TallisLAB
TallisLAB is a creative, enquiry-based curriculum for Years 7 to 9 at Thomas Tallis school - a local community school at the heart of an urban regeneration project in South London. The school has a comprehensive intake of 1650 students and sits between the relatively affluent community of Blackheath and the economically deprived community of Kidbrooke. The school has an above average population of students with Special Educational Needs and those who qualify for free school meals. In excess of 35 home languages are spoken by the school population.
The school has an ongoing and highly profiled commitment to developing a range of creative practices. It has a national profile for this work: see the Creative Tallis website. TallisLAB has replaced discrete ICT lessons and aims to provide students with a range of transferable personal learning and thinking skills fit for the 21st century: see The TallisLAB website. It is a response to both the RSA's Opening Minds and Futurelab's Enquiring Minds programmes. The use of new technologies is integrated into students' learning experiences in TallisLAB, provides them with an opportunity to experiment with a range of web based tools, hand held learning devices and creative software applications. All classes use blogs to share their learning with each other, their teachers and the world beyond the classroom.
The 'Digital Capsule' project (DCP), TallisLAB's contribution to Space2Cre8, will offer students the means to reflect on themselves and their place within their changing local communities as the school buildings and the local public housing is being radically redesigned and rebuilt.
The project will give students (ages 13/14) an opportunity to: create a series of ‘digital capsules’ where they will create websites and other forms of digital media expression (blog posts/photography/interviews/audio/video) engaging with their school and community histories: and the time and the context to reflect on their aspirations as learners going forward to the new school in a changing local community.
We believe that this kind of identity work is important for the individuals concerned but also as a way of defining membership of a generational and 'community' moment. We are interested to explore how the mechanisms of digital creativity and intercultural communication can offer a unique way to define the work of the self and its place in a wider sense of belonging. We are also interested in how both vectors will develop dialogically as members of these classes contrast themselves with the life histories of other young people from around the world.
The Project
The project will run across a whole year group (240 students) led by 4 key teachers during curriculum time and during after school sessions - around two hours a week contact time. The research project will focus on 4 classes (around 120 young people). The school’s outstanding suite of creative media production facilities comprising 40 Macbooks, digital stills cameras, Flip Cams and other peripherals, will available to the DCP cohort.
The project will run during the summer term at the school (April 26 - July 22 2011). The lead teachers will join the Space2Cre8 network and support the cohort members both to engage with the creative identity work activities and to participate as fully as possibly in all Space2Cre8 network activities.
The research team based at the Department of Medias and Communication at the LSE will supervise the research: including the collection and explanation of permission forms, the archiving of the video- and audio-records (of classroom sessions) and any artifacts, and the collection of other research data (interviews, surveys, etc).
In addition we will ensure that the field notes from each session are sent to the Berkeley research team and arrange for the periodic transfer of the data (interview, audio, video files, scanned permission forms, and creative artifacts) over this period.
