reality Archives - annabel smith

On Photography*

Posted by Annabel on 27/08/2013 communities, experiential education, global, impact, media, Photography, reality, skills, social justice, stories, volunteering, young people

Aug 272013

How would you feel if a complete stranger had a photograph of you on their fridge? Your hair a mess at the end of a tiring day, caught at an unflattering angle in your oldest clothes, damp and sweaty, longing for a shower.

You might feel that your soul had been stolen – plenty of people see cameras as frightening, not just annoying – or you might just be furious that your privacy had been violated by someone who doesn’t even know your name. A few years ago a group of young Chinese men surrounded me at a tourist spot in northern India, friendly, laughing, snapping away. I asked them to stop, but they didn’t. A tiny window into the lives of those whose faces pop up as screen savers the world over.

It can be tempting just to snap away vaguely, presuming it does no harm, but a quick walk round the block in someone else’s shoes provides a sharp reminder that it does. Many people who go on slum or township tours equate the experience to a trip to the zoo.

Enough.

Clicking the shutter should be the last thing you do.

Why are you taking the picture anyway? What will you use it for?

Now we don’t have to load film, check it’s caught, wind on, keep it in a dark place, make sure it’s developed safely and hope, pray we got the shot we saw. We’re digital, we’re point and shoot, we can take thousands of frames at no extra cost.

Yet it’s no coincidence that most photographers who have worked for long periods in war zones, disaster zones and among the desperately poor, are haunted. One ex-Sunday Times reporter told me he could not longer take those pictures after his first child was born.

You want to show people what you saw, but don’t give up on words. I won’t forget watching a student tell a friend about her day at a school in a South African township. Her voice became soft and tears came to her eyes as she realised that the children she was describing were far too small for their age because they had never had enough to eat. Talking forces us to engage; photography can let us off the hook.

Use the power of your camera wisely. Access to the lives of others is a privilege, so bring both good intentions and a critical mind.

Don’t forget to capture details, insights on the condition of people’s lives. Look for the things you can’t see. A near-empty drugs cupboard in a hospital can tell you far more than a picture of someone dying, and doesn’t compromise anyone’s dignity. Heads bent over a shared textbook, an unnecessary flower garden, feet in new shoes.

Seek out contrasts, juxtapositions that illuminate. Ordinary objects that tell stories.

Talk to people. Introduce yourself. Ask.

Sometimes people say no. Perhaps one of their friends, or someone nearby will say yes. Take the photo. Show them. Do it carefully, move to catch the light and their best angle. Many people have never seen a photograph of themselves. Don’t start if you don’t have time to finish.

Last January I was in Tamale, northern Ghana. I walked through the market with a local guide. He knew everyone, they catcalled as we went past. With his permission I took shots of the market, a riot of colour and activity. But I wanted the women. So I asked. Some said no. Some said yes. I started taking pictures and when I had a good one, I showed them. They were delighted. They were beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Those who had said no, now fought to be next in line. We laughed, I teased them, they teased me, we had fun.

I took their names and asked permission to use the photos. Although I had showed everyone their pictures, I couldn’t give them copies. I promised I would send them, and I did. I don’t know if they arrived. If I could have done I would have printed them on the spot. We lost something very precious with the demise of the polaroid. I was converted after a trip to a remote part of Madagascar in the mid 90s by friends who insisted on taking and giving people their photographs. I had been completely against the idea. I could not have been more wrong. What could be more precious than a picture of your family?

Don’t underestimate the power of photography. In thoughtful hands a camera shrinks space, connects strangers and illuminates lives. In thoughtless hands it snatches and grabs, hits and runs, confirms stereotypes. Used to tell stories it is still the magic lantern that captivated our forefathers and made us leave home in the first place.

* See Susan Sontag’s 1977 book of the same name, and her later Regarding the Pain of Others. Also The Bang Bang Club and Ken Light’s Witness in our Time

Making It Matter

Posted by Annabel on 24/02/2013 Africa, education, experiential education, history, identity, impact, reality, resources, schools, skills, stories, teachers, uncategorized, young people

Feb 242013

What motivates young people to learn?

Fun? Imagination? Fear of the future without a college education?
If you ask them, they will tell you that you can teach them anything if you make it matter to them.

The easiest way is to make it about them. Nearly 20 years ago, when I took over the History Department of a Nairobi School, the most successful thing I did was to introduce a family tree project.

