On Saturday 7th February, 2015 conversationsEAST are sponsoring an informal Open House drop-in event at their offices in Cambridge. Tim Smith FRSA will be holding a Fellowship Counsellor surgery, in his role as Fellowship Counsellor for the East of England. (Tim’s sponsored programme covers the region at monthly intervals or so. See more here...)
He’ll also be wearing his hat as Editor of this on-line publication, so a well as his Fellowship Council agenda, if you have a Fellow led project you would like support for, or to talk with another Fellow around funding, governance, communications or operational development…Tim will be on hand from 10.00am.
If you are intending to bring a charabanc of a dozen Fellows or so, do let Tim know, as our loft space will quickly fill up. See more details of Tim’s agenda and contact details for the day, including the creation of a women’s group to advance the interests of female Fellows in the region, here…
RSA Engage
‘The Power to Create is the theme of much RSA work this year and this Connect event will bring local Fellows (an interested others) together to discuss both local issues and exciting work coming out of the RSA’.
The RSA are currently about to deliver a suite of RSA Engage events in the Eastern Region. There are forthcoming events in Ipswich, Cambridge and other Fellow population centres. See details below.
These Engage events are a great opportunity to meet the team from The House and to develop contacts and share ideas with other Fellows, or yet to be Fellows too. See you there?
The RSA has recently published a report, called Spiritualise – Revitalising Spirituality to address 21st Century Challenges, compiled by Dr Jonathan Rowson, Director of the Social Brain Centre, RSA.
Below the Reverend Sue Martin, FRSA briefly reflects upon the theme…
“…this is an interesting report of some depth and brings spirituality into the open for all groups of people; faith and non faith, intellectual and pragmatic. Encompassing a multitude of dimensions the report draws on cultural psychology, embodied cognition, the divided brain and neural plasticity. If you venture into these chapters of the report you will find profound research and questioning.
(Jonathan Rowson gives due credit to The RSA for provision of the important institutional framework to allow the research to proceed, and provides details of the contributions of the many philosophers, psychologists and cultural specialists et al whose workshop activities informed the research conversation).
Before you get too deeply into the exacting mental science behind ‘spirtualising’, take a moment to dwell on what is spirituality, how do we know if we have it, and what should we do with it, if and when we get it?
And the following questions, seemingly simple, pose thoughts for us even if there are, annoyingly, no immediate direct answers;
Is there something more than just this time and place?
What happens to us when we see or hear something that makes us have ‘goosebumps’?
When was the last time you found yourself thinking about those you love?
If we spend all our time in gaining material goods and wealth, how do we know when to stop, and when is enough, enough?
Dr Rawson tackles many areas of spiritualising and in section three of the report addresses belonging or being, from love and death, from self and soul. “ Love, death, self and soul were selected, not as an exhaustive or exclusive map, but to illustrate why the spiritual is not fringe or niche but right at the heart of our lives.” (Spiritualise – Revitalising Spirituality p.56). This is followed by a number of illuminated pathways to personal, social and political transformation, including a section from happiness to meaning and back again.
In a Christian dimension, happiness and blessing are much the same thing and we look here in the report beyond the straightforward aspect of being happy, which can be rendered over simply, to see it can be a constituent of a deep and fulfilling spirituality.
The Dalai Lama in his book The Art of Happiness, links happiness to a quest for learning;
“ We don’t need more money, we don’t need greater success or fame, we don’t need the perfect body or even the the perfect mate… at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.”
A Himalayan view…
Spirituality is like the tip of an iceberg, or rather a view from the top of a mountain. We think we know it all because we believe what we see is all that there is. Yet beneath lies a volume of intellectual matter and reflection that deeply conditions our existence.
Dr Rawson has produced an excellent research report and I wonder if this is something that RSA Fellows in the East can pursue in further discussion and reflection; not seeking the ‘answers’ but in seeking meaning and understanding”.
Reverend Sue Martin FRSA, Diocese of Norwich
(Is there potential for a regional group to combine, reflect and look to create a project that can carry forward the theme of spirituality, social change and the human condition? Respond to Sue Martin’s rallying call using our ‘contact us’ service above and we’ll post a project proposalonthese web pages to help the idea coalesce…Ed.)
Photo credit: Nepal and the mountains – courtesy of Sue Martin.
As part of the Fellow led Chelmsford Remembers Project there is an upcoming joint meeting of RSA Chelmsford and The Civic Society at Anglia Ruskin University , Chelmsford.
Date: Monday 9th February, 2015 – 5.45pm for 6.00pm start
Venue: Room 001, The Sawyer Building, Anglia Ruskin University.
We are very pleased to announce that our guest speakers for the event will be Air Vice Marshall Ray Lock CBE, who is Chief Executive of the Forces in Mind Trust(FiMT) and Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes from the Veterans and Families Institute at Anglia Ruskin University.
