how to start a movement – tjblackburn.me

This bit is very rough………

Just do it.

Although the physical dimension of the direct action documented here was shut down by the covid-19 pandemic and change of management, these award-winning experiences on the ground were an experiment in the manifestation of hope in neoliberal the education system. All the actions described and illustrated below were tried and tested on college grounds and within the confines of the next looming Ofsted inspection, which came and went during these actions. What came about as a way of protesting the system of bureaucratic control, was written up in the opening paragraphs of their official report in 2018, singing high praise of the Seeds of Change Project and for its transformative potential.

This works intent is to inspire you into taking control and doing something to make a real difference, by taking direct action in your workplace. It is also aspirational in the way that it strives to reconfigure socially progressive ways of thinking away from the deepening furrows of culture war and the demonisation of critical thinking by the left brained dominance of narrow bandwidth thinking and outdated beliefs of the British political and media elites. There are currently few, if any, post sixteen college, seeking to empower its students to collectively challenge the ever-worsening conditions of the social, political, and economic world that they share with one another. Instead, young people are compelled to compete against one another via examination in fragmented subject specialisations, detached from locality and community.

The ideological dominance of individualism, seeded by top-down structures of management command and control are emblematic of so many problems replicated by the cultural iteration of social class inequality.
Here is a blueprint for post 16 education based around urban horticulture and food production. A college focused on promoting socially democratic decision making and empowering young people with entrepreneurial opportunities to promote positive energy and tasty food. A vision which uses subject specialism, existing curricula, and college infrastructure, to purposefully root student outcomes in alignment with urgent local community needs such as overcoming food poverty and mental illness, with dynamic affirmative action.

By ‘re-localising’ college provision we can offer the next generation, a future grown towards inspiring local social and economic transformation.
Now is the time to act and build from inside the system with a new methodology, devised to realise the potential from within, by promoting positive lifestyles in an imaginative student led food subcultural revolution. Whatever your ideological position, all available official quantitative data highlights how patterns of health inequality exist in specific regions and postcode zones. These numbers point to intergenerational ways of being that when combined with growing economic inequality, lead to high levels of morbidity that lead to premature mortality rates.

This prototype model, actuated via the Seed of Change Project in East Hull, is a self-funding fully functional concept that’s drawing upon pre-existing social enterprise networks and expertise, local business, and charitable awards. The ideas set out herein show how patterns of inequality locked in by hierarchical structures of social class replication, can, and must be transformed with co-operative college wide collaboration. This project is designed to be a manifestation of great hope, in a time of ever decreasing living standards and as thousands of experienced, passionate educators are handing in their notices in despair, at a broken education system, now turned into a maddening exam machine.

This is the bit where like clouds lifting on what seemed like a day that was going to be wet, windy and grey, only to turn out bright, sunny and full of joy. From this point forth all the hard work and critical deconstructionism will be rewarded with all the hope and joy that comes when we face up to the dark void of nothingness if the world was merely n moment existed without meaning, instead of what it should be, an aspirational meditation, actualized through thoughts and deeds. I say these words here in full knowledge of the black dog that lurks outside of each sunrise and at the end of the day, but it not for our ability to choose a proactive and positive life.

The Seeds of Change Project is a plan for creating a social movement based on the exploration of the an interconnected manifestation of human potential expressed through the fractal dimension which is the natural way of things. It is my perception that it is only through the nurturing of a more sophisticated form of shared understanding can we seek to inspire a more humane, holistic and hopeful world. There is nothing new about the idea of creating a better world that is rooted in shared collective action, many of which have well drawn plans and proposed economic structures detailing the more equitable distribution of wealth and resources. What I hope to offer here is instead a very micro applicable illustration of direct action at work and how you can use it in your everyday life. Through imagining the swirling and mathematics of Fibonacci and Mandelbrot mathematics and their ability to clearly illustrate both the quantitative and qualitative nature of reality and the self similarities of ideas transmitted via nucleus or seeds and replicated on micro and macro levels of reality.

As a teacher in a sixth form college, one has very little agency beyond the narrow confines of the syllabus or what meagre opportunities exist within the institutional framework. Speaking from my experience, there is generally very little scope for doing something like I suggest here unless you are to take very tentative steps towards gaining the trust of those in the hierarchy above you, followed by moments of bold direct action. You have also got to be mindful of those above you, who might be plodding their way up the promotion ladder, don’t take a dislike to you appearing to be more committed than them.

On top of this, you will have to rally support for your ideas between departments with whom you have never previously had any access, then try and inspire these people to join you in actions that are not directly directed from superior command. Then you need to deal with finding time, in between the fact that there is no time really available for you to be seen to be doing anything other than your day job, or of being totally accountable for your students grades. Should you fail to be able to keep this key modus operandi intact, then you are fucked.

In my case I probably went a bit further than many would or could be willing to go. I basically dropped from a full time position to part time, so that I could commit to the actions that I present to you. As you will see, I am did a lot in a relatively short period of time. I found that although my line manager was initially quite supportive of be doing things around college outside of my timetables lessons, there is a sense that these free periods should be used for meetings, marking and planning lessons. Initially I dropped down to 3 quarters of a timetable and then down to 0.6. This means that if it was not for the full support of my wife, I could not have afforded to scope this out for you.

By the time I was in full swing I would go into work for free one day a week and spend other hours here and there meeting up with the people, companies and organisations that I detail during this section of this book. Along with a couple of very committed colleagues, we enjoyed an interesting journey all around the local area, sharing our vision of positivity and hope. I will get down to all that business, wish me luck as this was rather complicated by the fractal dimension which I unlocked from the confines of linearity power structure as I set off to realise the pent up frustration of creative chaos and by becoming a strange attractor and a seed of dimensional perception change. The extent to which you can use any of these ideas therefore rests purely with you and how much you believe that you will be a positive agent for change.

guided by an inner light

Much of how this project came into being was so self-revealing and serendipitous that is difficult to piece back together here, or rhizomatic. This work was never meant to be anything more than an authentic expression of light into the dark gloomy thoughts, instincts and perceptions expressed elsewhere.

Pissed off with all of the above, I found myself at the back of a homeless hostel in the city of Lincoln, sitting around a big table with a group of people all clutching note paper and textbooks. I had no idea who anyone was and their relationship to academia, all I knew was that I was about to take part in a higher education experience, one where we were about to speak out against the current system.

