We’re back at Addis transit lounge, on our way back from Rwanda after a week working with the young journalists at Ni Nymapinga. This time we’re in the modern part of the airport and the mix of passengers is much closer to what you’d normally see. There are tourists, business people, families travelling – not the slightly surreal, smoky NGO-ness of our transit stop off on the way out. There is one connection point though: the video screens are still showing a photo gallery titled ‘Endemic birds of Ethiopia’ and we still can’t remember any of them.

The airport lounge is a kind of decompression chamber between Kigali and London and to be honest, there’s a lot to process. We got to see exactly how Ni Nymapinga create their youth-run magazine and highly popular radio show, and we got to see how it exists within Rwandan culture. Ni Nympinga isn’t just something for young people to do – it’s part of a concerted attempt to build a more positive future by empowering girls in a culture where the ideas like men-only foods (mostly high-status meats like chicken or beef) existed in the relatively recent past.

In Rwandan culture girls are expected to be shy and many of the girls we met out in the villages spoke so softly that it was almost hard to hear them. Ni Nymapinga, which is run by Girl Hub is designed to create a conversation between Rwandan girls, delivered in a tone that Rwandan girls will be inclined to hear and absorb. It starts a conversation in a way that respects Rwandan culture, and highlights the brilliant things that girls are doing in the country: the unusual and brave girl who has taken the traditionally-male job as a motorbike taxi driver, or a girl who built her grandmother a house.

The focus is on interesting and inspirational girls rather than celebrities, and the absence of the background status anxiety that so much of our media generates is palpable. The large-scale format of the magazine is more than just an artistic decision: it’s designed to sit over two people’s laps so they can both read it at once. Ni Nyampinga is a complex and multi-layered medium for promoting and supporting pride and positivity amongst Rwandan young people. It might be primarily for and about girls, but the team are now thinking about how they can connect with boys too, and the pieces we created with them included vox pops with boys about their friendships with girls.

This point about connecting with boys is an important one. We met the lady behind Gahaya Links, a social enterprise that supplies woven baskets and jewellery to Macey’s in the US. They were founded by two sisters after the genocide left a gender imbalance, with many women widowed or left alone after their husbands, sons or brother fled the country or received long jail sentences in genocide-related cases. The lady who showed us around the workshops said that empowering women economically had a positive impact on their relationships, too. Men saw that local women were learning skills and were bringing in money and they began to relate to them differently. They saw the women had value – and began to ask if they could learn to weave or sew, too. If Ni Nymapinga want to improve the lives of Rwandan girls then they’re aware they have to do it in the context of talking to everyone, and that includes the boys.

We had such a great week and there’s way too much to communicate in one, or probably a hundred blog posts. A few snapshots: the day when Live Editor Celeste and our International Editor Keisha learned a local dance where girls mimic the movement of a cow, with the last girl still dancing and smiling being named ‘best cow’ – a compliment in a country where those sweet beasts are held in high regard. Or our encounter with the security guard outside the Rwandan Agricultural Bureau where we tried to ask for directions to a food place and confused the word for ‘where’ with the Rwandan word that represents the sound of laughing. Or our glimpse into Kigali high society at a club at the Mille Collines hotel where the DJ played Tinie Tempah and CEOs danced with ballons at a party run by a Rwandan who grew up in Canada, or any of the hundreds of conversations we had with the girls about the differences between their lives, and average lives in London. Or the fact that there’s so much more to Rwanda than the genocide, but that it’s there, waiting behind almost every conversation, because it affected everyone, and still affects everyone. How could it not, when over a million people were killed and the country destroyed, less than two decades ago?

The cultural exchange will continue to colour our thoughts and actions here in London, and hopefully it’s just the start of a beautiful friendship between the teams at Live and at Ni Nyampinga. I think we have a lot to learn from each other.

We’re half way through our week-long collaboration with the girls of Ni Nyampinga. The magazine and radio show might only be two years old but it’s already famous in Rwanda. The degree to which Ni Nyampinga is a household name became clear when we went to visit Marie Adelaide school in Gihara, just east of Kigali. We’d gone to get content for the two features and two radio packages that we are making during our week here, and specifically, we’d gone to find content for a story about how new Rwandan music by artists like Knowless and King James were bringing young people together in friendship.

When we arrived, the whole school was lined up for an al fresco assembly in the yard.

