‘If music be the food of love, play on’ – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.

With our festive activities approaching, and continuing my theme around creativity, I wanted to write this week about music and its unique place in education. I would also like to share news of an innovative music session we are offering to our parent community as part of the school’s ‘Christmas programme’.

This will be a creative and experiential event led by Bela Emerson and this is what is what she envisages for the session:

“Cellist Bela Emerson invites the audience to become co-creators: a thirty-five minute piece (in the second half of the workshop) connects a series of spontaneous interactions between Emerson and audience, who are invited to play with her for two minutes each. Participants are offered one of three specific approaches (the first part of the workshop) to generate a unique collaborative flow of sound.

The three approaches are:
· creating a drawing (put up on an easel) for her to musically interpret.
· exploring the purple pedal (filter modeller) - turning knobs (cause and effect).
· interacting sonically (using the mic) or visually (a co-created live art/music piece).

There will be instruments available to interact with and it may be possible to bring your own. Drawing together Emerson’s extensive experience as both improviser and community musician, this is an audacious and inclusive work which she has led several times and with a variety of audiences.”

When I studied music education for my PGCE, I was directed to think about how best to support children in developing their musical brain. My philosophy, backed up through classroom observation, was that overall it had to be engaging and mostly fun. This is because the way to reach people musically is really through feeling, as a right-brained response to sound, and also through movement.

I was inspired by the work of George Odam and Christopher Small; Odam advocates teaching ‘sound before symbol’. This can be translocated into ‘feeling before thinking’ or even ‘right-brained activity before left-brained’. Later on, there is the synthesis of these two modes into ‘feeling with thinking’ or ‘feeling-thinking’. This aligns with the integration of right- and left-brain activities through the chord between them, the corpus callosum (mentioned in Sir Ken Robinson’s video a few weeks back). In music education practice, this directs the educator to introduce many different and diverse sounds to children before teaching about bars, notation and the like. You want children to think and move in sound, to imagine sound and experience sound first.

Music, or ‘musicking’, is an action according to Christopher Small and he includes listening as well as performing and composing. It is a commonly held idea that musicians ‘perform’ and the relationship is just one way – towards the audience. Small (and I) contend that it is always a two way or even multiple directioned activity. This is certainly borne out for me in my studies of Hindustani classical music (in Lahore, 1989-1990). In classical Indian raga, the audience’s response can determine the length of the piece and even the nature of the improvisations. I would certainly invite you to entertain this idea in terms of Bela’s offering.

Movement learning is fundamentally important to humans and ‘musicking’ is also making shapes to music – dancing and, for the instrumentalist, the actual repetitive process of learning how to play a piece and committing it to deep memory.

Creativity is an approach to situations, challenges, or events in our lives that is potentially really liberating and joyful. This event will help us discover a little more about how it feels to take risks, in this creatively ‘safe’ environment. As adults, we can get out of practice in regard to this immediate and truly present way of relating to life. Relating in this context can be interpreted as a mindful ‘beginning again’ way of going about things. If we are able to create more joy in our lives, it has a knock-on effect for everyone else that we come into contact with and reduces suffering in our world.

This week, like all of us, I have been drawn to the news from Paris and watched the bullish responses of governments, the counter responses and then the debate about refugees, migrants, Syria and the like.

The chaos and violence are alarming. How to find my way through all this? I go back to Buddhist practice and my core values for answers to this question. To live as a Buddhist does not mean that I have to live as a monastic or renunciate. I do, however, want to find my moral bearing in this age of interconnection and, with some understanding of interdependence, formulate my response and follow through with action.

To do this, I can go to the Fourth Noble Truth of the Buddha, otherwise known as the Eightfold Path. This path explains the mental, ethical and relational trainings that can bring about the end of ‘dukkha’ or ‘unsatisfactoriness’ that Buddhists believe pervades life. This is also known as the Middle Way because the practices expounded are not extreme and balance is a key element along the path.

The Noble Eightfold Path can be listed as: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration. The word ‘Right’ can be misleading because it is not meant in the context of right/wrong; translated from the Pali, it means ‘proper’, ‘whole’, ‘thorough’, ‘integral’, ‘complete’, and ‘perfect’. (See John Allan for a more thorough espousal of this).

The Eightfold path is not totally sequential and yet has some form of progression in it. The Buddhist scholar, Walpole Rahula, said that ‘the various aspects are to be developed more or less simultaneously, as far as possible according to the capacity of each individual. They are all linked together and each helps the cultivation of the others.’ The Middle Way in action!