Unlike at work, from which I had driven the 60 or so miles from on this deepest and darkest midwinter night in the pouring rain. Work is not the sort of place you can bring to the front, questions about the systemic replication of inequality rooted in the socio-economic disadvantages that Hull has endured for the past several decades. Here at the back of a hostel, beyond the TV room, where early evening popular culture did its best to dull the nation’s senses, including those without a home. Hidden behind the dropouts, drug addicted and the dossers, I eagerly waited to play my part in the upcoming insurrection against the mindless death grip of neoliberal capitalism.

The Social Science Centre was the name of this organisation, or the SSC for short. It’s been a few years since I attended the weekly or so sessions, so my memory is broad brush stroke of gathering. My pallet is filled with the energy of new ideas and a sense of possibility and future promise where each time we met was in a slightly different and novel location. It turned out that the SSC was a politically motivated critique of the neoliberal takeover of higher education, by a selection of Academic, fed up with the suffocating effects of neoliberal capitalism that was killing intellectual autonomy and extinguishing the flames of educational self-discovery.

I had no idea who anyone was around the table, but really liked the idea that we could all join in the discussion without fear of prejudice and without feeling that our opinions were of greater or lesser significance to anyone. It felt kind of exciting, the idea that we were plotting a new way forward and I felt like I was liberating myself from the status quo and opening my mind to ways of being that were not tied down to the daily slog as dictated to by mark schemes and management scrutiny. As the meetings progressed and the weeks passed we moved between several venues including different types community centre and a room in a small public house. Each time we met we discussed a reading set the previous week that were generally focused on the establishment of cooperatives and progressive political action.

As time went by, I became increasingly and instinctively interested in trying to find a shape that would enable me to build a better understanding of how I might be able to take hold of some of the ideas raised each week and apply them to the work that I was keen to get fully off the ground in East Hull. The idea of a shape became an apparent to me as a way of explaining how the ideas I was having to do with pushing upwards towards the rigid management structure of further education from a student perspective that might be able to energise them and inspire a self sustaining drive towards collective self betterment. As the contradictions between my various wants and desires for both individual autonomy and collectivism I became increasingly frustrated until I was introduced to the concept of permaculture by a regular member of the group who was keen to establish just a growing project with her community.

As the idea of permaculture and gardening more generally was discussed it became increasingly apparent that the idea of a sustainable garden and more widely, food production system had wider applications than just producing grub. In fact, you don’t have to travel far from this concept to the types of people and growing projects that surround this idea and the multidimensional reasons why sustainability is core to the continued existence of our species in the context of catastrophic environmental destruction and to our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

I started to search the Internet for ideas about how such projects work and the types of structures they encouraged to develop between people. It turned out that growing groups had began to emerge right across the country and around the world in places where communities were growing divided by fear of crime and poverty. One such place where an social project had united the community was in downtown Detroit USA, where I stumbled across a video on YouTube which explored how derelict land in between the decaying abandoned factories of boom times lay bust with cracking structures both of the built environment and of community cohesion. In these spaces, pockets of land were being cultivated by concerned citizens who saw the planting of food and flowers in between the decay and drug addiction might trigger the blossoming of hope. And sure enough it did, when people of all ages joined in, including the teenagers who it had been suspected might have dismissively done it in. Quite the contrary, such a project had began to develop bonds between the different generations of people who in better times might never have met in their patterns of consumption driven apart by marketing gurus and atomistic individualism. Now in this moment of post industrial decay the seeds of a better way grow in the fracturing concrete where the simple and natural act of growing seeds together, unite the community to live another day. Given a little more thought and attention just imagine what futuristic prototype this type of project has to play.

Closer to home, I could see that growing projects where emerging all around, such as incredible edible in Yorkshire Town of Todmorden where growing food is a well established act of political direct action around the streets and in plots and corners of land throughout the urban landscape.

Even closer to home I discovered that in Hull an organisation called Rooted in Hull was seeking to produce an urban container farm in the city centre, one which could be be used to refocus attention on the ability of the most disadvantaged that they could grow food and live healthy. I got in touch with one of the projects cofounders and passionate advocate for reintroducing the idea of food growth and production into Hull city centre. At this point in time Hull City of culture was on the horizon he was energised by the possibility of funding which could make the containerized farm more than just a concept.

Later I would email rooted in Hull to see if they would come to visit me in college to discuss what he was doing and to share his knowledge and connections with other food growth and gardening projects throughout the city.

But before I get ahead of myself I must explain that during the early stages of what became the Seeds of Change Project, I had no initial interest in the growing of plants for food, nor any interest or intention to make pizzas and smoothies. I had no idea that I would be drawn towards the sociology of youth subculture or delving into the darkness of Mark Fisher’s astute and damming critique of the way things are under neoliberal capitalism. I did not imagine that I would find myself being shown around the various hidden gardens and growing projects around Hull. I had no idea that my journey would take me to the place where LED growing technology was developed or find myself on stage at the legendary New Adelphy promoting sustainability at an end of the world gig. I also did not imagine that I would be showcasing LED growing in a homemade growing unit at the Hull Freedom Festival enthusiastically singing the virtues of out of season low energy salad, tomato and chili plants. I would have laughed if you had told me that I would be in the local paper, interviewed on the local radio, being asked to speak at a regional teachers event about teaching methods and best practice. And I most certainly would have fallen over in fits of laughter if you had told me that I would be awarded a national sixth form college trophy or cited in the first paragraph in the opening gambit of an official Ofsted report as best practice. Not to mention the idea that I would inspire the raising of £30 000 plus of grant money for the construction of a purpose built student action hub and fully operational commercial growing poly tunnel capable generating several grands worth of high quality salad leaves per month. But then, this would not be Britain today, if all this potential was overlooked, until I write these words large now. All of my accomplishments and actions were rooted in my deep dissatisfaction with the way that things are. The lost opportunity of further education to fully equip the next generation with skills, aptitudes and ambition firmly and demonstrably possible if we take control of the machine and do what is needed now. My amusement at all of the above, based on the fact that everything I achieved was founded on my exclamation “Bollocks”, and of my genuine passion to serve the good people of East Hull, the most decent and down to earth people you will ever meet. This is for them and is the articulation of how much I was inspired by all those who spend their lives trying to to get the best out of the most deprived and challenging of times.