Ni Nyampinga girls Cecile, 22, Beni, 19,  Glorious, 24 and Christine, 15 took to the stage and were greeted with cheers and whistles. The story required an interview with a musician so they asked the students if there were any musicians among them. Two candidates were quickly pushed to the front: a rapper and a very shy girl who was described as a gospel singer. The former is already a school star and his peers were enthusiastic in singing back the chorus to his track. The girl performed a version of Rwandan teen favourite Knowless’ song Nzabampari and everyone responded, soft voices dropping then rising, like a Rwandan village version of Donny Hathaway Live In New York.

It was a vibrant welcome for the team who have become slightly famous themselves. Girls and boys throughout the country read the articles in the quarterly magazine, now on issue 7, and hear them weekly on their live radio show which has been running for two years.  The magazine is designed to be shared (“not kept in one person’s bag”, says Girl Co-ordinator Pacifique) but still it’s at a premium: the head teacher of the school, a softly-spoken lady who radiated a quiet authority, explained that the magazine is so popular they have to ration it, and only students who are processing well get their hands on the new issue.

Celeste and Keisha took their team off to a youth club south of Kigali to make a story about that perennial question – whether boys and girls can ever really just be friends – and had their own adventures. Back in the office, we collected all the audio, pictures and notes we’d made from our various excursions and finished for the day, dusty, tired, but pretty sure we had the seeds of some very good stories.

And in case you’re wondering, Ni Nyampinga is a Rwandan concept which describes a girl who is beautiful inside and out. A Nyampinga is confident and happy, she makes good decisions, and she knows she is valued because of who she is.

It’s a concept we think might just be useful back in the UK, too.

We’re going because of a partnership we’ve developed with the team at Ni Nyampinga, a magazine and radio show run by girls aged 10-19 in Rwanda. They came to visit us in Brixton a few months ago, and we realised we had a lot in common. There were the obvious things: Live’s run by young people, and so is Ni Nyampinga. Both publications aim to do more than just sell stuff. And both publications have an innovative creation and distribution model. For Ni Nyampinga, innovative doesn’t quite cover it: two years ago, when they started, there was no distribution network in the country. They created one, from scratch.

We met in Brixton, sat round the kitchen table in the office and realised we had a lot to learn from each other. One simple example is that both publications are working out how to integrate their platforms: Live as we focus on our website and YouTube channel, and NN as they try and bring their radio and magazine teams closer together.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, a trip coalesced into reality. We worked out what we needed to do. We got jabs (wow, Typhoid hurts) and our very cool Yellow Fever passes. We learned a few words of Kinyrwandan (watch out for us saying ‘murakoze’ every time you offer us a cup of tea on our return). And we whizzed up a workshop and content creation plan that we hope will allow us to share the best of what Live knows and to find out how things run Kigali-style.

It’s not that Live knows everything and Ni Nyampinga need to learn from us – we know what we know and we can definitely learn a lot from them. In fact we already have. Brand Manager Afrika’s powerpoint issue outlines are definitely a step up from our google doc-based efforts.

So, it’s 3am at Addis Ababa Transit Lounge. It’s a strange mix of people waiting here, many of whom we think are probably working for NGOs, because we keep hearing words like ‘refugee camp’ and ‘south Sudan’. There are a few of the obligatory kids crying, and a lot of people sleeping. It smells of incense and rose petals. There’s a smoking room comprised of an open glass square in the corner of the lounge. There a brilliant film on loop titled Endemic Birds of Ethiopia, which include the squat looking Ankober Serin and the Blue Winged Goose. Keisha’s asleep, thanks mostly to the fact she had to hand in her final uni assignment the night before we left and reckons she slept a full three hours in the previous 90. Celeste is reading a feature on Rwanda’s successful fight against corruption in New Africa and I’m tapping this out.

Phase one, done. Phase two, we’re ready to go.

I can’t decide which is my favourite diagram from Scott Christianson’s new book, 100 Diagrams That Changed The World.

This gorgeous image of the phases of the moon made in 1016 by Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni

or Moses Harris’ colour wheel, from 1766.

Thank you to Brainpickings for the tip.

Boy, he liked drama. The early sections of the exhibition show the epic glamour of the life he was born into, a child surrounded by ornate women in dresses like the one he famously maximised for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. They show his early experiments with multiple exposure and surrealism, like the images of poet Edith Sitwell with five or six versions of the shot surrounding one smudged face.

