Selfie number 8

This is a countdown of selfies and photographs with people who have influenced my thinking or inspired me over the years. Previous selfie posts can be found here and here.

As a regular speaker on the international conference circuit, I am privileged to meet and work with some of the brightest minds in my field. It was a special pleasure to meet former head teacher Richard Gerver at a conference a few years ago, and as a added bonus, to spend time working together recording a video for the Saudi Ministry of Education. The video we made can be viewed on this website. I had already read Richard's first book, Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today, and had been challenged by his radical vision for the future of education. One of my favourite quotes from his book is a critique of the current school system and a clarion call for authenticity:

'To our children, learning is something they do at school. [..] it is a distraction from their real lives. When they look beyond the gates they don't see timetables, subjects, paragraphs and full stops. They see a huge, glistening, confusing world. They do not see how, by engaging in one, you can understand the other. They feel that they leave their real life at the gate. It is our job to move schools forward so that they are seen by our children as a development of their real lives.' (Gerver, 2011, p. 57)

Richard and I spent quite some time together during those few days, and I learnt a great deal from him. He has subsequently gone on to achieve best seller status with his follow up book Change, and has developed into one of the most sought-after speakers in education. When Richard wrote the foreword for my latest book Learning with 'e's, he told the yarn about how we first met while riding camels in the Saudi desert. It's almost true - we did ride around on camels in a Bedouin encampment, and I have memories of Richard doing the Arabic Sword Dance around an open fire (I declined, owing to my aversion to sharp objects) - but we really met while travelling from Riyadh airport in a lot more comfort via limousine to a very nice hotel.

Reference
Gerver, R. (2011) Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today: Education - Our Children - Their Futures. London: Continuum.

Photo courtesy of ELI Conference, Saudi Higher Education Ministry


Selfie number 8 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.