From this point onwards I must make one think extremely clear, none of the Seeds of Change Project would have been remotely possible without the support of a fine group of people who included those both inside and outside of college. Within college Jill Naylor was by far the most important partner in crime with her can do attitude and amazing organisational skills. A partnership that was made possible by the then senior management team, by means of an experiment in encouraging staff members to meet up and discuss college development opportunities. At the time Principal David Cooper had responded to a recent inspection with the idea of getting our input on how we might respond. I elected to join the equality and diversity group to work towards promoting such concepts. Jill Naylor was the Learning Support Manager for the college and was tasked leading this group which met during directed staff development time. Up for discussion in the first meeting was part of the ofsed report that stated that we did not do enough to promote equality and diversity. Being that in East Hull, Wilberforce College is one of the least ethnically diverse colleges in England, so I found this criticism fairly lame, but in the true spirit of a critical thinking I pointed out that equality and diversity were quite different concepts and that even if promotion diversity was problematic structurally, perhaps our best aim was to challenge inequality. Not to say that there aren’t other forms of diversity that we might and should promote surrounding sexuality and gender fluidity, but that from a grounded point of view economic wealth is the most deep rooted foundation upon which all expressions of cultural identity are founded. In fact without money all aspects of who we are or might become are held back by malnutrition and a multitude of negative impacts on our physicality, mental health, intellectual development and emotional growth. So it is with the explanation “BOLLOCKS!” that I expressed my disappointment with Ofsteds lack of insight and unhelpful criticism of our work in one of the Uks poorest neighborhoods. “Let’s do something real like challenging the socio economic inequality that impacts upon our students”, I grumpily rejected the idea that we might spend our time highlighting days of each calendar month merely highlighting awareness a multitude of just causes with the mere tokenism of a poster or a mention in class. Nothing wrong with national dyslexia day, or asperges awareness week, but what we are dealing with in East Hull is gross health inequalities that are having a negative impact on people’s lives whether they are experiencing gender dysphoria or not. If we were to respond to the suggestion that we might deal more effectively with the concepts of equality and diversity, then we must treat each one separately and in particular view the ideas as very different to one another and with growing gross inequality being the most important even to the extent that any attempt to promote diversity will for ever be held back by the social division that inequality creates, as become explicitly illuminated through Brexit and right wing haters blaming European economic migrants for failures in neoliberal trickle down economics.

City of Culture

It was serendipitous that Hull had just been awarded the City of Culture award at around about the time that I’d had enough of the daily grind. Awareness of the potential of the event was limited in East Hull and nothing was really made of it at college. I’m not sure why it didn’t feature in the college calendar, except for the usual lingering cloud of the potentiality that an ofsted visit might be immanent. The culture of control and fear surrounding education under the occupation of neoliberal capitalism does very little to inspire any form of vision outside of spreadsheets and grade boundaries. It’s not really seen as our business to do anything but prepare our students for examination and the world of work. I instinctively realised that an event could be useful in highlighting cultural inequalities rooted in the subcultural differences between different groups of people occupying do strata of the society. More specifically, as a teacher of sociology I was aware of the ways that ways of life are manifestations of varying degrees of social, economic and cultural capital, all of which are discussed elsewhere and pose significant discussion points as to the links between food and cognitive development, and educational outcomes, amongst other pertinent contemporary concerns. I has a sense that if I could tap into the city of culture concept with the idea inspiring a food revolution in East Hull, where we might be able to energise the youth to rebel against patterns of inequality that had been self replicating for generations. It was with this in mind that I put together an application to the city of culture funding panel…put the form here…

I b

Rooted in Hull is an innovative urban farm in a box concept, imagined into being by two friends who wanted to bring fresh locally grown food produce to the minds and tables of people struggling to put delicious nutritious food on their tables. I came across Adrian Fisher, the company director on the Internet as I searched around for inspiration on the Internet. At this time in my investigation had just launched a website to generate interest and support for his plans to challenge systemic food inequality in the city and share his passion to educate and challenge food poverty with positive action. Following an outreaching email Adrian Fisher came to visit me and Jill and college.

Open the project outwards as much as possible to create oxygen and mome. Also to make it difficult to shut projet down.

Whist searching the Internet for ideas I came across an National Union of Students campaign called Student Eats. This is a national campaign to promote the growing of food crops around university campuses, promoting sustainability and local community based food production. I quickly discovered that there was going to be a Student Eats conference at the University of Lancaster and was given the opportunity to take the day out from teaching about the impacts of inequality to go out and find how we might challenge it. At this time, back in 2015

The idea of permaculture is often illustrated with diagrams that link cycles as flow.

Panarchy interesting ideas building sustainability and resilience in communities based on looking at natural cycles of growth, die back and regrowth in different scales and on different self perpetual levels. The idea of Panarchy as political caught my attention for a while but then I got drawn towards the wider implications of cycles and patterns and the cyclical nature of permaculture.

I then got into th

Coop common land in Lincoln

Shape of roman cauliflower is self repeated patterns

Religious imigary of india and meditation is self replicating

Self replicating patterns in nature are fractal

Fractal is nature’s energy

Fractal energy is explain in chaos theory

Butterfly effect small change in one place can make big changes elsewhere

Seeds of Change is a fractal seed

Health is at heart of inequality and is seed of project when real issue is freedom

Freedom is creative opportunity for new order to come from chaos

Chaos is manifest through youth subcultures

Ccccs.

College project to inspire deviance as resistance to inequality

Pizza is gateway

Take over Union to inspire revolutionary Ideas

Young people seize means of production through food preparation

Food production and growing is money is real rooted in community

According to a recent National Education Union poll, about half of all teachers want to quit teaching within the next 5 years, giving the number one reason for intending to quit was the unmanageable workload, created by Ofsted preparedness. Speaking at the launch of the NEU’s campaign to abolish Ofsted in 2022, Daniel Kebede, the union’s president said that “for too long, this unfair and unreliable inspectorate has driven up unnecessary workload and stress for education professionals, significantly contributing to the alarming numbers leaving the profession every year… It’s not right that teachers and school leaders live in dread of the current toxic inspectorate.” Perhaps such a fast turnover of teaching staff would be a price worth paying if the link between such pressure and improved learner outcome could be demonstrated.

The Seeds of Change Project is/was my antidote.

Research commissioned by the National Union of Teachers in 2015, found that schools are responsible for only a small proportion of the variance in attainment between pupils and that their lives outside school are the main influence. In its conclusions it argues that it’s unreasonable to expect schools alone to close the qualifications gap. It found that the increasing burden and pressure placed by Ofsted measured outcomes on schools and further education colleges to improve qualifications, has a negative impact on both pupils and teachers.

It also found that universities and employers have become increasingly critical of the way that young people are not prepared for life, because children and young people are increasingly seeing the main purpose of education is to gain qualifications. If unpreparedness for life was not a damning enough criticism of the education system, the report also found that more and more children and young people are suffering from high levels of school related anxiety, stress, disaffection, and mental health problems. This is attributed to increased pressure from tests and exams which creates a culture in which there is an ‘awareness at younger ages of their own ‘failure’.