By the mid 1930s, he’s got himself a reputation as highly talented, highly-strung and difficult. People didn’t care, lapping up his tantrums and demands in order to be immortalised, Godess gorgeous. Then he scribbled a nasty antisemitic phrase in the margins of an illustration in Vogue and was fired. His apology, preserved in a vitrine with press cuttings about the incident, claims he’d written it as a ‘silly joke’ after watching some bad films, and exudes a shame and isolation that suggests he recognised and genuinely regretted his actions.

War breaks out in ’39. He offers his services to the Ministry of Information and soon he’s working as a war photographer, showing the impact of Nazi bombing on buildings and lives. The pictures are pure film-set drama, with gorgeous architectural lines and sweeping curves of rubble and a terribly lonely image of a newly homeless woman sitting at a table by herself.

He says it himself, in a quote etched on the wall.  “Often the bare walls or the struts of a hangar lent themselves as usefully to a pictorial scheme as any more calculated effects of decoration”. In the pictures of shipbuilding in the North East, there are welding masks that look like industrial sci-fi costumes.

The images that stick in my mind come from the latter part of the exhibition when he travelled to photograph troops in India and across the Middle East. One is of a sailor repairing fabric at a sewing machine. He glares at the lens, eyes hooded in shadow, accusing the viewer. Sewing machines have honestly, truly, never looked so hard as they do here. The second is of British Liaison Officers sheltering under camouflage netting in Burma in 1944. The light shines through the holes and overlays an Escher chequerboard over the whole thing – and as you look up, in the far right hand corner of the image, there’s a person leaning out of a window, unexpected as a chip shop in the desert.

One final thought, inspired by the footage of his post-war work designing film sets and costumes: Cecil Beaton would have LOVED Leigh Bowery.

Go if you can. It closes on January 1st. More info here.

The night was to promote Hooky’s new book about Joy Division, unsurprisingly titled Unknown Pleasures. It’s the follow-up to his Hacienda book and if propelled by a similarly dark sense of humour. It’s laugh out loud funny at times, even if that laughter is undercut with the knowledge that the end of the story is coming, and is as inevitable as it’s been since Ian Curtis killed himself on May 18th 1980. When a poster falls of the wall behind us, halfway through, Hook looks over his shoulder: “Ian again” sounding like he’s only half joking. 

I’d recommend you read the book. In Hooky’s version of the story Joy Division was less depression and Dostoevsky and more about throwing eggs at The Buzzcocks. You get a real sense of the difference between the band and how they saw themselves and the version of the band captured so icily by producer Martin Hannett. “We would have made a great album for then,” says Hook in the book. “But he made an album that was great for all time.”  

Hooky gave some good examples of the opaque instructions Hannett would give the band after a take: 

“More buttery”

“Faster but slower”

“More cocktail party”

I could hear people talking about Martin Hannett all day, but we did move on. Hook did a nice impression of manager Rob Gretton, and the way he’d always push his glasses up his nose, and shared his thoughts on how he’d decided what to include and what to leave out, and talked a bit about the New Order book he’s now definitely writing. 

There was a great question from audience: “What would Joy Division have sounded like if Ian had done the right thing?”  

“We would have sounded the same,” said Hook, animated and frustrated. “We were going that way anyway.” Ian loved disco, he said, and not just Kraftwerk. He loved Georgio Moroder. New Order, he said, was how Joy Division would have sounded, with the one simple difference that they’d have had Ian’s vocals and Ian’s lyrics. It was eternally tragic that Ian hadn’t stayed for the success, he said, for the good bits. 

After we finished talking, Hook told me a good story about producing The Stone Roses and playing the demo of Elephant Stone to Geoff Travis. He’d travelled down to London, got to Rough Trade and proudly put the cassette in the tape deck. It sounded horrendous. A tinny, hissy mess. Turns out one of their entourage had bought a job-lot of tapes that didn’t work properly. Travis was infuriated, told Hook off, and sent him away – and missed out on the chance to miss one of the biggest bands of the ’90s. It’s a story that’s mirrored in the book, where the first Joy Division promos were sent out with an accidental interlude of roadie Twinny being called for his tea, with the sound of Coronation Street in the background. Some things never change, I guess. 

For Youth Workers And Youth Work: Speaking Out For A Better Future

Doug Nicholls (Policy Press)

At the heart of this book is a simple argument. That youth work is by definition political and that youth workers should be overt in transmitting socialist ideas to young people in order to make them aware of the degree to which they are oppressed  – and to give them a chance of creating a new world order. It’s not an argument you hear very often in 2012. 

