ROUNDS: building a teacher-community out of conversation

This blog post is written by Mark Reid, Senior Lecturer English PGCE at the Institute of Education, London, and ex-Head of Education British Film Institute. Mark worked for many years as the Head of Education at the British Film Institute, where he oversaw education programmes for children, schools, teachers, young people, and diverse communities, both online and in the BFI’s cinema venues.  He has a long standing interest in the relationship between arts and education, including film.
[All images were taken at the BFI’s ‘Cultural Campus’ – an annual week-long ‘residential’ project for young people working alongside professional artists and practitioners developing film, music, craft and other visual & performing arts skills and experience. It was held annually over a number of years from 2009-2016, and was in part inspired by Project Zero, the Harvard-based project described below. More information on one iteration of the Cultural Campus from 2012 can be found here. ]
Photos: Michelle Cannon.

Project Zero (PZ) is the arts education department of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  It was established in 1967 by philosopher Nelson Goodman to explore learning in and through the arts.  Explaining the coinage, Goodman said ‘the state of general communicable knowledge about arts education is zero. We’re starting at zero, so we are Project Zero’. (Someone once asked Goodman if it was possible to teach people to be more creative; he thought for a moment and said ‘Yes.’  When he was asked how, he thought again for a while, then said ‘set them harder problems.’)

PZ has always been interested in thinking and cognition, and the roles they play in human expression.  For many years it was led by Steve Seidel, who is now retired.  If Steve were asked what his focus was, rather than ‘arts education’, he would say something like ‘the ways in which people think when engaging in making’.   In 1995, Steve set in motion a talk community of arts educators and researchers called ‘ROUNDS’.  On the first Saturday of every month around 50 educators and researchers from Boston and beyond sat in a big circle, drank coffee and ate doughnuts, and talked about arts education.  I visited twice, in the spring of 2011.

ROUNDS was based on the medical education practice of case conferencing on a specific patient or condition.  It follows a strict protocol, in a three-part structure: an initial question posed by a member (for example, ‘is it possible to teach people to be more creative?’) followed by a discussion; an examination of a work of art made by a child; and a final short reflection, where Steve asked ‘What does it mean to be an arts educator, right here, today?’  The idea was to create an open ‘community of practice’ where the practices of arts education – noticing, reflecting, imagining, casting making into language – can be learned, rehearsed, and developed.

On the two occasions I visited, in April and May 2011, I was struck by the appetite for talking about arts education, which I put down to two things: an American culture of ‘shared talk’ in a member-community, and maybe a paucity of other opportunities to talk about pedagogy, practice, and crucially, children’s art-making.

On the culture of ‘talk communities’ I was reminded of friend and colleague Steve Goodman’s reference to the Prospect Centre in Vermont, which ran as a school, then a research centre, between 1965 and 2010.  The ‘descriptive review of a child’ would happen every week for two hours, where the staff sat down and conducted a shared conversation about a particular child in order to better understand them, their learning, and how the school was responding to their needs.  Like ROUNDS, the Descriptive Review followed a protocol – a set of conversational rules – and had roles for different speakers.  An account of these protocols can be found here: https://cdi.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/ProspectDescriptiveProcessesRevEd.pdf

Protocol-governed talk offers a disciplined form of enquiry, in which participants collaboratively discover new insights in a forum where everyone has an equal role: the enquiry is social rather than singular; it builds, and builds out of, a ‘community of practice’.  The commitment shown to these ‘collaboratives’ is evidenced in the fact that in ROUNDS every month, those same 40 or 50 people voluntarily showed up for three hours’ worth of talk and had been doing so for 30 years.  The diversity of the group mirrored its provisional, in-situ quality: teachers, arts educators, policy makers, academics and students all had a stake in the conversation.

ROUNDS stopped during COVID, and then Steve retired, but there has been talk of restarting it.  What was so unusual, and what I felt we could learn from at DARE/ ReMAP, was the notion that new knowledge could be generated in conversation by a community of practitioners and then do little more than enrich the practice of that community.  No requirements to publish or to turn into research grant applications.  Every month, Steve recorded the conversations, and every month some wag asked ‘what do you do with them Steve?’ to which he replied ‘well, someday I might listen to them…’

The second time I went, in the final ‘what does it mean to be an educator, here, today’ section, Steve recalled the time they met after 9/11, and the weight of that moment.  Connecting teaching with the everyday, with the world outside the bubble of the institution, is as important now as it always has been.  And, I believe, following a talk-based protocol, in a collaborative, conversation-based community, is a powerful way to make those connections.