2012 The Harold Rosen Memorial Lecture no.1 / DARE Launch

The DARE Collaborative was launched last Friday – 22nd June – at the BFI Southbank. Attendees from arts and media organisations, schools and universities, were treated to a fantastic welcome in the form of a promenade performance by Lambeth schools of work created in response to Hitchcock’s silent film from 1927, The Ring.  You can read more about that here. After the music, drama, dance, video remixing and so on in all of the available public spaces at the BFI Southbank, the DARE launch was held in the Blue Room. Representatives from many of the partner organisations gathered in the Blue Room to hear from co-directors, Andrew Burn (IOE) and Mark Reid (BFI), about the overall aims and vision for the collaborative, summed up in the “About DARE” post on this site and put into context by Andrew and Mark as a series of research and evaluation projects with interested partners form across the spectrum of the arts and education.  A key aim, as Mark put it, was “better conversations” about the arts in education. The aim being to move beyond the project report and into a pro-active engagement with arts and culture in learning.

With that in mind, the event got off to an inspirational start with the opening talk in what is hoped will become an annual event. Michael Rosen spoke in the first Harold Rosen memorial lecture, a series named for his father the pioneering educator, teacher -educator and writer.  Members of his family, including Betty Rosen, the storyteller and writer, were present to hear a wonderful talk on the subject of “Beyond Recitation – Poetry and the arts in the curriculum”. It was inspiring to hear from someone who is passionate about defending the arts and culture and the broader curriculum for all our learners in a week in which the controversial primary review made the headlines.

Photographs from the launch taken by Michelle Cannon are in the DARE photo album on this page.

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The talk by Michael is available in full below.