I had Kikuyu students in my classroom, and Luo and Kalenjin and several born in Britain as well as five or six born in Nairobi but with parents or grandparents born in the Indian Subcontinent. Computers barely existed, so all information was gathered by talking to family members, either in person or on the phone, waiting for visits or even writing letters. Everyone had to keep notes and start drawing their tree – and as they grew, the trees became collages, with stories and even artefacts stuck on: a coin, a bead, a piece of cloth, a photograph.

My students held court, sharing their research and findings, feeling the thrill of an attentive audience. They were the experts on their own lives, and they loved it (a lot more than Napoleon, who they’d done the previous term).

Of course you can’t design thirteen or fourteen years of curriculum around ‘Me’ – at least not without creating a generation of narcissistic monsters. But taking time to relate distant or abstract material to those in the room, and finding ways to engage heart and emotions as well as head, makes excellent educational sense.

This is one area where education can learn from the non-profit sector which has long understood that you engage people by creating proximity. It’s hard to care about people of whom we know nothing in a faraway country; the trick is to tell stories to bring them closer, to show the similarities between their lives and ours, to help us understand how it might feel to be them. To make it more real.

Carl Jung wrote that people cannot stand too much reality, but I disagree: in my experience, teenagers gobble it up. It brings out the best in them, differentiating them as individuals with both abilities and passions.

2 years ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson and I both hit on the idea of a London Curriculum (although I’m pretty sure I thought of it first.) I based mine on an experimental class I’d taught a few years before in the US that used our local city as a classroom. Part of my inspiration also came from CITYTerm, a brilliant programme run out of the Masters School, which uses New York City as a classroom and laboratory. In both cases the approach was project-based and relied on collaboration with experts from the city – architects, engineers, poets, social workers and entrepreneurs.

It can come as something of a shock to learn what’s on your doorstep: the things that are closest to us exert huge influence, yet we seldom look at them carefully, let alone understand them.

The nearly 4 million people who have seen Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk on the danger of a single story will also have heard her descriptions of growing up on a Nigerian university campus reading British and American children’s books. She loved those books, but because of them, the first stories she wrote featured characters with white skin and blue eyes, who played in the snow and ate apples. Only later did she realise that people who looked and thought like her could be in books too.

In January I met Deborah Ahenkorah, Ghanaian Echoing Green Fellow and founder of the Golden Baobab Prize for African literature for children and young adults. She created the prize because

“the tremendous lack of good quality African children’s literature dawned on me. A continent so large and richly diverse has tons of wonderful stories to share with young people everywhere: where were these stories?”

Last year they had more than 400 entries from 25 African countries. They also run workshops for writers and illustrators, and have plans to establish distribution channels across the continent to ensure that African books reach African children in their schools and, at last, in their own homes.

And it’s not just African children on the continent who need stories about themselves. There are millions of children of African heritage in the diaspora who never read stories that connect them with their own identities either. For stories cross continents too. Last month in Ghana I visited the slave castles of the Gold Coast and saw the door of no return through which millions of men, women and children left, many of whom ended their days in Jamaica. With over 200,000 Ghanaians and 250,000 Jamaicans in London, shouldn’t these stories be told in British schools too?

Who else is in our classrooms? Are we telling their stories?

Growing up is an identity project, and if we want to engage young people, we need to show them that school is the place to learn about the things they care about. We do that best by nurturing schools’ most valuable secret weapons – infectiously enthusiastic teachers. They are an endangered species now, killed by the growing exam culture and an obsession with cookie-cutter, lockstep learning, but they are still there. Let’s hope that those who have been taught by them will realise that it is loving learning that matters most, and the freedom to explore who you are and how you will take your place in the world.

Make More Noise

Posted by Annabel on 11/02/2013 Africa, change, current, education, genocide, global, media, reality, schools, stories, teachers, uncategorized, young people

Feb 112013

The great great aunts

Last week I was privileged to be the keynote speaker at Global Issues Day at Ursuline Academy of Dallas. It’s a wonderful school and my audience was both fiercely well-informed and completely engaged. They asked fantastic questions.

I took as my text the words of Secretary of State Anthony Lake to the head of Human Rights Watch Alison Des Forges in the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide: She asked why he wasn’t doing more. He replied, “You have to make more noise.”

She asked why he wasn’t doing more. He replied You have to make more noise.

