Tuttle Club Social Planet Projects
Author: Lloyd Davis
We are a group of consultants, members of London’s Tuttle Club, who are helping Counterpoint to look at interesting ways of talking about what the Council does and has done, in the context of its 75th Birthday this year.
We are carrying out work in four project streams, each of which you’ll be able to read about and discuss here. We are committed to carrying the work out as openly as we can and so we will be writing about our experiences, what we’ve done and what we’re learning as we go along.
The project streams are:
Conversations – we are experimenting with getting conversations about culture and cultural relations started in small, face-to-face groups as well as online.
This part of the project is concerned both with building a community of interest and providing content for the platform. It also aims to raise the quality and quantity of conversation about cultural relations in society generally. The process is to create a series of small, face-to-face circles of conversation in people’s homes or public places, within existing social groups, simply to talk about what cultural relations means (or indeed whatever the group wants to talk about) and then to capture some of the things that come out of the conversation using social media. At the end of each conversation, participants will be encouraged to start their own circles within a given time period and to continue to replicate the process with others.
Testimony – we’re asking several people to reflect on the question “What has the British Council ever done for me?” and we’ll be making some short films out of the results.
In order to improve appreciation of the reach and importance of the Council’s work, we will carry out and publish a series of video interviews with selected individuals explaining how their experience of working with or receiving help from BC has enhanced their lives. Each participant will be asked to nominate two others who might be willing to participate.
Film Archive – we have access to the Council’s film archive going back to the 1940s, we’ll be exploring that and writing about what it tells us about how views of culture have changed in the lifetime of the Council. We hope also to be able to share clips of archive material.
The Council has a visual archive stretching back at least as far as the second world war. We will work with the Council’s archivists to explore, expose and examine content from the archive to look at how changing attitudes to cultural relations are reflected in the content. We will also explore the digital rights and management issues around the use of the archive and see how much of the record can be opened up for public use. Our intention at this stage is to curate a number of screenings to highlight interesting themes and content from the archive.
Exploring the Social Web – we’ll be working with staff from the Council to teach and encourage them to extend what they do by adding the use of social media and online social networking to their working lives.
To make sure that all this activity does not stay only on the outside, we will design and run a series of workshops and days when BC staff are encouraged to step outside of their normal working environment and participate fully in social media and online social networking to see how their work practices might be enhanced, amplified and extended. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on the experience and write about what they’ve learned here and elsewhere on the web.
Please do join in through the comments form that you’ll find on every page. We’re interested in what you think about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and what you else you think the British Council should be doing.
I look forward to thinking about how we can become involved through the British Council in Greece both with our colleagues and our partners and friends. More widely I will be thinking about this on a South East European level – 18 very diverse countries – for the British Council and next week in Istanbul with our Regional Leadership Team Meeting (30 senior colleagues from across the region) will be kicking off our thinking on what the relaunch of Counterpoint and the centrality of Cultural Relations on the Council’s agenda means for how we approach our work and, indeed, what that work is or might become.
And my colleague Dace Melbarde and I will be doing something that sounds quite similar, Richard, for the RANE RLTM that starts in Warsaw on Monday – let’s compare notes!
I have just come back from a trip to Bratislava where I met up with a group of new, and old, contacts. One of the latter – now the headteacher of a secondary school in Bratislava, and someone with whom I was in contact in the early 90s – impressed on me how the Council played a vital role in changing people’s lives at the time, and how important our work was in terms of the impact it has had on the present – a positive testimony to the durability of cultural relations. Central Europe must be full of such experiences. Rich pickings for the second stream of this project.
Would love to hear about any conference or meet for educationists and teachers and be a part of this across the globe. Definitely cross cultural relationships make you immensly mature and understandable and polite. Tuttle club is a great effort.