Seminar on the role of schooling in the integration of 'new' Polish migrants to th UK

Briefing by Paulina Trevena of the University of Southampton who has conducted interviews with 83 adult Poles .... She didn't talk to teachers in schools dealing with populations of migrant children or  migrant children themselves...(so rather a limited remit). ... But recommendations that make sense and match ours and those we've heard elsewhere from people at the coalface....
- 'buddying' systems can be helpful
- information packs for migrant parents would be good, particularly with info about differences in school systems
- involving migrant parents in the school community is important.
And, of course, language support at every turn is essential.
This was at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and part of the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing series which 'present topical,cutting edge research on migration and migration related issues). COMPAS is part of Oxford (University). More on the COMPAS website.

Box art... the possibilities

Have spent today thinking about our new project on worklessness - it relates to all the work we've done on I PACKED THIS MYSELF which deals with migrant workers and local employment (and/or lack of it). Looking at people's experience in areas of high unemployment has been central to this.

How to bring the two together visually - and even practically? The suitcase is a metaphor for history, of course (as we've used it in I PACKED THIS MYSELF, by asking migrant workers what they brought with them to this country). It can also be a metaphor for the future.

Have always been very interested in art in boxes - and came across this - so thought provoking. Immediately want to make a doll house like this....

But I had really been thinking of more traditional box art, as in Mexican shrines to the dead. This one (fairly traditional - love the playing cards and chrysanthemums)...

And this one breaking away into idolatry of that ubiquitous figurehead of Mexican art, Frieda Kahlo. (I wear a Frieda Kahlo pendant myself - given to me by Tessa.)

But then came across a fantastic artist and I cannot believe that I had never heard of him before: Joseph Cornell (1903-72). Now this is really box art.

Background from http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/ 

"He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes'. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films."

Perhaps an interesting link (as far as I PACKED THIS MYSELF) with Schwitters here: he was an artist in exile in the UK during the war years.

The solution to youth unemployment lies in the coffers of big business?

The solution to youth unemployment lies in the coffers of big business | Stewart Lansley

http://gu.com/p/36tta