Making noise is one of the most important jobs human beings have. For democracy to function, for change to happen, for the rights of the weak and of minorities to be protected and for the preservation of those things that have no voice – those of us who can, must shout. We must drown out the sound of vested interests and entrenched hierarchies, of the profit motive and of fear of the unknown.

I showed a photograph of my great great aunts. There were five of them, and they had 2 brothers. One of the boys, my great great grandfather, was an alcoholic. The other was epileptic, which in those days meant he was unable to function independently. Both had the right to vote.

Their sisters, on the other hand, were extremely well educated, well travelled and bold. One went to Bogota, another introduced the Montessori system into Australia and taught the governor’s daughter; another was Matron of the Royal Free Hospital, and another the headmistress of a London school. None had the right to vote.

What did they do about their voicelessness? They became suffragettes. Not the chaining yourself to railings, starving yourself in prison and throwing yourself under the king’s racehorse sort, but the making mountains of Turkish delight and coconut ice to sell at fetes sort, the marching through the streets wearing the purple, green and white sash sort, the making public speeches and rallying the troops sort. They were part of the no- longer quiet majority who gave one another the courage to keep singing when society condemned them as monsters.

And as Emmeline Pankhurst, one of the bravest of the Suffragette leaders said

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.

In 1994 as the killing in Rwanda escalated, we didn’t raise our voices because we didn’t know anything was happening. We rely on the press to tell us these things, and they didn’t. Perhaps they thought we didn’t want to know: it was too far away, too complicated. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves. As a result, thousands of us who might have jumped to our feet and started to shout, didn’t. And nearly a million men, women and children died.

Citizen journalists are beginning to change the story, as are outstanding news organisations like the Pulitzer Center, which funds journalists all over the world to tell untold stories. But so too is something else:

School.

At last young people are being educated to know about the world; to find their passions, to understand who they are and what they care about. They are being taught to ask questions, to find out for themselves and not to take no for an answer. They have powerful role models from all over the world, opportunities to see for themselves, and real experience of what they can achieve if they choose to.

Ursuline girls were among the millions of young people who rose to the challenge of Kony 2012. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and sent 2 students to Uganda to see how it was spent. I spoke to one of those girls, and her eyes shone. She couldn’t wait to go to college and then, maybe, back to Uganda one day.

To the rest I said this: The luckiest people in the world are those who have something they care about. School is the place to start looking. When you’ve found it, fight for it. And make lots and lots of noise.

Learning To See Invisible People

Posted by Annabel on 06/09/2012 communities, education, experiential education, global, maps, reality, schools, skills, social justice, stories, uncategorized, volunteering, young people

Sep 062012

I started seeing invisible people when I lived in Philadelphia, after my first visit to a homeless shelter. An old man with a shopping cart; a woman with her possessions in bulging plastic bags; the people-shaped bundles under bridges. It reminded me of the time I tried on a friend’s glasses and first saw the leaves on trees.

I had another shock 2 years later when I ran a community-based program in Cape Town. I thought I knew a good deal about the townships, having spent some considerable time working with community leaders. But nothing prepared me for visiting a hostel where families rented not rooms, but walls. 1 room 4 families, bunk beds on all sides, belongings, or a child, underneath, clothes hanging from the bedposts. In one room a single woman forced to wake and wash at 3 am if she was to have any privacy.

Last year in London I had my English eye-opening. Guides from Unseen London took a group of my students and I on walking tours around the city. They had all slept rough – they showed us where, as well as telling us where to find the only free toilets (in Covent Garden) or a free cup of tea and a sandwich. They showed us the places where you could find a warm grating in winter or shelter from the rain, although most had recently been closed off or locked. I complimented one guide on her highly detailed knowledge of the city. “And I’m a History teacher” I said. She beamed back “so was my mum.”

Like the transparent overlays that transform the ruins of ancient Rome into the great city it once was, there’s a whole missing dimension to our cities.

Without realising, we have all become partially sighted; without intentional programs and lots of practice there is a real danger that this may become a progressive condition

Without realising, we have all become partially sighted; without intentional programs and lots of practice there is a real danger that this may be a progressive condition. To combat this, we have to show young people how to look and to listen; to see what’s under their noses, to make sense of the quiet voices it’s so easy to miss. We need to bring that lens into the classroom, and with it reality, and some pretty big surprises.