This event, as part of Chelmsford Remembers, links the centenary commemorations of the First World War to the effects of deployment to war zones today. Other items include…
Final report on the Ideas Festival 2014 (IF2014) and the initial consultations on 2015. IF2015 will run from the 18th October 2015 to 1st November inclusive.
Update on negotiations on future uses for the Hall Street Marconi Factory.
Notifications on upcoming Chelmsford Remembers event with Dr. Paul Rusiecki author of The Impact of Catastrophe – The First World War.
If you are able to attend, do please confirm with Malcolm Noble – (mnoble3211 at yahoo.com), or use our ‘contact us’ panel above and send Malcolm a message directly from this web page.
REALITY brings together over 50 works celebrating the strength of British painting with some of the best and most influential artists of the last sixty years, testifying to the survival of painting as a medium and the impact of British painting today. Major 20th Century artists are represented such as Walter Sickert, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney, alongside contemporary painters including Ken Currie, George Shaw and Caroline Walker.
The tour will be followed by lunch in the restaurant. Lunch is self service but we have reserved a table, so Fellows can eat together and review the morning.
During the summer of 2014 the Society sent out a survey to the Fellowship, seeking their responses on a number of issues and asking for their views and comments.
Below is a copy that analysis, garnered from the 29% of Fellows who responded, along with some thoughts from the conversationsEAST team as to how our contribution to the work of the Fellowship might be flexed, in response to the findings.
The summary findings from The House indicated the following…
“Overall responses to the survey were positive. Over two-thirds of Fellows join–at least partially–to support our mission, the quality of almost all of our outputs is seen as very high and by far the majority of Fellows are intending to renew their Fellowship. The Survey also generated a large amount of information that can be used to guide ongoing Fellowship development”.
Key findings included…
There is less satisfaction with local events compared to other areas of our work.
There are a large number of Fellows wanting to self- organise but are frustrated at being unable to do so.
There are a large number of Fellows wanting to self- organise but are frustrated at being unable to do so.
Some Fellows want to be more involved in the work we do.
There is a lack of knowledge about what we do. Across the seven RSA Projects included in the survey, `have not heard of it at all’ accounted for between a quarter and a half of all responses.
Younger people and females are less likely to recommend the Fellowship to suitable people than others
There are strong regional variations in how Fellows perceive the RSA.
(Key findings drawn from the RSA Fellowship summary report – Ed.)
Looking forward into 2015 we have recently published our ‘road-map’ as a journal, where we have been working with Tim, our new Fellowship Councillor in the East, to develop a series of gatherings to explore how Fellows can become more engaged with the Society.
We will, as stated, pivot these, supporting Tim directly in the delivery of a series of Fellowship Councillor Surgeries across the region. This might help inform and engage the interested Fellowship directly. Offering an informal setting, with refreshments, for the survey itself to be discussed and for Tim to explain and heighten awareness of the work and input of the Fellowship Council itself. One of the findings in the survey was that many Fellows were unaware of the function of the Fellowship Council, for example.
Another way forward, we would argue, would be to foster the engagement of female Fellows, either as new Fellows, or to develop some way to engage with the Fellowship on a gender basis. We have written before in this journal and in our regional annual reports about the gender imbalances, including in the Fellowship, in our region.
(We could start an Otrera Group in every region to foster the engagement and promotion of Fellowship skills by gender, for example? -Ed.)
If this imbalance in Fellowship is ‘normalised’ across all regions, we would look to develop a campaign/project to engage by gender across adjacent regions for example. Sharing both the information in the recent survey, but garnering explicit local knowledge on gender bias as part of the project initiation work.
(Having talked so long about the matter, it seems that a short burst of positive discrimination, in terms of engagement and resources, might go a long way? -Ed.)
In our publishing activities we will develop a ‘Fellows have their say!’ web journal page. Where the Fellowship can directly contribute to the regional debate in the East. This might be particularly useful in bolstering the regional events catalogue in terms of feedback or activity recommendation. All this information will be passed directly and securely to the Eastern Region Fellowship team, of course.
We will foster and web publish a set of ‘View from the Fellowship Council’ reports. Getting Tim to write a regular review of Council activity and debate, in a generalised way, which can feed into regional meetings and, more importantly, be immediately available to the wider regional Fellowship. Helping to support and deliver a clearer understanding of its work and role.
We think the new RSA web site, arriving this month, which will enable Fellows to contact each other directly if they wish, offers an important and effective mechanism for pan regional co-operation, as well as improving inter-region project and activity development. We look forward to reviewing it on our web pages.
Also useful, we believe, will be the launch of artSUFFUSION, our sister arts focused web journal. We are refining the publication manifesto this month.