As a teacher in post 16 education for the past 24 years I too had just about had enough working under the shadow of the next looming Ofsted visit being held personally accountable for the exam results of every single learner in the room. Made to feel like each study into the impacts of poverty, on educational aspirations and attainment are an excuse for not meeting the business model metrics of value added. This situation is endemic within every educational institution.

Intentionally decoupled from the structural inequalities and their impacts on learner aspiration and educational attainment, teachers are left exposed to take account of growing economic inequalities rooted in the failure of neoliberal education policy and the toxic cultural conditions of capitalist realism. If discussion on these wider social and economic factors were permitted in local contexts, schools, and colleges would be free to make a real difference.

Together we might come together as agents of progressive social change that combine forces in shaping an education that is specifically targeted at overcoming the multiple indices of crisis that are getting incrementally worse in the now. Alas, in this current and prolonged moment of neoliberal education capture, and the shapeshifting morally dubious dominance of ruling class political and cultural hegemony, the dominant narrative of individual consumerist lifestyle choices and personal accountability is used to downplay any sociological critique of the contemporary education system and shut down teachers who realise its tremendous significance.

Instead, teachers and their structurally replicating hierarchical superiors are compelled to view the attainment of each student in a statistical vacuum outside of reality and in the digital display of the database. Even though you might make a pastoral note of concern about a student’s personal situation in the surveillance system of educational administration, you are still held personally account for attainment, your wage frozen if exam grades are lower than predicted by a computer-generated value-added algorithm.
Nothing outside of your immediate interaction between you and each youth is considered to have any bearing on how much they are inspired or take ownership of wanting to learn. The grim economic reality or limited emotional and cultural resources back at home are considered irrelevant when your data sets are inspected by those above you in the chain of command, who out of pay graded necessity assume the mindset of Ofsted inspectors and identify the teacher as at fault. In the business logic of empirical data and performance related teachers’ pay, growing up skint in a northern city of England has no impact on the collective imagination of what is possible through education.

If the metrics of value added, retention and achievement dip for even one year, every good or outstanding lesson observation, learning walk or database mark book grade upload is downgraded considering your latest metrics. Now you feel the full force of suspicion, that you are not as good as the other forms of surveillance data suggested. This is the very heart of what the philosopher Mark Fisher identified as ‘capitalist realism’. There is nothing you or your senior manager can do except conform to the internal logic of the system.

Over the 24 years that I have been teaching the metrics by which both teachers and students are measured has grown insurmountably, as pay and conditions have been eroded by restructuring and forms of self-service online performance management. Being educators in these most difficult times, we are increasingly used as agents of state proscribed utility, doing as we are told, making sure that opportunities are rationed to those with the best memories and do as your told conformity. This situation is now culminating in a national campaign of strike action.

Charged with the prescription of top-down hierarchies of knowledge our agency to interact meaningfully with the lived world has been side-lined by political skulduggery and the flattening of social possibility. In these terminal stages of neoliberal capitalism, a cancer grows from the top down, where a mix of greed, apathy and structurally replicated social ignorance, ferment a toxic brew of nationalism, xenophobia, blame and hate.

By design, the collective consciousness of all or our potentiality to overcome the multiple of crisis identified below, has been held back in development by a narrow spectrum of opinion that has come to dominate since long before the age of the industrial revolution. Instead of inspiring localised autonomy where a reimagined inclusive community could seek collective solutions to what have become endemic problems of the current political system, individual failures are blamed. The power structures that are now tearing apart the very fabric of British life are rooted in an economic system that is spiraling out of control, even though not many of us would like to admit it, if we don’t act fast our ways of life are soon to be over.

Top-down forms of politically authorised ideas command a focal position in the social construction of reality and in the way young people come to perceive science, economy and society are metered out as extractions. Facts, figures, knowledge and information are considered the most important feature of the next generation, built on scientific enquiry and a taken for granted sense that the world is getting better. Although memory recall and subject specific knowledge can be a good way of indicating how some minds might be better than others in the world of work, we all know that this misses the real point of education. As teachers, we meet so many young people who have so many different gifts, some of which through formal examination do fail. Although I will never degrade the accomplishments of those who succeed, it must be noted that this two-dimensional system tends to deflate the possible new worlds that might be achieved if it new ideas were encouraged to germinate in the minds of young people who instead taught to pass exams.

The oblique reference to local community needs is overlooked in a system that fears any analysis of the system that thrives best from the motivating inspiration of greed. The skill sets that promote the successful of passing exams allows those who excel most by their ability to conform to the mark scheme. In a world of increasing employment instabilities where manual work is replaced by robotics and middle management roles become automated via algorithmic artificial intelligence, this old system of education is done in. If we are to equip the next generation to build a better world than the one that is eroding right be our eyes then we must teach what is important and provide them with the appropriate intellectual, mental, and physical tools.

Through this work I hope to inspire you to reignite your passion for teaching and its transformative potential to shape a more compassionate, thoughtful, and cooperative society. Before you start trawling the Internet for the types of jobs hacked off teachers can do once they quit the profession, use your agency, fulfil your potential, and take control take part in a
and direct assertion of professional control over post 16 education and save these great islands from political void of imagination that is poisoning this land. My many years of teaching experience and conversations with students, teachers, department chiefs, curriculum directors, managers, inspectors, and bosses, have clearly taught me that the problem with education is the way that the system is pressed upon us from the power structure above.
It is now or never, we must seize the day and meaningfully reposition the way we educate young people by empowering them to take direct action.

Chapter 1: Carpe diem

It was with a profound sense of hope, empowerment, and deviant optimism that I found myself digging holes alongside colleagues and students on the turf behind the F-block at Wilberforce Sixth Form College in East Hull one day during the Easter holiday.

Having been donated a couple of thousand pounds by a Hull baking business a few weeks earlier, I decided to use this money to plant a small orchard of supermarket bought fruit trees on college land. Following an informal visit from the person in charge with allocating grants to local community projects, our pitch, to inspire positive lifestyle choices amongst six form college students in one of the most morbid regions of the UK, resulted in our first donation and act of guerrilla gardening. Unbeknown to our benefactor, and college management, my motivation was rooted in a greater ambition than encouraging sixteen-year-olds to eat more fruit and vegetables. In teacher speak, encouraging young people to eat more nutritious food was just one of the objectives that I would use to meet my aim.