There are lots of ways you can do this, but here’s one: Community Mapping

2 years ago I collaborated with an amazing English teacher to design a Service Learning program. Ours had a Human Rights theme, but it would have worked equally well focused on people with disabilities, the elderly or refugees. These are all sensitive issues; the trick is to give them a human face. Our inspiration was a highly-detailed map of our local community, produced by the UK Ordnance Survey, which also has a fantastic Digimapping package for schools.

Each Year 8 / 7th Grade class had a map, and a set of pins. The project began with lessons on human rights, looking at the Universal Declaration and all the laws that require governments to act (the UDHR doesn’t.) They also studied definitions of Poverty, widely agreed to be the greatest human rights violation in the world today.

That done, their first task was to find and mark on the map every organisation that worked towards fulfilling people’s rights: doctors and hospitals, schools, churches, a homeless shelter, the police station, a library and a community centre. I’d established community partnerships with many of them the year before, so this was a powerful way to strengthen and extend those partnerships.

The next task was to divide the list up and research each one. For each organisation they identified a leader and made a note of their contact information. As a class, they drafted a letter inviting all the leaders to come to school to be interviewed – on a day we called Write on Rights Day.

The venue for the work now switched from advisory / tutor / form time, to English class. The English teachers launched a journalism unit, with a particular focus on interviews. They studied examples, looked at the most successful techniques for extracting information and opinion, and started practising. In small groups they began deciding the best questions to ask each of the community leaders.

Invitations were emailed out and replies came in. A Friday afternoon was chosen and several parents roped in to bake cakes and man the teapots. Posters went up around school to let everyone know what was happening.

18 local community activists and leaders were interviewed that day – not only one of the most powerful and inspiring collections of role models you could imagine, but also a masterclass in leadership. Student photographers were hard at work. Detailed notes were taken, and for the next few weeks students worked on their articles. Once edited and peer reviewed they were gathered together and indexed. A small group of students then put in a grant application to the parent association, and a month or so later they got approval: the manuscript was sent to a local printer. Copies of the book were delivered to all the community partners.

One boy talked to a student from the neighbouring school about what it was like being in a school with lots of refugees:

“I learned a label can mean a lot of different things. The word refugee is more complicated than just something like illegal immigrants. A student I talked to was a refugee from Kosovo and all these years later, he’s just a normal kid going to school.”

A student I talked to was a refugee from Kosovo and all these years later, he’s just a normal kid going to school

Far from a grim responsibility, this work is a gift. I’ve yet to meet a young person who couldn’t be drawn in, their curiosity piqued by the mystery of the unknown, their brains and hearts engaged by the stories they uncover. They don’t even notice that they’re collaborating, problem-solving, thinking critically and analytically, being creative, storytelling and developing their communication skills..

Learning to see, hear and acknowledge one another is a fundamental part of being human. It’s also really interesting. As one student wrote: “The way I see the local community changed a lot. I never thought that there were people living so close to my house that needed so much help.”

Teaching War

Posted by Annabel on 30/06/2012 education, experiential education, history, Learning Away, reality, schools, stories, war, young people

Jun 302012

School trips are often memorable for the wrong reasons, but sometimes chance encounters bring lessons that could never be learned in a classroom.

History is full of wars. Sometimes I felt that I dispatched thousands to their deaths before break, then thousands more after lunch. I used poetry, photographs, music and diaries to try to bring soldiers to life, but as my students continued to write sentences such as “unfortunately 6 million people died” I knew I’d failed.

I had no experience of war, but I had studied many. The first World War always seemed different. My grandfather fought first to last but never spoke of it, instead bringing home a puppy from one of the smashed French farms, a tiny creature forced to stand symbol for all that could not be said. My father used to tell me about walking past the Star and Garter Home in Richmond as a boy, and seeing the old soldiers, many of them in their twenties and thirties, staring and gently rocking.

When my father died, it was the First World War I couldn’t teach: weeks later I was unable to speak of the futile deaths and wasted lives without facing the window, tears running down my face. There was something utter about the loss of humanity that allowed that pointless war to continue. I am not saying that it was a worse war than the Second World War, or any subsequent or previous wars, but for me, blessed with the infinite privilege of not having lived through one in my country, it was the war that taught me about war.

In fact it was a school trip to the war graves that taught me what even the best book could not, and taught my students too.

