Connected and Creative Learning Webinar Series

24th – 28th March

How can connections be used as a tool for improving diverse learning and what role can creativity play in this process?

This is the question driving the Connected Learning Project and that this five part seminar series will seek to explore and answer. Our interest in connected learning arose through Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa. DEPA is a 5-year project of 16 individual projects in 14 countries in Africa. It engaged with marginalised and conflict- affected communities across the continent to understand how indigenous knowledges, cultural heritage, and creative practices contribute to peace. Connected learning means a form of learning which connects across research and teaching, higher and secondary education and between different communities in the global South and North.
A core ambition of the project was to develop educational resources. Collectively, we have produced a suite of courses and materials covering a range of topics at the intersection of creativity and education. The material focuses on decolonial pedagogy, African-centred peace pedagogies, creative economies and climate change. They draw on examples from across the suite of projects. In these materials, creativity is a topic of interrogation, a research methodology and an output. This seminar series explores all these issues.
This seminar series provides a forum for connecting and learning creatively. It is open to academics, policy makers, artists, activists, civil society and community members.

The seminar series asks, how do we:
• Use teaching methods creatively to address and redress inequalities among and between young people and genders in ethical ways?
• Provide researchers with a set of resources that they can use to address inequalities while undertaking research, especially educational research, including how to engage with the creative economy?
• Produce these resources collaboratively?
• Connect people in order to make resilient societies?

We invite participants to take part and to engage constructively in shaping connected and creative learning that addresses contemporary issues.

What It Means to Connect?
Connections is now an often-used term. We speak of everyday connections becoming more common due to the Internet. We may also make a deliberative attempt to connect people in order to highlight interconnections in the making of places and communities. This notion of connection has been successfully used to decolonise curriculum, as in the case of the Connected Sociology project. It may also be used to de-emphasise some connections which are often taken as fundamental and to highlight other connections. For example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam does this in the case of history, to show the connections within East Asia and how they led to the making of Japanese history in the early modern period. He wants to situate and de-emphasise the role of Europe in shaping Japan.

This project borrows from these ideas but intervenes in the world in a slightly different manner. It aims to forge the possibilities of three forms of connections:
– Between different communities, national, educational and social
– Between people from different parts of the world who deliver education (for peace), formal and informal (including the creative economy) and across sectors
– Between different types of knowledge, pushing for the recovery of indigenous
knowledges while also recognising the need to stay within contemporary educational frameworks.

It also aims to think through disconnections and how and why they can be used as tools of resistance. How are communities becoming disconnected through conflict or due to parochialism? In what ways can connected learning be used to address this?
Our approach to connections is to act as live conduits who enable social transformation through our connections. We are thus not commentators or researchers alone but actively pursuing social change and equity through our creative and connected practices.
Please join us on this journey.

Seminar Sessions
Each session is 90 minutes. Panels will consist of three speakers who will present on the particular thematic issue and how it connects to creativity and learning in their work. Two presenters in each seminar will be from DEPA projects. A third will represent a project DEPA has connected with through our work. Presentations will end with a brief panel discussion before opening the floor to conversations with all attendees.

Seminar 1: Youth

In the first of the seminar series, DEPA Principal Investigator Parvati Raghuram will briefly introduce the ideas behind the Connected and Collaborative Learning Project and this series. The panel will then look at the creative ways in which young people have been involved in learning new skills and what has been achieved as a result. Presentations will explore the importance of connections between youth during the skills learning experience and different ways through which their training in creative processes has benefited themselves and the society more widely. Register Here: https://bit.ly/4hncX1o

Seminar 2: Gender

In this session we will hear from those who have been involved in creative methods for learning and teaching about gender issues. Specifically, how can creativity help in the fight against sexual and gender-based violence which is a major global challenge. Panellists will speak to experiences of working with communities who are particularly vulnerable and are on the fringes of SGBV work. Presentations will explore the importance of connections between youth during the skills learning experience and different ways through which their training in creative processes has benefited themselves and the society more widely. Register Here: https://bit.ly/3R5jvHf

Seminar 3: Arts

The third seminar will focus on the important role that arts have to play in facilitating learning. Arts can be an input, i.e. something which is taught. They can form a methodology for researching or an output which is produced as an outcome of research. The arts can also provide a way of building cross-cultural connections. The presentations in this session will look across a spectrum of art forms and mediums to ask: what are the artistic practices that can be put to use in creative learning? Register Here: https://bit.ly/3XIzPl0

Seminar 4: Teaching

This seminar explores education as the centrepiece of connected and creative learning. It brings together participants who have been active in teaching for change using the arts. It will consider topics, such as how to do careful teaching that ensures buy-in from young
people, teachers, parents, community members, and local government officials. It will explore how to innovate teaching in ways that address locally pressing issues, which is something does not only happen in the formal sector but, also, informally. It will look at what has been learnt about teaching in the creative sector and how museums can be educated to decolonise their teaching, as well as, what happens then when you introduce creativity into the education process and pedagogies. Presentations will explore these issues to bring into focus what created and connected teaching can actually achieve. Register here: https://bit.ly/4ihWI79

Seminar 5: Partnership and Co-operation

There is increasing interest in equity in research partnerships between the Global North and South. Calls for different and alternatives ways through which power asymmetries in the research ecosystem can be made fairer and more equitable. This stretches the gamut of the research process. From who sets funding agendas, to how research is designed and implemented, through to research outputs. Questions such as where does ownership sit, how are decisions made and by whom and what voices are given legitimacy. The presentations in this session will look at how connecting creatively in different ways within the research process can be leveraged to catalyse learning that fosters greater equity. Register here: https://bit.ly/3FygKvy