what is valued seems to be at the heart of the project - is it a Papyrus from the time of Moses or Kate's father's wheelbarrow?
Answers on a postcard please.