July, skylarks, a perfect, timeless summer day. We set off from London early, by bus and channel tunnel, my mind on lunches, lists and toilets. We took all of Year 11 who had ‘done’ the war, but were mostly excited by a day off school. Our first stop was the cemetery at Tyne Cot, Belgium, close to where the three battles of Ypres had been fought.

The visitor centre was yet to be built, so once everyone was off the bus I was suddenly able to take in my surroundings: more than 10,000 identical white headstones, row on row, each planted with a single rose, framed by manicured grass and an unbroken blue sky. It was impossibly beautiful.

My students walked round solemnly, reading inscriptions – thousands ‘known only to God’ – and talking in whispers. The air was still and heavy; there was something of church about it.

Suddenly a bus pulled up and tens of tiny Belgian children tumbled out and started zooming around across the grass. They shouted and screamed, ran around, pushed one another, and pretended to be airplanes. My students were horrified. They rushed to me, begging me to do something – I didn’t need to be told twice! I too was appalled that this sacred place had been so violated and was ready to give the children’s teachers a piece of my mind.

Before I had the chance they approached, smiling, and said, in perfect English: “We hope you will understand: these children live in the villages and we bring them here so they aren’t afraid of all the graves and dead people.

So many of the men buried here were so young that they died before they were married; we think they would like to hear the children’s voices.”

Later in the day we saw the small piles in the corners of the fields where the farmers place the unexploded ordinance they still turn up. Here, where Passchendaele’s mud devoured more men than both sides’ bullets, bodies still sometimes rise to the surface.

The German cemeteries tell their own story. No flowers, few individual gravestones, dark, shady trees providing cover. How much courage it must have taken to visit your son or husband buried deep in enemy soil.

There may be no more important work a teacher can do than help their students understand the reality of war, whether by letting those with first hand experience tell their stories, or by going to the places where wars are not History yet.

So don’t lock down the curriculum, force everyone through assessment hoops and slash budgets: make space and time for us to stand back, so war can teach itself.

Why Global Education Matters

Posted by Annabel on 11/06/2012 education, global, history, media, reality, schools, social justice, stories, Syria, young people

Jun 112012

Today’s New York Times carries a story about the Syrian President’s carefully polished image, courtesy of some very expensive Western PR. As well as the notorious Vogue feature on his British-born wife, there are surprisingly many flattering portraits of this most brutal of dictators. Although the horrifying events of recent weeks have been widely reported, it will take time to erase the carefully crafted, wholesome image of this glamorous couple. The NYT article quotes Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert who once worked for a charity sponsored by Mrs. Assad, explaining the appeal of the President and First Lady thus: “He speaks English, and his wife is hot.”

The article reminded me of my visit to Syria in 2003. At first glance everything looked normal. There were no public protests, no opposition marches and no tanks in the streets. The only unsettling things were the huge billboards covered with images of the president: here in an army uniform, there in a business suit or with his wife and children. Every shop and café had a photo of him on the wall. He smiled benignly on his people, the new young president. Sometimes he stood beside his father, the former president, Hafez. Then they were both smiling. People were desperate to chat, to practice their English. Women watched me from behind their headscarves, and when I smiled, they smiled back. Children waved and rushed up to me, not to ask for anything, just to meet, to say, “Hello, how are you? What is your name?” Conversation was complicated, and took place only in large open spaces with nobody close by. On the pretext of taking photographs I separated myself from the crowds and asked careful questions of those who hung around, obviously eager to find an audience. Could they listen to international news? No, it was censored. Could they access the Internet freely? No, it was blocked. Was there politics taught in school? Yes, all students had classes of political indoctrination. What did they think of America? Wonderful!

There were almost no other Western tourists in Syria that summer. Souvenir shops were empty, cafes were closed and everywhere people were suffering because their only source of income had disappeared. Hotels were operating on a skeleton staff and many people had lost their jobs. As I drove into Damascus, alone in a taxi, the driver pointed up to a brutal, heavily fortified building on the hill: an unmistakable piece of fascist architecture. “If you are a murderer you can be out in a week. If you criticize the president you can be there for life.”

