Cultural Capital and Curriculum Remixing

So that is it, all fininished! Now just to try and use this to take down the government's lacklustre approach to education and remix the whole curriculum!

Short Video here explaining the main outline of my intervention aimed at raising cultural access and awareness in our students: Password : culture Cultural Capital Movie from Mr Sloan on Vimeo .

As all staff were notified of the changes to displays in the school and were given some idea of the intervention. I decided to get some feedback from two senior leaders in the school to enquire whether they thought the project had any value or impact. Rachel Ray Chouduri - Assistant Head and Leader of the Faculty for Teaching and Learning. Head of Expressive Arts. Lead practicioner.  "What i didnt realise was how much impact its had.. the schools strategic plan and one of the key areas we are working towards is the creative use of technology and if ever there was an example of creative use of technology then this is it" Also mentioned: Its widened their learning.. so students arent limited to just learning about their own subject specialisms. The enthusiasm that she has seen for independent learning is excellent. Embedding this lower down the school Does 'museum culture' impact on students. Ray said yes i think its a starting point..so even that is...

As I have now run my first week or two of the Haggerston Cultural Capital Go game. I have posted below some of the interview / focus groups I had with students after the event to see if they thought it was useful or valuable and if they did indeed feel that it had made them aware of the need for more background knowledge.  "Very interactive" Students agreed that they were engaged more with the displays as a result. They also suggested ways in which this technology could be used by their subject teachers, which shows that they are aware of the possibilities for this interaction. "When we did our blogs.. it (the app) helped a lot "If you made it more specific to lessons then we would definitely go and find them" "the treasure hunt brought it back to games when we were young which was fun" Improvements:  Students thought that staggering the release of them out would be a good idea and that they could be linked to questions about this person...

So for my final staff interview I have interviewed Rachel Ray-Chouduri who is the Head of Expressive Arts, Assistant Head Teacher and Lead Practicioner for the Teaching and Learning Faculty! Do our students have Cultural Capital? "When I first started at Haggerston (15 years ago) there was a huge gap, especially in the Arts" "In the arts there is a history out there (that is impossible to teach) that makes their vocabulary their understanding and their connections so much easier (if they knew about it)". Ray interestingly highlighted the recent change in the demographic of our school due to gentrification of Hackney and the explosion of the arts in Shoreditch and East London: "What we have now is that we have a different type of middle class young person due to their culturally knowledgeable parents "(what i was used to was) trying to teach drama to people who had never been to the theatre" "the head of music used to teach music whe...

Hannah is the Head of Sixth Form and member of the Senior Leadership Team at the school. She is also a subject teacher in Psychology and Maths. Do students lack cultural capital?  "Yes some of our students, and not just our students but my experience in previous schools,  they know a lot about the now and different strands of culture and celebrity culture, but its often historical references they lack". Is cultural capital useful?  "it might be that the only use it serves is to enable them to move on to the next level (in society)" Hannah also explained using an example around the topic of conformity on the psychology curriculum that Cultural capital is useful in the contextual sense around historical time periods. How are we tackling background knowledge in the sixth form currently: - Giving wider reading - Prior knowledge needs to be considered as part of the curriculum in the planning stage. Has the curriculum changed?  "(Maths) Its harde...

Interview with former Literacy Coordinator, Lead Practitioner in the Teaching and Learning Faculty member, Homework coordinator, English teacher and long serving teacher (since 1997) at Haggerston School; Nancy Matthews. Is there a Gap between student knowledge and what they are expected to know? "Yes!... it becomes very obvious when you teach a student with cultural capital.. they stand out" Nancy exemplified her point of view through a student she taught who gained their cultural capital : ..Through parents jobs, political leanings, reading culture at home led to students having a huge advantage when it came to analysing a text for context. ....Many of our EAL students experience issues because at home their talk is all in other cultures... Nancy talked about the positive impact of the old AQA anthology 'poems from other cultures' and the way in which this opened up a cultural dialogue for many EAL students and students from a wide range of backgrounds. ...