We hope that by combining the arts, crafts and making into one energy stream in the region, whilst connecting new conversationsEAST social enterprise start-up projects, we can also help convert our Society’s brilliant research papers and mission into real world examples of sustainable community business and social outcome funded projects.
We look forward to 2015, hoping that our readers will come along with us?
At this time of year everyone reflects a little on their progress in the previous twelve months, and more often than not, looks forward to the next twelve, with joy or trepidation depending on personal circumstance.
One factor of life that will not change is the ubiquity of the web and the range of services available for the owners of the right ‘machinery’, or for those who have access to it.
This journal is the product of Fellowship imaginations, but others are looking at the world and re-imagining news, reflection and analysis too. Below are some great ways that you can commit to developing knowledge and understanding, all at no cost…beyond that all important access to machinery!
Wonker – a complex news analysis engine:
This is a brave attempt to develop and share knowledge and understanding about the critical social, economic and community development conflicts across the globe.
Just getting started, but with a vast task in front of them, Casey and Nick the creators of Wonker, risk burn-out or perhaps even take-over by mainstream news outlets if the concept becomes a raging success. The site currently offers analysis of the ISIS crisis and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for example.
That said, even if you are a ‘policy wonk‘ already, the site offers a great way to get contextual analysis from outside your own professional field of endeavour. Alternatively, you can use your professional knowledge to contribute to the Q & A style presentation of Wonker.
As with all user contributed content, there are potential questions of political bias, Americo-centrism in this case or even propogandism as the site develops. It is however, we think, a brave attempt to make clear the complicated to either the disengaged or the distracted, one conflict at a time.
Highbrow – expand your knowledge universe, one email at a time…
Not a new concept on the literate web, but this service is nicely presented for those who have just five minutes a day over ten days to become acquainted with a new field of study, one email at a time.
It’s not particularly clear on their web site, but you are constrained to one ten day course subscription at a time. Presumably to prevent burn-out or ‘knowledge fatigue’?
You can choose your starting date, in order to manage the light work-flow from the beginning. Courses you can choose from cover such topics as art, history, philosophy and psychology, amongst others.
It will be interesting to see the content as it develops over time, as the delivery is heavily dependent upon TED talks at the moment. Worth checking out, either as a refresher in a busy email day, or as context to develop a new interest.
If video access to fresh thinking is your mode of learning, then the RSA has a long history of offfering its audience the most topical material from thought leaders of the day.
The RSA can offer you a whole range of video talks and presentations from some great thinkers. The example below is one such. The need for a revolution in education, breaking the political and social bounds of the mind to create new worlds. (Makes me breathless just reading this…Ed.)
Debra Kidd argues for the creation of ‘architects of hope’ for young people. A powerful ambition and an idea well worth spreading. One interesting observation Debra makes is that individuals need to know what they are voting for and how the solutions offered by the political machinery are tinkered with by the self interest of the elected representative.
Knowledge, context and critical thinking are key. With a tsunami of information crashing over us, the tools and resources above can help with process, we would argue.
We hope that all our readers, subscribers and site visitors enjoy a warm and happy seasonal break, wherever you may be?
Thank you for your support and interest in the East of England regional activity in 2014. Below is our conversationsEast road-map for 2015. A short list, but with much energy and enthusiasm behind it.
Launch of our sister site artSUFFUSION.org in the first quarter 2015 (…putting the arts back into the RSA regional profile?)
Beginning our ‘guerilla gatherings’ programme, with some test ‘get togethers’, initially focussed on spreading news and information about the Fellowship Council. (A sort of Fellowship Councillor surgery programme in the East really).
Finally publishing our web and project support offer in a formalised and structured way to help regional projects build a web presence or develop a project plan.
Making our news feed a simple subscription based print edition, so that the lack of technology is not a bar to receiving our news.
As with all our conversationsEAST sponsored support – publications, events, coffee and buns are always free at the point of delivery.
Updated: 26th December 2014: Provided you don’t have Google code blocked in your browser, you can now translate all our content on individual article pages into many languages…including Latvian and Igbo, for example. Click the headline, and use the Google Translate drop-down box on the top right of every web page. Making the RSA more accessible…
Some of our most read articles in 2014, in case you missed them…
Licensed to create – a new model for teaching? Read more here.
Getting behind British Science – new funds for 2015. Read more here.
Just published, this report offers fresh insights into the conditionality of being an employer, factored through the lens of rising self-employment, business fears about employment and how central government could deploy a mind-shift in its approach to entrepreneurship and the creation of new jobs.
Authored by Benedict Dellot, the report looks across the business landscape and considers three key areas of analysis that cause the self-employed to falter at the recruitment doorway – pragmatic issues, the mindset and the cognitive biases.