Hama is a beautiful small town in the Orontes Valley, famous for its huge water wheels, or norias, which are used to feed the fields and fill the aqueducts. Their grinding, creaking and rhythmic groaning creates a soon unnoticed soundtrack like the whirring of cicadas. My memory retains a tranquil picture of a traditional town, where every woman wore a headscarf and loose topcoat, and every person waved and smiled. By night it was a dim, quiet city: by far the loudest noises I heard were the call to prayer and the sounds of the swallows swarming at sunset. There were peach, pomegranate and citrus orchards and gardens of flowers made possible by the plentiful water. I stayed at the Cham Palace Hotel, which was almost empty. In the evenings I swam alone in the pool in the garden. From the water I could see the weathered domes and dappled tile-work of the mosques and minarets of the old city.

On the plane home I talked to the man sitting next to me. This is what he told me about Hama: In 1982 the city, Syria’s fourth largest, with a population of 350,000 people, was destroyed on the president’s orders. Aerial bombing cut the roads so that nobody could escape on foot. The army surrounded the city and started shooting. Bulldozers and tanks followed, and then, to be sure that there were no survivors, cyanide gas was released. The old city was razed. Between 10 and 20,000 people were killed. In a case study of political violence, Hafez al-Assad, the then President, had ordered the attack against the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic insurgents inspired by Iran’s 1979 revolution. His aim was to teach a lesson for generations. Every family in the city lost someone. Exactly as he intended, it spread terror throughout Syria, and was barely reported elsewhere. What I had thought was the old city was in fact a complete reconstruction, distressed and pre-aged to fool the tourists. My hotel, with its swimming pool, was built on the mass graves of one of the neighborhoods.

This is why global education matters. The accurate representation of reality is too important to be left in the hands of market and profit-driven media. Some voices in the press are expert, brave and impartial; more are naive or careless; a few are being paid to misrepresent. How are young people ever to understand the world that their taxes and votes shape if they do not learn at school?

The best education in the world is one where children with different histories learn together side by side. There’s no better example than the family of United World Colleges which turns out outstanding, compassionate graduates year after year, many of them years older than their age-cohort because they started life as refugees. If we start seeing the world as a classroom, unfolding events as lesson plans and those who have lived life on the ground as teachers, then we will educate a generation of young women who will scoff at the idea that being “extremely thin and very well-dressed,” is more important than standing by whilst your husband orders the slaughter of children.

Lessons from the Rainbows

Posted by Annabel on 20/05/2012 communities, education, global, hub, India, reality, schools, social justice, street kids, young people

May 202012

Before we give up on Broken Britain, here’s some inspiration from the girls of Loreto Day School in Kolkata. Over the last 30 years they’ve changed thousands of lives by turning their school into a multi-faith hub for social justice. They also passed all their exams. If they can do it, why can’t we?

In 1979 LDS Sealdah was a traditional girl’s Catholic school with a small group of scholarship students. This left the new Principal, Sister Cyril, ‘uneasy’, so she began to open the school up, to create a ‘healthy mix’. Now twice the size, half the pupils are from families so poor that the school not only buys their uniforms, food, medicines and books, but also pays their parents’ rent in the nearby slums.

Meanwhile, the girls daily passed hundreds of children who were living on the pavements and railway platforms with no hope of an education. So the girls began an amazing experiment, gradually drawing street children into an after school program of games and lessons. It was so successful that within a few years they had created a fully integrated school-within-a-school. The children became known as the Rainbows, a source of joy and also a revelation: with regular attendance, an illiterate ten or eleven year-old Rainbow can be ready to join a mainstream class of girls her age within a year.

Teaching the Rainbows is Work Education, a curricular subject which takes place twice a week. Girls are taught to teach literacy, numeracy, life skills and crafts, vital for survival and income generation.The huge top-floor room is filled with children, half in blue and white uniforms, half in ragamuffin cast-offs. All are intent on the lesson, holding up cards with sounds and letters, spelling out words, laughing and shouting encouragement. In a country still riven by the legacy of caste – where a high caste woman may work to support a low caste woman but not touch a cup of tea she has made – it’s an amazing sight.

Work Education can also be completed in local villages – 150 girls go on their day off every week to teach 3,500 rural children – with Childline, the Hidden Child Domestic Labour Project, or in the local slums. Girls regularly encounter cases of injustice and abuse and are challenged to get involved. They learn to use their voices and their skills, gathering evidence, lobbying and advocating for children’s rights.

Values Education is also compulsory, designed to make girls think and to promote social change. Together these two programs, equal in importance to the traditional subjects, make a curriculum of agency. This honestly recognises that the world outside the window is not ok and prepares young women to be part of the solution: Loreto graduates are confident, informed and dynamic.