The bolder destination was an act of rebellion against free market capitalism, set to empower the youth of east Hull by resocialising the negative health effects of poverty, away from the individualised choices of free-market consumerism, and into the college community as a social phenomenon. As my actions and ideas grew, emboldened by my growing success, a blueprint for an alternative form of post sixteen education emerged that inspires the community engagement of self. Driven by a profound sense of frustration at how its current configuration continues to fulfil a significant role in the systemic replication of social inequality, despite the teaching profession’s best efforts.

Although the physical dimension of the direct action documented here was shut down by the covid-19 pandemic and change of management, my award-winning experiences on the ground were an experiment in the manifestation of hope and belief in the next generation. All the actions described and illustrated below were tried and tested on college grounds and within the confines of the next looming Ofsted inspection, which ironically came during these actions. What came about as a way of protesting the system of bureaucratic control, was written up in the opening paragraphs of their official report in 2018, singing high praise of the Seeds of Change Project and for its transformative potential.

There are currently few, if any, post sixteen college, seeking to empower its students to collectively challenge the ever-worsening conditions of the social, political, and economic world that they share with one another. Instead, young people are compelled to compete against one another via examination in fragmented subject specialisations, detached from locality and community. The ideological dominance of individualism, seeded by top-down structures of management command and control are emblematic of so many problems replicated by the cultural iteration of social class inequality.

Here is a blueprint for post 16 education based around urban horticulture and food production. A college focused on promoting socially democratic decision making and empowering young people with entrepreneurial opportunities to promote positive energy and tasty food. A vision which uses subject specialism, existing curricula, and college infrastructure, to purposefully root student outcomes in alignment with urgent local community needs such as overcoming food poverty and mental illness, with dynamic affirmative action. By ‘re-localising’ college provision we can offer the next generation, a future grown towards inspiring local social and economic transformation.

Now is the time to act and build from inside the system with a new methodology, devised to realise the potential from within, by promoting positive lifestyles in an imaginative student led food subcultural revolution. Whatever your ideological position, all available official quantitative data highlights how patterns of health inequality exist in specific regions and postcode zones. These numbers point to intergenerational ways of being that when combined with growing economic inequality, lead to high levels of morbidity that lead to premature mortality rates.

Nothing outside of your immediate interaction between you and each youth is considered to have any bearing on how much they are inspired or take ownership of wanting to learn. The grim economic reality or limited emotional and cultural resources back at home are considered irrelevant when your data sets are inspected by those above you in the chain of command, who out of pay graded necessity assume the mindset of Ofsted inspectors and identify the teacher as at fault. In the business logic of empirical data and performance related teachers’ pay, growing up skint in a northern city of England has no impact on the collective imagination of what is possible through education.

If the metrics of value added, retention and achievement dip for even one year, every good or outstanding lesson observation, learning walk or database mark book grade upload is downgraded considering your latest metrics. Now you feel the full force of suspicion, that you are not as good as the other forms of surveillance data suggested. In the management meetings that follow you will be expected to accept that whatever you did last year, was just not good enough.

As we shall explore in more detail later, the power structures that are now tearing apart the very fabric of British life are rooted in an economic system that is spiralling out of control, even though not many of us would like to admit it, if we don’t act fast our ways of life are soon to be over.

As a sociology teacher in Hull for the past 17 years, I am optimistic that the critical thinking that my subject promotes, might have opened minds to the potential of their becoming a better world. It is the way that the system is structured that grinds your spirit down, the way that your track record of prior excellence is torn down with suspension at the latest set of results. The way that social backgrounds are erased from conversations following the latest government report compiled by someone with only half a thought.

But it is not this that really gets to me that drove me to these thoughts and actions, it is the immeasurable missed opportunity to make the last of years education really count for individual self-actualization and the transformation of local community. Through teacher led direct action we can prepare the young people we teach for life in a world that now more than ever needs fresh minds filled with hope, not depressed, and filled with anxiety. I hope to inspire you to act through a blueprint of direct action, where you as a teacher, line manager, curriculum leader, vice principal or top boss can focus the direction of your college or educational provision towards engaging the young people with real life skills directly applied to the problems that they and their community now face.

The potential you and your students have to offer has been held back for too long by a political class that is fundamentally out of touch with our lives and the people that we encourage to live their best lives in an economic system that is becoming ever more self-destructive. Once we have faced up to the facts and created a little space by means of capturing attention I will offer up some simple solutions that are tried and tested, ready for your application.

To confront the multitude of problems that we face new can be challenging especially if it involves learning a language built upon concepts and ideas that challenge one’s original preconceptions. To explain the rationale behind my thinking I propose that we loosely follow a sociological way of thinking, whereby humanity is viewed as a social construct, built upon the transmission of ideas via cultures, that exist between groups of people that are rooted in time and space. More specifically I propose that we proceed with

This approach will enable us to see beyond the dominant idea that we exist a unique manifestation of the genetically transmuted individual. Although our atomistic selves are the lenses through which we ultimately experience our connection with reality, all our ideas are based on our absorption, synthesis or reaction to the norms, values, beliefs, and ideas that exist in time and space as the shared social construct we refer to as society, community, and human civilisation. To progress here, we must de-naturalise our experience of reality by taking the leap out of ourselves and into the universe of endless possibility.

Everything to gain

Through this work, these ideas, and our actions I hope to inspire a post 16 education revolution, so that we shall fulfil the potential of ourselves and the next generation. By bringing hope through these powerful tried and tested ideas and actions, we can transform our college communities, their families, friends, ourselves, and country. By using our can-do attitude, professional connections, and esteemed social standing, we have the power to inspire collective socially progressive aspiration.

For too long the money men have torn our collective will to shreds with their blind faith in cash, and just look at what’s its done, growing economic inequality, socio-political breakdown, and the climate emergency. Through inspired agency we will create the spaces and opportunities for young people to find themselves and together work out sustainable solution to the plethora of problems we face now and in their future. Until now we have been trapped by the spreadsheet world of tick boxes and value added, inflicted upon us by market force systems. Extracted from the real social world of interconnected possibility, we have been locked up in the bureaucratic exercises of capitalist realism, a dystopian world of tick box conformity. We must equip the next generation with the skills to survive and thrive, we must step forward and assume out rightful position as educators, empowered citizens, and lovers of life.

For too long the disaster of the British political system has enabled moneymen and a handful of women, to divide, rule and deaerate our collective living conditions. Decades of self-repeated patterns of society inequality and poverty have led millions of our brothers and sisters right towards the brink. It is now or never, we must work collaboratively, as we are the many and their systems are but a few. People powered regional transformation has the potential to seed patterns of positive pathways of direct action, and all we need to do is create space.