A new RSA Report
Everyday Employers looks at the practical steps that could be energised in order to overcome barriers to employment.
Pooling risk – where recognition exists that not all risk can be avoided, but could be mitigated by establishing collective approaches to insurance, HR or administrative functions.
From hiring to the concept of accessing a workforce – where employees can be shared across a number of organisations.
Boosting supply, rather than stimulating demand – using existing networks, institutions and and networks to create awareness of new jobs and to generate fresh points of contact with work seekers.
From support expansion to support consolidation – taking a fresh look at a large, hyper-active business support nexus. Assessing fitness for purpose and a leaner operational requirement.
… a divergence in opinion is mirrored in people’s attitudes towards crossing the VAT threshold – one potential consequence of employing staff . While 47 percent of business owners not registered for VAT say it would be difficult to operate their firm if they went past the threshold, this compares to just 13 percent of VAT registered business owners looking back in hindsight…
The question of the VAT threshold for small business is used to illustrate the mindset, perceived assumptions , that can restrain business owners from taking on additional staff. The report underscores this philosophical error by highlighting research into how little the small business actually understands about government policy, a gap in knowledge which is compounded by the complexity of the existing business support mechanisms previously mentioned.
In the final section of Everyday Employers, the issue of cognitive bias is analysed. This falls into four distinct categories, the whole of which is, it can be argued, a neat proxy for the ‘landscape of fear’ that can wrack the entrepreneur.
Inertia – simply put, the gain from expansion is outweighed by the potential loss that might be created by the process of growth itself.
Control – a business builder increasingly feels they need to control their creation, nearly always over-estimating their own ability to be productive, for example. This conditioning leads the potential employer to inherently distrust the potential capabilities of new recruits to their business.
Short- termism – a lack of planning and an over-focus on the near term. That and the inability of some business owners to step back from the intensity of the day to day running of their business to appropriately plan.
Social proof – we mimic the behaviours and model our organisations alongside those we interact with. If there is no context for the individual and his or her peers that looks at and responds to growth and recruitment, then they won’t do it either.
Benedict’s report, Everyday Employers, also contains interesting data on self-employment, growth and recruitment. Changing or tempering the landscape reviewed above could have a seismic effect the report argues…
“The number of self-employed people has increased by 30 percent since 2000.
Only three percent of sole traders hired someone (and kept them) over the 5-year period from 2007–2012.
Doubling this recruitment rate to six percent would result in an extra 100,000 more jobs being created (and sustained) over a 5-year period”.
This is a detailed and convincing report, which comes with practical recommendations for business sector change. It also revisits some previous research and uses the data and analysis to support the operational arguments presented in the report.
For the reflective small business person, the practical politician or the profoundly caring policy analyst, this should be the ‘go to’ manual for the next five years.
This interesting new RSA Animate looks at a revolution that is needed in teacher development. Work consigns teachers, it argues, to becoming victims who are trapped by the systems they operate within.
The goal should be to make change-makers, who are authors of their own pedagogy.
The essay collection which supports the argument posits that schools are conditioned by a command and control culture, which ignores creativity in delivery. The teacher, it argues, strives to educate whilst coping with a top down culture of compliance.
Get the essays here…
To best serve learners, and the professional development needs of teachers, there should be a methodology available that echoes and supports the research which shows students, who have the best teachers, can learn at twice the rate of other students.
The final essay from the collection is by Tristram Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Education. In the introduction to The Rationale for Revalidation: a movement to transform teaching, Hunt states…
The teaching profession is changing. One year into this job there are few things of which I am more certain. If this collection of essays achieves nothing else then it will be to highlight how the energy unleashed by this cultural shift has the potential to become a force for far-reaching education reform.
Whether you are just beginning your professional teaching career, ending it or are just passionate about education…there is much to think about in this RSA report.
To echo the perceptive analysis in this collection of essays, and to underscore how the change in pedagogy, the re-processing of education in general for the benefit of future generations is an ongoing project. We re-looked at Ken Robinson’s TED Talk How to Escape Education’s Death Valley.
Robinson, speaking and living in the USA, argues for change to support young people who drop out of school, and those who remain it, but who stay disengaged from the education process.
This is not a new message from Ken Robinson, but it is witty and discursive as well as telling, placing the young person at the centre of change in education.
A nice counterpoint to, and contextualision of, the thought processes and ideas revealed in our RSA essay collection above.
Vikki Heywood, Chair of the RSA, will be giving a presentation at Chelmsford’s Anglia Ruskin University on Wednesday 22nd October.
Her topic is the cultural aspects of First World War centenary commemorations. She chairs 14-19 Now, an organisation funded by the Heritage Lottery and Arts Council England, to produce a programme of commissions relating to the centenary.