These eight facets can be divided into three subgroups: Right View and Right Intention are the cornerstones of developing wisdom; Right Speech, Action and Livelihood are grouped as ethics, and Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration as concentration. Concentration, which often we think of in terms of meditative practice, is seen here as the apex and the place at which Right Knowledge and Right Liberation occur. All the other aspects need to be in place for this to be achieved successfully. I think this is interesting as often, in the West, meditation is viewed on its own as a separate practice, but here we are told (from experience) that awakening and freedom from the suffering/unsatisfactoriness of life can only arise in the context of the whole Eightfold Path.

As a school, we have decided to gently introduce the Noble Eightfold Path age-appropriately. Next Friday, we will offer the first of several pujas in which we will ‘water the flowers’ of children from each class. This will be a chance to share our appreciation for their efforts. We intend to mention specific instances of Right Speech, Right Action or Right Effort. This is an opportunity to shine light on the children’s strengths, contributions to their class and learning, and to encourage the development of their positive qualities.

I want our children to leave the Dharma Primary School with a good set of values, as well as a strong skill set and excellent knowledge. I would call this the ‘Learner Profile’ of our students. I hope the Noble Eightfold Path will be a positive means of rewarding both effort and achievement in our school.

‘The Question is not how to survive, but how to thrive with passion, compassion, humour and style.’ - Maya Angelou

The number of special days that are in the calendar at the moment can feel a little bewildering! Today is both World Kindness Day and Children In Need, and on Wednesday it was Diwali and Armistice Day. As a school, it is often inspiring to respond to these events as a community and to understand how they might resonate more deeply with our ethos (see above for activities the children have been involved in and there’s more on Facebook). I can, however, feel pulled in multiple directions by all that is going on. For me, it is important to stay grounded in the core of our ‘business’; educating children from the age of three to 11 in a school with a Buddhist ethos.

This week I have been sadly reminded of the argument raging within the education sector about the status of creative subjects within British schools. I am happy that, here at the Dharma Primary school, we do not need to follow the diktats of the Department for Education in terms of curriculum and that we do not devalue the arts, in fact quite the reverse.

Creativity and the Arts are core to our school and to our ethos. Drama, dance, music and art are key to fostering a love of learning and developing skills in those subjects, by practising them. Schools need to provide for a wide variety of learning to match the wide variety of children that we encounter. Some children may appear to be disengaged, or misbehaving because some core part of them is not being met. As the Head, I seek to offer a variety of learning environments and situations, to engage all learners in a range of styles. (See Honey and Mumford and the VARK model of Student Learning).

Sir Ken Robinson gave a talk in 2007 entitled, Do Schools Kill Creativity? The entire talk is worth a listen, but in particular he tells the story of Dame Gillian Lynne DBE (from around 15 minutes into the video) who became an incredibly successful dancer, choreographer and director. As a child she was referred to a doctor for underperforming at school, being fidgety and not concentrating.

“The real evidence, and all of us know it, is that the way children get set up for life is by having balance, variety and stimulus in their lives and in their education – well-rounded to use a very traditional phrase.” - John Newbigin, Chair of Creative England, 2015

I believe that all subjects can be looked at through the lens of being ‘crafts’. In other words, there are skills to be learnt, be they academic, kinaesthetic, artistic, musical and so on. Yes, facts need to be absorbed along with targeted vocabulary, but then creativity comes in. In my experience of science, there is a tremendous amount of discipline on the one hand, skill at measuring, conducting experiments (the ‘craft’) but ultimately there is the making of the hypothesis and the creativity in finding ways to test it.

The creative process can be having an original idea, possibly through brainstorming, or mindmapping, or through seeing and making patterns, and experimenting with this idea, finding an application or value for it. Relaxation and ‘relaxed focus’ are key in encouraging creativity – say after meditating, after a game, or after music – all activities that offer within our school and through our ethos.

Making mistakes, (‘feel the fear and do it anyway’) and through that, building resilience, (‘I’ve survived! It wasn’t that bad!’) is an essential part of the creative process and by this I mean not just for arts subjects. Making mistakes can be reinterpreted as ‘doing a first draft’. If we continue to frame mistakes as ‘bad’, the fear that is created arrests the creative process. With a wider lens, uncertainty is part of life and demands creativity, resilience and sometimes tolerance of uncomfortable feelings. It is my wish that we prepare our children for this.

The celebrating of effort over achievement is part of a growth mindset, which we are fostering at our school. To this end, my next puja on November 27th will be a ‘watering the flowers’ puja for all classes from Dragonfly to Lotus. We will be celebrating both effort and achievement and it will be the first of several pujas on this theme.