At this time of greatest national and international crisis we are compelled to facilitate progressive social change from the grassroots level. Management structures have been captured by state surveillance and are frozen into stagnant compliance with whatever action is thrown down to them by a disastrous system. Teachers live in the perpetual fear of an Ofsted inspection, our collective imagination haunted by the big other.

Office workers feel trapped by an increasingly dehumanising system where the profit-making incentive of late capitalism erodes agency away from human connection to the algorithm. Public sector workers too, are trapped by the constant threat of restructuring and targets set up to trap anyone who dares not to tick every pointless degrading box.

Here I will illustrate what is possible when you take the initiative and demand more. You too can raise tens of thousands of pounds from within your organisation and create the space and gather all materials necessary to plant the seeds of change in the next generation. For too many years the true potential of 16–19-year-old has been denied by British capitalism.

Dismissed as idealistic, naive, politically apathetic, the ruling elites oppress this group because they care not to listen. For these young people the world still awaits to be discovered, their openness of mind challenges all those with powerful positions. Take the time and you will hear their deep despair and understand that they fully understand our desperate situation. Stop sending them to counselling service, what is at fault is the system.

Through this work we will take the power back from the top-down structure of a control culture that has run out of ideas, haunted by the ghosts of its shadowy past we are trapped. We must cast light on this darkness, where critical collective reflection and social progress are demonised for being “woke”. Our very survival is dependent on the direct activation of our collective will. We must assert our rights to redefine our deeply troubled times to reclaim our streets as celebration of ability to transform our world for the better as a kind, tolerant and giving society. It is through our cultivation of pro-social spaces and pro-human connections that we can peacefully assert and nurture humankind, not one on the brink of nuclear war. No more will we be held back by the tick box culture of command and control, where our agency to shine was once curtailed for fear of a “big other” watching over us via the bureaucratic machinery of an outdated system, left you feeling powerless, alone and numb inside. Our power to transform this world is already here, when we face up to things and realise that we have the power to do so much more. As individuals we must not allow ourselves to be convinced any longer, of the false narrative that life is survival of the fittest, atomised individuals, the winner takes it all. The lazy politics of blaming individual weakness can no longer be tolerated for its animalistic exploitation and demonization of the sick, vulnerable and poor.

We are not atomised individuals fighting for survival when we work together believing in me and you. This idea is nothing new but is as radical as ever. Instead of shaping a more equitable world, the ideology of the powerful is frozen in a neo-feudal time warp. Here we will challenge the feedback loops of history that iterate the hierarchical dominance of class-based socialisation, divide and rule. Where the structure of contemporary society restrains our hunger for social progress, by the economic chokehold of capitalism that increasingly serves just a few. These words will ring true in workplaces around the world where physical labour is replaced by machines and thoughts are erased by algorithms. Those who retain employment, face a panopticon of digital surveillance, performance targets, constant restructuring, redundancy threats, and transnational relocation.

Written from a perspective viewed from an archipelago to the north-west of mainland Europe, much of what is presented can be extrapolated to anywhere the politics of neo-liberal capitalism has taken hold, dislocating people from place, space from time, nature from civilisation and humility from the human experience. Here in 21st century Britain in the imagined landscapes of modernist futuristic living, a class-based empire still asserts its idiosyncratic power via corporate management ladders, where deference to the boss mirror cultural norms rooted in slavery and serfdom. Under grandiose Royal Estates and their tourist filled gardens, lie the firmly entrenched foundations of ruling class hegemony and endemic cultural deference to their sperm given power and our obligation to swallow it.

This is our call to action to do something special, beyond the spreadsheets of curriculum reviews, retention and value added there is emancipation. Through this work, these ideas, and our actions I hope we will inspire a post 16 education revolution, so that we might fulfil the potential of ourselves and the next generation. By bringing hope to our college communities, their families and friends, we will be the catalyst for social transformation, and life lived in compassion. Through the power of our can do attitude and the connections we have, we will shape the power of collective aspirations to make the world a better place for ourselves and the next generations. and assert our ambition through shaping a more sustainable future for our selves and the you people we serve. For too long the money men have torn our collective will to shreds with their blind faith in cash, and just look at what’s its done.

Through inspired agency we will create the spaces and opportunities for young people to find themselves and together work out sustainable solution to the plethora of problems we face now and in their future. Until now we have been trapped by the spreadsheet world of tick boxes and value added, inflicted upon us by market force systems. Extracted from the real social world of interconnected possibility, we have been locked up in the bureaucratic spreadsheet cells of capitalist realism, tick the box, work, eat, sleep, repeat, bollocks! We must equip the next generation with the skills to survive and thrive, we must step forward and assume out rightful position as educators, empowered citizens and lovers of life.

Although evidence for why we should take action can be easily found in data surrounding covid-19, pre pandemic information is more robust as it cannot be implicated with virus effects. Later on I shall draw upon the implications of the pandemic on the future generation by examining what it felt and link this to the power of generations to shapes social change.

For too long a specific type of education has dislocated young people from place, leaving them in what can sometimes seem like a perpetual identity crisis. Kicked about by the increasingly out of touch political and media class, young people are demonised by the lazy concept of woke, classic divide, conquer by dismissing the youth. Trapped in a world haunted by the ghosts of an imagined past, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill are summoned up by a media and political class who are structurally removed from the millions of us who suffer the dark energy of capitalist realism with its suffocating death grip on human agency. Conjured up by a feudal mind-set, those with the greatest will to power, seem to lack the vision required to see how we might move forward from here.

Extracted by the Enclosures Act of our not-so-distant past, our majority urbanised population are the great grandchildren of an uprooted way of life provided organic sustenance for hundreds if not thousands of years. Nowadays, countryside constituencies have no connection with the majority millions who live in cities, either escaped to by a long wealth permitted commute or lived in by rural pockets of seasonal farm working activity, multicultural city life rural traditions are a billion miles apart.

Cut off from each other there is a growing famine that affects urban and rural people differently, both communities suffer from a lack of ideas that they could share. Where the city folk are fed junk foods by the multinational corporation the rural economy is locked out from promoting healthier options by supermarket monopolies who refuse to pay a fair price for produce that allow a decent way of life for the producer.

