An Invitation to Think: Being Together Differently
Emily Dowdeswell shares her reflections on A Call For Being Together Differently, a workshop at our recent event.
Gathering together to think
What does it mean to think together? This June we gathered together with delegates from 30 organisations across Fullscope’s wider community to find out. During a stimulating morning of keynotes, provocations and workshops centred around Fullscope’s guiding principles, our goal was not only to think together, but to think together differently.
Mutually holding space for one another to reflect on building collaborative, person-centred practices that offer the right support at the right time for children and young people, the event prompted us to move away from delivering a service and towards nurturing an environment.
Emily Dowdeswell, Gabby Arenge & Ruth Sapsed, CCI
Making as a pathway to doing
Giving ourselves permission to pause, listen and make something from fragments that typically do not sit together, can help us first think critically and deeply about our usual ways of being together, and then consider how and when we access more open, creative, and connected ways of being together.
At Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, we champion our vision of a creative society for all and advocate for the impact of attending to materials and space as a pathway to storying ourselves differently. We recognise working creatively with simple materials can feel uncomfortable, and so we chose to sit with and explore this experience together as part of our Creative Health workshop – A Call for Being Together Differently.
Together we shared, made, and reflected with our innovative, paper-based evaluation resource, to think together about how creativity and curiosity can disrupt conventional practices to gently expand professional spaces, and languages, of intervention, development and collaboration. The resource originally emerged from work with families in Peterborough as part of the Creative Care programme CCI ran with Fullscope during lockdown, co-created with educators and professionals who supported families to explore creative health practices and materials that they could then share on.
Listening to the Call, immersing ourselves in our own experiences and stories while sharing the experience of making together, side by side, underlines the idea that knowledge itself is always situated and co-produced. Prompted by the Call, we embedded a more creative, reflective way of reimagining our ways of working through small group conversations facilitated by key partners. We then responded to Fullscope’s call to action, by identifying together practical steps we can embed in our everyday routines to foster ways of being together that offer alchemy and freedom instead of instruction.
“Offering alchemy and freedom instead of instruction sparks joy, lightfullness, and giggling. Adventure takes hold. Bringing with it excitement, curiosity and an openness that transforms vulnerability into value-ability.”
– Extract from A Call For Being Together Differently.
Resisting barriers to different ways of being
Together we reflected on the importance of giving ourselves permission to feel free to explore and express our own ideas in ways that feel comfortable. We shared the dangers of reductive stories across our different settings and thought about how physical space itself can both open up and close down creative connections with young people and for ourselves. Bringing our own experiences, both personal and professional, into our conversations brought enriching nuance to our narratives of people, places, and things, enabling us to not only bring the “outside” in but also to bring ourselves outside our usual ways of being. Indeed, beginning with shared ways of doing, making and moving through space, grounded an emergent common language across our diverse contexts.
What next?
Gathering together to reflect and think on how to ultimately do things differently, we were left wondering how we can build tangible, practical steppingstones out of our well-worn ways of doing and storying. In particular, our conversations explored how we might work together to really listen and respond to young people, and how we might build cross sector support to seed change. Listening to testimonies from our peers and partners was a powerful reminder of how achievable radical change can be given the right support, as we have seen in our Artscaping creative health programme.
“As a school we would love all students to be able to benefit from Artscapers as it has proved to be life changing for young people who now have a way to calm themselves and express themselves which they can employ throughout their lives. As one young boy said, he now goes to stand under the tree in his garden to calm himself and, without Artscapers, he would never have known how much this would help.”
– Jan Collings, Family Liaison Officer, North Cambridge Academy
Being together differently through creative ways of doing, making and moving through space will look different in different settings. We look forward to continuing these conversations and fostering that sense of belonging to a creative coalition working towards embedding collaborative, person-centred practices that offer the right support at the right time for children and young people. In the meantime, here are three small steps you can try with your teams:
Take time to reflect on where creative freedom sits in your organisation; reflect on how people can explore and express their own ideas.
Take note of any blind spots and petrified practices and understand the processes that contribute to anxiety and stifle change.
Take action and identify the concrete steps you can take to build the coalitions that will support creative freedom as an ongoing emergent practice rather than a discretionary tool.
Read more from Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination in A Call for Being Together Differently
Read more from Fullscope in Creative Health in Education
Read more from Phoebe Tickell in Imagination Activism in Camden
Read more from Ruha Benjamin in Imagination Playbook
If you’d like to join the next event, An Invitation to Think: Act 1, get in touch by emailing info@fullscopecollaboration.org.uk
Written in conjunction with our guest, Emily Dowdeswell. Emily is Director of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.