Room 13

Page 13

The difficulty of defining the Room 13 approach is illustrated by the "Notes on Room 13 Management Structure Proposal" which were pinned to the wall in the studio. (These notes had been produced in response the many requests that had been received for a definition of the ethos of Room 13, so that it could be replicated elsewhere. No one at Caol when I was there could remember who had produced them, but I was assured that much of it looks as though it came from children. )

Notes on Room 13 Management Structure Proposal

It is difficult to write a set of rules for an organisation (even that word seems wrong!) who exist for the purpose of constantly redefining, breaking, bending and disproving set rules which govern the way we think (or are told to think) we should live our lives. We have tried to distil the complex theories of Room 13 into very simple values which we think sum up Room 13.

"Believe in the supreme worth of the individual." (J. D. Rockefeller)

Room 13 puts every individual at the centre of their own learning.

"If I advance, follow me. If I stop, push me. If I fall, inspire me." (Robert Cushing)

So say the students of Room 13.

"A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle." (Erin Majors)

There is no distinction between learning and teaching. Both aspects of Room 13 are continually reciprocal.

Respect the intelligence of all others.

"Of course we all have our limits, but how can you possibly find your boundaries unless you explore as far and as wide as you possibly can?" (A. E. Hotchner)

Encourage exploration, experiment, and all areas of enquiry.

Mutual trust and respect.

Treat every person as one who has thoughts and experiences different to yours and recognise their potential as one you can learn from.

A personal commitment.

Enter Room 13 in any capacity and accept your responsibility to impart what you have learned about life to those who are seeking answers to their own questions. You owe it to them to be honest.

Thinking.

Share the benefits of your experience - but be careful not to impose them. You may know that a certain activity will end in disaster or that a proposed solution will fail comprehensively but others will benefit from finding out for themselves. Only intervene if there is likely to be dangerous or potentially serious irreversible consequences. Even then, intervention should be just enough to subtly steer participants towards a more appropriate line of thinking.

Integrity and self worth.

As Room 13 spreads, it is bound to change. However, it is not being allowed to change too much. Some Caol children had recently visited one primary school which had expressed an interest in starting a Room 13. These are quotations from their report on their visit:

The teachers looked as if they would be very interested but when we got to know them we found out they wouldn't give two monkeys.

We ESTIMATE that about 75% of the teachers were crabit and moody, 10% were very nice and the rest were in between.

The proposal for a Room 13 at a school in Rotherham has fallen through. Nevertheless, there are new Room 13s planned. As well as in Lochyside and Lochaber High School there are now Room 13s at Hareclive Primary School in Bristol, in the Sacred heart Primary School in Glasgow (a music studio with a composer in residence) and in a school/orphanage (The Helpless Children's Mother Centre in Kathmandu. Other possibilities are a school in Skye and a school in Johannesburg, under the auspices of a London-based company who were moved to react after seeing the Room 13 film, and who have in fact expressed a wish to set up a Room 13 in every country in which they operate, which means another sixty countries.

When you consider that, in addition to all this, Room 13 is involved in organising exhibitions in London and Inverness, negotiating a new film for Channel 4, selling school photographs, booklets and CDs, publishing postcards and printing T-shirts and selling them, writing reports for organisations like Children in Scotland and the National Campaign for the Arts, planning a Room 13 qualification and perhaps even a degree course as well as managing the day-to-day running of the studio, dealing with correspondence and accounts and purchasing materials and equipment, it is difficult to see how one small, part-time management group of any age can ever cope with it all. Nevertheless, when you see what the children are achieving now with minimal adult assistance - clearly without adult interference or authority - it is still possible to hope that greater numbers of children will mean greater potential, and that they will be able to ensure that future Room 13s remain true to the original ideals.

If I were asked to describe the Room 13 approach in a single phrase, I would say it was a profound manifestation of trust. Children are trusted to do real things, to administer their own studio affairs, to negotiate with adults from outside the school, to weigh up the significance of world events, to face physical difficulties, to formulate and express their own philosophical ideas. Here, as everywhere, different children have different needs: some said that it is useful to have adults around to help but others were sure they could manage everything by themselves.

In a Room 13 children are trusted, no matter how far they may grow beyond the kind of work that their mothers might like to stick on their fridges.

Rob tried to define Room 13 for me in a recorded interview.

Rob: It's a constantly evolving idea. I think it has to be an environment which allows kids to create and learn and I think without these two things Room 13 probably doesn't exist. Of course you can create just by thinking. That is perfectly valid. There's one or two other strands that at the moment exist with all four of us - bear in mind there's Shani in Bristol as well. That's probably a global understanding that we are all in this together, to phrase it in its most dumbed-down version.

DG: We, including the children, are all in this together?

Rob: All of us. It's definitely not a them and us situation. The reason all four of us are working with youngsters is because they've got as much to teach us as we've got to teach them. Possibly more, actually.

Miss Cattanach's understanding of the staff's common approach is that "they have a theory going that they want children to see themselves as people who are respected by people and it doesn't matter whether the people are children or adults."

In the Channel 4 film Rob has another shot at it: "It's just a case of teaching people how to think. It's the one thing that we are different about - we actually think, and we think quite deeply about things. And then all our thinking is transferred into art."

And in the proposal for funding to NESTA, a voice which sounds to me like Danielle's says:

"We are (we hope) changing people's ideas about creativity and what young people can do and (slowly) showing adults that there are other ways of education that work. We also show that the Arts are important in everything. Everybody says we are talented but we are not really, it is just that we do and think about things differently. A newspaper reporter asked us yesterday (March 21st, 03) if we thought we were different from youngsters in other schools. Of course we are not - we just get the chance to work with adults rather than for them."

That seems to be the simplest and clearest definition of all. It is also the most ambitious and optimistic, and it has the widest implications for the whole world of education.