In the countryside rural communities whose votes count the most, ruling class hegemony is reinforced at the ballet box as rural votes are weighted to give the people who live outside of the cities a larger say in the vote. are misinformed by the junk food media. The pathway to a more healthy, equitable and more sustainable future lies in the reunification of these two communities torn together by a blind faith in neoliberal capitalism and its economic destruction of time and place. First past the post politics further reinforces a damaging division between the two parts of the country that, if allowed to be reunited could begin to heal.

Seeking a sense of what it means to grow up in 21^st century Britain the contemporary education system is ill-equipped to deal with the multiple crisis of now. Distracted by a deliberate attacks on socially progressive ideas and growing human compassion, key sections of the political and media elites divide and conquer. The amplification of certain important but minority. For progressive social change to happen we must locate all of the inequalities indicated in the pages that follow in the communities that they inflict and repurpose local college provision towards the collective hope of student led action, here and now.

This work is an illustration of how these issues are found within the East of city of Hull, or everywhere else that systemic inequality is deep rooted and intergenerational. This solution is based on nothing more radical than re—socialising inequalities in the communities that we serve and redirecting the provision of further education towards the overcoming of these inequalities via a form of cross curriculum direct action, led by each one of us.

Through inspiring a collective social consciousness we can direct our learning objectives to feature true local needs and develop course content that can create a shared that opens up in the minds of the young people who we serve roots an awareness of growing inequality rooted in the communities we serve. draws upon the subcultural resistance of an earlier age, when the power of a growing social consciousness demanded that after the Second World War, things could be better for us.

The radical action that lies at the heart of this work is only as deviant as sharing the local statistics and then facilitating their ability to challenge the power structure that seeks to overwhelm and dominate us. Although as a teacher I try to remain reserved and open to persuasive discussion, writing this opening section of yet another Conservative leader competition I believe that this nation’s only change of a brighter future rests with us.

It was with great excitement we took delivery of a purpose built student container designed to be a hub of student led local transformation. Centred around the idea of creating a student controlled space, within campus grounds, but separate from the architectural structure of the college premises, we began to develop a student union that could begin to rebel against food poverty and poor nutritional value snacks, with the means to produce and promote natural ingredients, make money and spread the message around their peers. And it was a real sense of the possibility of college wide transformation as I imagined how our commercial grade poly-tunnel would empower our students to make money selling the finest ingredients to fancy pubs and restaurants in Hull City, York, Leeds & London.

Devised and supplied with cash generating seed combinations , planting schemes and a fully automated watering system, we have shown that premium salad leaves can be grown on college grounds. A growing facility capable of raising several thousand pounds a month in profits is possible, should you be brave enough to imagine this is possible, all of this in one the country’s poorest neighbourhoods. Naturally this development was not part of my job description and I lay awake on many a night hoping that I would get away with asserting my vision. Although the then college Principle could have shut me down at any point I kept pushing ahead growing more and more outward connection so as to illuminate the power of such direct action within the confines of a closely monitored government controlled education system. This is part of the thrill and the attraction of fractal action as you keep on linking ideas with people and places via your imagination.

The pop up pizza company fully equipped Gozney Roccbox portable pizza oven, professional grade gazebo and all the required equipment to set up ans run a fully mobile and commercially viable student run pizza company, and business grade smoothie making equipment too. The pizzas and smoothie company, funded by an National Union of Students grant, offered up a way to start a conversion between students the importance of good grub. It also offered them a way to make money and work even harder at their business development.

And all of these actions stemmed from the day that I called out “bollocks” in a development group meeting, at the latest OFSTD report to do nothing about the systemic inequalities of region. . Stripping apart the concepts of equality and diversity I expressed my frustration at the lack of political action geared towards transforming the lives of these most economically deprived people. The irony of how my critique of box ticking target based managerialism became the key feature in headlining paragraph of praise in the proceeding Ofsted report.

It was me calling bollocks on self replicating inequalities that led to me being featured in the local newspaper twice and interviewed on local radio, being asked about my passion for promoting regional transformation via the encouragement of a more sustainable living culture amongst the young people of East Hull. Raising a few tens of thousand pounds to sustain these plans autonomously growing within the college grounds, from the national lottery, Jacksons the Baker, KCOM, the National Union of Students, and NHS, to no name but a few sources of revenue that I no prior experience in attracting. was developed or find myself on stage at the legendary New Adelphy promoting sustainability at an end of the world gig. I also did not imagine that I would be showcasing LED growing in a homemade growing unit at the Hull Freedom Festival enthusiastically singing the virtues of out of season low energy salad, tomato and chili plants.

I would have laughed if you had told me that I would be in the local paper, interviewed on the local radio, being asked to speak at a regional teachers event about teaching methods and best practice. And I most certainly would have fallen over in fits of laughter if you had told me that I would be awarded a national sixth form college trophy or cited in the first paragraph in the opening gambit of an official Ofsted report as best practice. Not to mention the idea that I would inspire the raising of £30 000 plus of grant money for the construction of a purpose built student action hub and fully operational commercial growing poly tunnel capable generating several grands worth of high quality salad leaves per month. But then, this would not be Britain today, if all this potential was overlooked, until I write these words large now.

All of my accomplishments and actions were rooted in my deep dissatisfaction with the way that things are. The lost opportunity of further education to fully equip the next generation with skills, aptitudes and ambition firmly and demonstrably possible if we take control of the machine and do what is needed now. My amusement at all of the above, based on the fact that everything I achieved was founded on my exclamation “Bollocks”, and of my genuine passion to serve the good people of East Hull, the most decent and down to earth people you will ever meet. This is for them and is the articulation of how much I was inspired by all those who spend their lives trying to to get the best out of the most deprived and challenging of times.

The Seeds of Change project originated back in 2014, as I became increasingly frustrated with the contradictions of being a sixth form teacher in 21^st century Britain. Frustrated by the growing intellectual (and political) void between mounting empirical evidence on a plethora of negative impacts that poverty and social class have on educational attainment and the way the education system systematically ignores these. As sixth form teachers we are held accountable for every exam result, despite the well documented evidence that growing inequalities are having a negative impact upon educational attitudes, aptitudes, aspirations and outcomes

In our materialistic consumer society, the dominant ethos encourages us to express ourselves as complete individuals, rather than as searchers for shared social meaning. Even though every newly enrolled learner is accompanied by individualised background notes, teachers are encouraged to treat them as standardised units, ready to have knowledge deposited in them from a scheme of work. We are not encouraged to see patterns of poverty, inequality and failing mental health, that are manifestations of a political system in crisis.