The school survives from hand to mouth, on gifts and grants and prayers. It’s by no means perfect, Sister Cyril can be distinctly dictatorial and some of the education is old-fashioned and dull. But several very powerful myths have been exploded by these merry girls with blue hair ribbons: they have demonstrated beyond doubt that compassion is more productive than competition, and that doing the right thing is about love, not money.

London is not like Kolkata and many of Sister Cyril’s programs would be crushed by Health and Safety before the ink was dry. But across the UK things are not ok either. People are separated from one another by gulfs of inequality and unfamiliarity; children are abused, homeless, hungry and frightened. It’s time for our own radical vision. So let’s be inspired by the Rainbows and get started.

The Invisible Genius of KONY 2012

Posted by Annabel on 20/04/2012 current, education, global, media, reality, schools, stories, volunteering, young people

Apr 202012

After several weeks on the critics’ bandwagon I’ve suddenly realised the invisible genius of this campaign: it’s given us a reason to be proud of our young people again. Did you notice?

Our kids – the ones we constantly criticise for being plugged in or on the phone, not pulling their trousers up and not listening – just stood up in their millions and said they want to help African children they’ve never met. Did I hear a cheer?

Ok, the organisation that facilitated this revolution is flawed, and so is their message. They took a highly complicated situation, simplified it, added regrettable emotional schmalz and rocked it up, insulting everyone in the process. But can we just for a moment let that pass? This film has been watched by over 100 million people, and while we don’t know the exact numbers, we do know that a huge proportion were young. Millions of children have watched, and talked about, a half-hour documentary on an obscure, barely-reported war in a country few adults could find on the map. What does this tell us? That our kids don’t just care about their peers in other countries – they care passionately. That our kids want to be good people. That it’s time we helped them.

In 1994 800,000 Rwandan people were hacked and burned to death in 100 days. When the Head of Human Rights Watch in the US called the State Department to ask why the US government wasn’t doing more, she was told: “You have to make more noise.”

But how can we make more noise about things we don’t know are happening? We rely almost completely on two sets of institutions to tell us everything: schools and the media. Neither is serving the public well just now. Despite the best efforts of many hero teachers and heads of school, education is shaped by cookie-cutter thinking and a remorseless need for data, while media empires, driven by ratings and sales, fill our screens and news stands with celebrity pap or foreign reports that just don’t seem real.

Both let young people down.

How did we do when KONY 2012 came out? Did our columnists and media leaders provide clear analysis and helpful insight? Did our teachers stop teaching to the test for long enough to have a proper conversation and get beyond a cake sale? In a few, wonderful cases yes, but in the vast majority, no. And why should they? It’s hardly a winner with exam boards or media ratings. So everyone fell back on Google, the BBC, whatever was trending on Twitter; on the Culture-makers and Policy-makers who didn’t know what to say. I bet most households’ resident dinner-table expert was under the age of 18.

Why don’t we, just for once, listen to those young people?

Ten years ago I started writing and teaching courses on global issues. The reaction of my first class of 17/18 year-olds shocked me – they were really angry. Why had they never been told this before? (They were still reeling from the news that President Bush was not attending the Earth Summit, then taking place in Johannesburg.) Just as they were entering adult life, voting and paying taxes, they were told how much they didn’t know. Nobody likes feeling stupid. So we rolled our sleeves up and got started: poverty, global public health, complex emergencies, international institutions.

Then we took it one step further and found the people in our neighbourhood who were the experts: refugee and immigrant communities, local government housing officials, those on low incomes. There’s no better classroom than the community, and no more powerful resource than people telling their own stories. Every year I ask my classes whether I should run the class again. Every year they say yes; courses like this should be compulsory. Everyone should know that the top five arms dealers in the world are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Everyone should know that more than 20,000 children under the age of five die every day of poverty. Apparently it surprises our media moguls and curriculum planners that young people care about these things.

We can’t teach everything – the world is a big place, after all. Writing curriculum and planning courses isn’t about covering all the facts, it’s about developing skills and habits of mind that allow young people to understand events and situations for which they haven’t been specifically prepared. So if they had a sense of the issues on the African continent, or of the workings of the ICC, or of how civil wars tend to focus on resources not borders, then they would be better equipped to see that whilst Kony should definitely be behind bars, Invisible Children’s approach is reckless and irresponsible.