This densely argued book is a clarion call for a revolutionary take on youth work where interactions “must be informed by ideas and consciousness that the wider picture is unacceptable and alterable”.

Nicholls presents and contexualises information well: for every pound spent on public services, another £1 is generated in supplies and services, he says, before pointing out that the £6bn bonuses paid to bankers in last January would fund the entire youth service in England and Wales for over 20 years, to name but two.

There’s also great stuff on youth clubs, an area of the youth service that has been decimated by the cuts. At their best, says Nicholls, youth clubs are “utopian commonwealths and mini democracies that provide space for independent self-discovery and an appreciation of the value of free association.”

Nicholls is particularly powerful when scathing. He is brutal on positive activities which he compares to the Roman’s bread and circuses; on the casualisation and outsourcing of youth work (a ‘theft’ which he claims amounts to £70bn removed from the public sector since 1997); on ‘assessination’ or the mindless focus on quantifiable results; on the privatisation of prisons and the damaging effects of IYSS and on the cuts to youth services.

One fascinating suggestion is that all youth workers are working class because they become the same class as the most vulnerable young people they work with. It’s an interesting idea: working with young people won’t change your class but it can make you drop some of your own class-based assumptions.  Another idea I’ll be taking away with me is that of ‘lifeworld’ – a term coined by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas to describe the unregulated, unmarketised space of family, friendships, community and culture. Nicholl is compelling on the disastrous effect of the market moving into this space.

Doug Nicholls has been a youth worker for 30 years and he’s a powerful advocate for the real impact that youth work can have on the most vulnerable and on society as a whole. He’s also a committed and experienced Trades Union leader, and makes an argument you rarely hear about how unions supported and promoted progressive education and youth work. He argues that Trade Union education should be up there with International Women’s Day and Black History Month. A new version of youth work is needed, he says: youth workers must “assert their progressive nature and reconnect with its origins in an alternative socialist education”.

I wondered what serving youth workers would think about this, and so asked a brilliant and committed individual who frequently refers young people to LIVE Magazine where I work. My assumption was that Nicholls’ ideas would be anathema to your average youth worker. 

I was wrong: “It’s a big topic and young people need to get different opinions, but basically, he’s right.” 

Who knew? 

The book asks some really good awkward questions (‘what is informal education for? What is participation for?’). It would be odd if it’s didn’t, as he agues that youth work is built on questioning both its own process and practice and opening young minds to questioning the world around them. Youth workers, he says should empower, and should be empowered themselves. 

For Doug Nicholls, political ideas that were last mainstream in the 1970s and the 1980s, have strong resonance in 2012. I wonder if we’ll be seeing more books like this as austerity bites.   

There are only 2,309 Academies.

And only 79 Free Schools.

So why, as Dr Janet Dobson, senior researcher at UCL, asked in her letter, don’t we get proportionate cover of the vast majority?

And where’s the pride and interest in our successful, non-corporate state sector?

“A few fragments,” he said, starting his short talk on memorable teachers before bringing to life a handful of characters: the teacher who bombarded them with dramatically-performed French literature; Ms Pope, the biology teacher who made them always find a new way to tell their partner what they’d just learned; and his father who gave him the same advice Karl Marx gave his daughter – ‘be curious’.

My fragments, then.

Michael Wilshire arriving with two men carrying attaché cases, and coming across very well indeed. This is despite fact he still clearly believes in an old-fashioned top-down view of excellence: that only leaders can inspire and that it is the job of leaders to make everyone else obey.

Bill Lucas‘ instructive workshop on how parental engagement helps improve schools. “Parental engagement is forgotten territory,” he says, pointing out that 80% of waking hours are spent out of school, and that parental engagement helps raise achievement unequivocally. It has positive social impact and helps shape children’s learning character. “There are two games in town: exams and learning dispositions. You can do both, and if you focus on learning dispositions, your exam results go up.”

The Rebel Teachers workshop: ”Make a nuisance of yourself” (Mike Kent); ”The government are desperate for solutions. We have to stand up and speak out.” (Martin Latham); ”Heads have power. They should speak out, and not be afraid of speaking out.” (Kenny Frederick)

The session on breaking down the achievement gap between middle class and ‘disadvantaged’ young people, with head of Generating Genius, Tony Sewell, speaking persuasively about ignoring class, race and gender to ‘provide young people with a ladder to the moon’.

