The Arts and Education 2017 event is an interactive international seminar organized byKulturtanken – Arts for Young Audiences Norway and the DiSko project, CASE center. International keynotes and clinicians are Eric Booth, US, the founder of the Teaching Artist movement, professor Gert Biesta, UK, and professor Liora Bresler, US.
Masters student Jose Eduardo Garcia Aldama Pepe is studying at the Annimation Department of Volda University College (Norway). Pepe is currently working on animation films for the UH-nett Vest project ART@CREATIONS which will produce a series of music and animation artworks inspired by scientific themes related to the European Commission’s project, CREATIONS.
DigiSus is a bottom up competence project involving kindergartens in two municipalities, pre-service kindergarten teacher programmes and a research environment. The main objective of the project is to develop and establish a competence framework for kindergarten staff and teacher educators connected to evaluation and implementation of sustainable digital practices (SDPs) in kindergartens supporting playing and learning in literacy and arts practices.
Newer research findings suggest that small children’s use of mobile screen technologies may prevent the development of crucial pre-academic abilities such as self-regulation, empathy, social competence and problem solutions (Radesky, Schumacher & Zuckerman 2014). This critique suggest to us that the introduction of digital practices need to be less screen based and more balanced in order to deserve to persist and become sustainable in kindergarten environments for play and learning. The DigiSus project will introduce and explore a balanced environment for play and learning in kindergartens where non-screen based technology will be used along with existing screen based technologies in moveable experience labs, e.g in the shape of aesthetic interaction rooms (1- 3 years), and language exploration rooms (3-5 years). The interaction rooms will be designed in collaboration between kindergarten teachers and researchers and implemented in kindergartens.
The overall research design of the project is inspired by action and educational design research and is structured around four key research phases:
Research processes and phases will all lead up to knowledge as competence agency connected to actional thinking and research based decisions.
Funding: Norwegian Research council (NFR)
Research partner: The municipality of Tysnes and The municipality of Stord
Project owner: CASE center, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL)
The UK Global Science Opera school Premier Academy is shortlisted for International Award in the prestigious TES Schools Awards 2017, sponsored by the British Council, for the school’s work with GSO. In June, music educator Jonathan Harris will travel to the House of Commons in London to discuss GSO with several MPs and attend the awards ceremony.
In the project “School and concert – from transmission to dialogue”, fieldwork has started. This first half year is dedicated to analysis and exploration of four different school contexts, and a “field portrait” of each school will be constructed on basis of interviews, observation, conversations, focus groups, document/curriculum analysis and literature reviews. The researchers are aiming at picturing the school as an environment for site-specific partnership collaborations in music. What are the schools’ needs when visiting musicians enter school, which strengths weaknesses, opportunities and threats towards ownership and site-specificity is there in the different schools?
Master students and researchers from within the fields of marine biology, astrophysics, and creative and esthetic learning processes from Univ. of California Berkeley, Concordia University, University of Bergen and Western Norway University of Applied Sciences met in Berkeley for a week-long seminar held by the Norwegian Research Council’s project, iSCOPE. The iSCOPE project is designed as a bridge between successful science education methodologies, including ones which are supported by arts education, and the goals which UiB (BIO) aims to reach. Excellence in biology education will be evaluated and enhanced with world-class excellence from physics.
The goals were a) to experiment and develop didactic elements based in the arts and science, so as to further develop the course Biological Data Analysis and Research Design (BIO300) at the University of Bergen, and b) to negotiate the challenges within inter-disciplinary work of this kind as the project begins authoring a series of three publications.
The program was varied and eclectic. An Eco-Scenography at the MITAcademy school (whose Astronomy club is creating a scene for this year’s Global Science Opera) led by Master students from Stord, a a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Monterey Bay Aquarium, and a Science Communication workshop led by Concordia University Master student introduced the participants to new perspectives. An inspirational session with Heavy Metal band Cardinal Wyrm about music as a mechanism in science dissemination, and presentations of research about the Global Science Opera by colleagues from Stord, Norway and Montreal, Canada, were also on the program, as well as much more.
Jonathan Harris, is Head of Academy Music at the Premier Academy (Milton Keynes, UK), and the UK “alpha-contact” for the Global Science Opera. He is now working on a new version of his song “Bring Peace” for this year’s Global Science Opera, “Moon Village”. Originally written for the 2015 GSO Production, “SkyLight“, he now hopes that many children and students taking part in this year’s GSO can learn and record the song together. The song lyrics link science investigation and world peace.
The Italian Story-Telling Center in Portico di Romagna will collaborate with the Global Science Opera (GSO) in 2017 during the “Moon Village” opera production. During the year, the Italian team, here represented by Giovanna Conforto (photo), will create a scene within the opera, together with Italian pupils.
Preparations have begun for the Global Science Opera’s production in 2017, “Moon Village”! The science opera will be performed around the world and streamed online: A year-long creative inquiry shared by schools, universities and art institutions in 25 countries. It will communicate the process, science and technology of the European Space Agency’s Moon Village. In March, members and students of the EU Erasmus+ “SPACE” project will gather at the European Space Agency’s Technology Center (ESTEC) in Holland to receive inspiration, and to plan the performance of the Dutch GSO team at ESTEC during the opera premier in December. “Moon Village” will be a cooperation with a network of institutions and these projects:
Global Science Opera is the first ever opera initiative to be created, produced and performed as a global community.
Ghost Particles will premiere worldwide on November 19th 2016. This new production tells the story of the amazing zoo of particles starring Higgs Boson, Neutrinos and Photons. It will be streamed online by TV-Haugaland and will include a virtual live visit to the CMS experiment at CERN, the largest multinational particle physics lab in the world. The opera’s scientific concept was provided by Dr. Sofoklis Sotiriou (EA, Greece).
The Global Science Opera is co-organized at Stord Haugesund University College in Norway, in collaboration with a global network including RESEO, art@CMS, Global Hands on Universe and Galileo Teacher Training Program.
The opera is a flagship initiative of the European Commission’s Horizons 2020 Project CREATIONS, which develops creative approaches based on art for engaging science classrooms. It furthermore provides a research focus for the Norwegian Research Council’s project “iSCOPE“.
The opera may be viewed online here on Nov. 19th, 2016 at 1:30 PM GMT: https://hnytt.no/se-tvh-live/
Find out more at http://www.globalscienceopera.com