But let’s not forget that Invisible Children are experts, on both social media and our kids. So rather than demonising Jason Russell and his team, why don’t we try to learn from them. Here are some things they did right:

• Make the invisible children visible by telling their stories.

• Shrink the distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ by bringing people together

• Empower and challenge young people all over the world to act

• Trust young people to care

Friends in schools all over the world reported children who had never before shown any interest in the news or politics asking about the video. If this is what Invisible Children mean by ‘changing the conversation of our culture’ then I for one am right behind them. At a time of deep budget cuts and growing social polarisation I can’t think of better news than an outstanding display of compassion and determination by our young people. Let’s see them, hear them, and cheer.

The Missing Link

Posted by Annabel on 26/11/2011 education, global, history, reality

Nov 262011

A few years ago, while I was living and working in the US, I devised a new optional ‘elective’ course for my teenage students. I began the first lesson by presenting them with a passage describing a community wracked by hunger, unemployment and epidemic sexually transmitted disease. I asked them what they thought and not surprisingly they talked of AIDS and poverty in Africa.

In fact the passage described Gaston County North Carolina, and was written by Martha Gellhorn as part of her work chronicling the impact of the Depression and syphilis epidemic on ordinary American men and women. Your grandparents, I said to my students. My point was not to embarrass them, but to make them think of life as a continuum. So many of the keys to understanding human experience lie on our own kitchen tables, yet too often we send young people into the world believing the world to be an alien place that they simply don’t understand.

To make my American students feel better about their country I drew a few parallels with mine. In 1910 life expectancy in London was 45 (the same as Sierra Leone today). The poor routinely died of malnutrition. One in seven children died before their fifth birthday.

My course was called Contemporary Africa, and was less about summarising the vital statistics of fifty-two countries than about a way of thinking. I explained the value of seeing things from other points of view, and used first-hand accounts and witness statements, personal stories and case studies to illuminate and humanise the big picture. I introduced my students to the rational actor framework and suggested that people generally do the things that make sense to them in a given time and context. Of course a factual framework helps too, so Colonialism, the Cold War and the Arms Trade made regular appearances.

As a more traditional History teacher, my aim had always been to bring the past to life, to cross the divide of decades or centuries and find points of contact. I wanted to make the dead real for my students, to make the ‘deadness’ unimportant, and to concentrate on the personalities and the situations. I wanted them to like or dislike historical figures for a reason, to get into their heads and to understand why they did what they did. My students were required to take on roles, defend positions and find the way in to often unappealing or alien points of view. We studied ordinary people, not just kings and queens. We looked at their houses and clothes, and at statistics on health, life expectancy and infant mortality. We tried, above all, to connect.

But I didn’t provide the missing link. I didn’t give my students of Nineteenth century economics recent newspaper articles about the coltan mines in the Congo from where the vital ingredients of their cell phones came. Nor did I show them photographs I’d taken in Ethiopia and Madagascar of farmers tilling the earth with wooden ploughs and oxen. I didn’t tell them my stories of former commercial sex workers in India and my visit to a brothel, any more than I reminded my current events students that London used to be a seething hell of child prostitution, dead babies and filth – in my grandmother’s lifetime.

So why don’t we put our study of the past and present together? Why don’t we take the hard-earned skills of analysis, imagination and empathy and use them to help decode the urgent issues of the day? Why not use those approaches and that understanding to make the world we live in more comprehensible, familiar and human? Perhaps then Africans would stop being crazy and frustrating, and start making sense. Kenyan street kids sniffing glue would seem as logical a response to hunger and cold as drinking gin in Edwardian London; and the traffic of women and children for domestic slavery and the sex industry not something new, but the continuation of an abominable and heartbreaking trade.

While we’re at it, why don’t we also take a rather more global perspective? A few years ago a black South African friend pointed out that it is strange that Europeans consider Africa a dark, savage continent. Looking from Cape Town, Europe was the instigator and venue for two savage world wars and a genocide that incinerated millions of people in purpose-built ovens. Selecting a particular lense, and then looking at the whole world through it is not only more fair, but also far more interesting.

If we want to create a big, compassionate society filled not with incomprehensible strangers but with ordinary people, then we need to fix the missing link: going round the world and going back in time are not as different as we might think. And in case that sounds like a case for progress and the superiority of the global north, it’s worth noting that London is currently experiencing a new epidemic of that ‘Victorian’ condition, rickets.