Remarkable head Bushra Nasir outlining how her school had got 74% of her students achieving at least five A-Cs at GCSE, which including spending £50K on textbooks for GCSE students. Teach First alumni James Toop who is now CEO of Teaching Leaders, suggesting that schools should rename rooms after the universities teachers attended, and that caps and gowns could inspire students to aim for top universities (to be fair, he gallantly expanded on this when I collared him afterwards to find out how this might work, and he said it could help break the cycle of deprivation by helping inspire individuals from families where no-one’s been to university.)

Camila Batmaghelidjh describing how hard it was to receive SEN teaching – and how one teacher recognised what she could do, and worked with her abilities not her disabilities.

Poet (and part of the extended LIVE Magazine family) Bridget Minamore, reading a poem about her favourite teachers – and the one who stopped her writing for a year and a half.

And Michael Rosen, again, to bring us back to the start…

“The fundamental basis of education is talk.”

The attendees, a mix of students, teachers, heads and the miscellaneously interested, didn’t need much help with questions for Mr Gove, the best of which was one from the front which asked the famously erudite Scot whether he was aware of the truism that weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to blog about the festival in two parts because there’s a huge amount to reflect on. First up, then, the opening session, where Michael Gove was in conversation with journalist and writer David Aaronovitch for a talk titled ‘What does an educated person look like?’

The festival was opened by a Year 10 student, who spoke eloquently about wanting to be a barrister. It was the right note to open on, as you really can’t talk about 21st Century education without involving students, and the Festival did a good job of starting to get the recipients of education involved – although I hope next year they get more students running or adding to sessions, interviewing big names, and being visibly at the centre of things.

Gove came on stage to a few muted boos. “Don’t boo me,” said Aaronovitch with a neat line in diffusion. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

I’m waiting to hear if the session will be hosted online, but it was fascinating, depressing and vaguely tragicomic all at the same time. At the start, Gove used an unlikely example: the British Communist Party of the 1950s, with their libraries and demand for education, was, he said, “quite admirable” . I imagine this was the quote bone he was throwing to waiting journalists, and he even brought a book along as a visual prop should this be required for photographs.

There were a few specifics points worth commenting on. It looks like he wants to introducing individual purchasing power into sixth forms, saying that every student over 16 should have cash and be able to say to schools and FE Colleges ‘you have to tell me which course will get me a job’ and chose on this basis. He claimed that the EBacc is the encapsulation of what happens in other countries that have been successful at raising achievement, particularly Poland, and said that his proposed examination system would not preclude the teaching of arts, although @localschools_uk claimed that 187 schools have dropped Art GCSE in the last year which may suggest otherwise.

Gove was unrepentant, as you’d expect, on Academies, claiming that he’s never met an Academy head who wants to go back, although I imagine that the increasing use of Non-Disclosure Agreements for staff in both academies (and in the state sector) may be influencing this. “Resistance to academies is with people who want to swim at the edge of the pool, not strike out to the centre. To them I say come on in, the water’s lovely.”

He appears not to believe that schools focus aggressively on exam results to the exclusion of everything else: “Someone people say some schools are exam factories and are prisons of the soul. These schools do not exist”. The audience murmured and occasionally heckled their dissent.

It also looks as though education will remain ring-fenced after the Autumn budget. “The Lib Dems have helped me argue that education remains well-resourced.”

The most instructive moment (apart from when Gove experienced what body language experts call ‘leakage’ during a discussion about the sense of making hormonal teenagers do exams, when he talked about things ‘going wrong hormonally’ during teens and stiffened his left leg in a most peculiar fashion) was during the Q&A session. He was asked about over-assessment.

Gove: “You can’t have education without assessment.”
Audience: “Why not?”
Gove: “We need it. Education without assessment is just play”

As someone pointed out to me later, what does he think happened in Primary Schools before SATs?

It’s a classic example of why politicians shouldn’t get involved in the content and mechanics of education. Governments need assessment, in order to prove they’ve raised standards, and whilst students need some assessment, there’s plenty of evidence, particularly at Primary Level that too much assessment is bad for students.

For what it’s worth, my cod-psychological take is that Mr Gove is involved in a powerful psychological projection in which he wants to replicate his own schooling. I once read an interview with his mother who described her son being so brilliant that teachers would invite him up to the front of the class to take the rest of the lesson.

I think it’s ego leading this, not evidence about how young people learn, nor 21st Century requirements. This is a shame because on today’s showing he’d be a most entertaining conversational companion – and a damn dangerous person to have in charge of education for a generation which is more diverse, in all senses of the word, than any before.