It is in this situation that I position myself to explore how working class culture might be encouraged in a community of young people, to engage in collective action towards overcoming health inequality by making money and promoting health. Teaching young people in one of England’s poorest cities, where the brunt of austerity and welfare ‘reforms’ has increased poverty, provides fertile grounds for seeds of radical change to grow

Over the past couple of years, I have been working along two lines of action, one in the physical and one in the academic. I have been working to keep the physical space ‘open’ for the Seeds of Change Project at college by growing it through various actions and developments. I have also been developing a deeper theoretical understanding of the issues I seek to uncover, especially in relation to the work of Mark Fisher. One difficulty I have faced on a personal level through this process of turning the Seeds of Change Project into the subject into an academic piece of work was letting go of previous achievements and milestones along its development. That said I feel that it is important to refer back to some key moments, as this project is rooted in real action.

A central dimension of my work here is to re energise a sociological understanding of the world by developing the fractal dimension to both our understanding of society gleamed from the artwork of prescientific ways of understanding life, scientific exploration into the nature of physical reality and the dominance of quantitative ways of knowing versus qualitative ways of understanding the world. My premise is rooted in the idea that all ways of human life are built upon social construct of and expression of thoughts, ideas and values as norms of behaviour and ways of life. These thought matrixes are transmitted between generations via culture that in its various guises are the code which sets in motion the script for our ways of life.

In previous iterations of these matrixes at the time when the modern nation states were violently transcribing the idea of the nation state onto maps and into minds the concept of we emerged as members of nation states. This violence as metered out by the ruling feudal classes unites us against them in a world they imagined as being defined by fear, greed and arrogance. Although this shortcut to my world view might be too hasty for most, what lies beyond this simple assertion is that now our sense of us, as an expression of social unity is under threat, as is our way of life which is under threat from a looming climate crisis. In the contemporary world the ability of one social group to dominate the writing of cultural code is no longer possible and this threatens to expose the inequalities which have since the earliest days of citizens and subjects divided us. The code of master and servant was transcribed into our proto democracy which is has up until now been left unreformed by our learnt arrogance, that asserts that its age old traditions founded in feudalism, serve us well, where in fact it is under current political iterations, simply not fit for purpose.

I like the idea of the dynamic unfolding fractal dimension and shape of physical reality found everywhere in nature, being used as a moving totem of our self perpetuating power and movement. As the ideas that this work inspires you to do, by getting involved with various modes of action, you too can contemplate yourself as the seed of change at the heart of an unfolding chain of interconnected acts. See this shape as the power of evolving consciousness that will enable you to imagine the interconnected ways that your thoughts and actions transform those around with ideas that spiral out from all around you as you become the strange attractor for a shift of actions in time and space.

We must find the will to push back against the rusty notion of industrial upgrading, the new buzzword recycled from the past, and allow our young people the time and space to grow. So full of knowledge and understanding accelerated by the information technology revolution, these young people we teach are eager to be given the opportunity to take their part in shaping their future. Outside of the daily “news” and “views” that push division and distain upon the fragile yet volatilite collective ego of industrially cultivated group think, the youth are without cliché, hope. So much more developed, than the minds of those who have willed themselves into power, the young of today have insight, empathy and overview. These next generations have the toughest times ahead, it is for them that we must seize control.

Bit below needs lots of work to explain social science centre in Lincoln.

12) struck me how the contradictions and patterns of my thoughts were shaped like a Romanesco broccoli in that they flowed around in spirals around the nucleus of ideas and subjects that were inspired or related to each other in self-replicating patterns that could exist simultaneously both in harmony with each other and in contradiction- felt like this way of thinking could brake me free from the limitations of left wing / right wing binary. Started to see this pattern in the world around me- looking online I developed a portfolio of ways in which the fractal shape manifest itself in religious architecture and patterns of meditation- found that such patterns are called fractals and that they can be seen as the building blocks of nature- reminded me of the film pi, where a mathematician realises the number if God (pi) which he starts to see reflected as the fractal patterns in the clouds and in his coffee before he drilled his brain out.

As I looked further into fractals I found George Mandelbrot and his calculations that in order to measure anything you needed to take into account the fractal dimension where things become infinitely small or large depending upon whether you looked outwards and inwards. Hunch that this method of mathematical measurement must be a valuable contribution to the social sciences as it points towards a resolution between positivism and interactionism it suggests that truth is infinitely measurable , in that the more you focus inwards on any fixed point the more varied and complex the iteration that lie at the heart of that thing or thought. If you look down at coastline using the fractal dimension- i.e. following every contour, right down into the microscopic level you will keep on being able to measure a longer and linger distance- to infinity. The same is equally true with human thoughts or motivations, the deeper you can penertrate the thought or the possible origibs of a thought or a belief the more fragmented or further apart the origins of that idea are until you ultimately reach an origin rooted in magic or the fuzzy logic of the gaseous vibrations that hum behind every single thing, or the idea that there is a moral force emergent from everything. Perhaps the Euclidean shapes through which we have based our understanding of reality from the structures of building, bridges, roads and hierarchies of power and chains of command have left us blind to the flowing life energy of everything. Locked away in the cubes, squares, rectangles, pyramids and sharp edges of our everyday we are cut off from the flowing fractal dimensions of the infinite the magical and the spiritual.

It is this point that I began to realise was the most important part of what I want to say and that is most interesting and liberating. However in the systems of power and control that we live the finite nature of our knowable existence have through cultural iterations passed down to us via our enculturation demarked left and right wing ideologies as defining lines in between an over simplified binary between left and right wing ideologies that have emerged as a manifestation on the structures of this rather blocky vision of reality.

To deny the fractal dimension to politics is like only existing in the pixelated world of 16 bit computer game instead of the richer landscape and clarity offered by the latest computer processing power . Our political system and is like playing the wall game on the zx spectrum home computer as loaded by cassette tape recorder, where socially progressive ideas are fired up at the blocks of rigid and pre existing power structures of wealth, only to rebuilt at a higher and more complex level where the rate at which walls are built is speeded up and the chances of winning are made all the more challenging .

-fractal brain theory

-choas theory- for social change- climate change = chaos

13) looked into social movements around world- ‘how to start a movement’

14) chaos theory= fractal = energy flows and strange attractors- seeds = “seeds of change” as a strange attractor – get students involved with action that re-socialises them into community. Direct action as strange attractor- use deviance as catelist for progressive social change

15) neoliberalism/ capitalism as a force to control the fractal world of humanity/ human spirit= human spirit is fractal- people feel mentally well when in nature/ woodland/ mountains/ stream and seas = all fractal- capitalism tries to contain human spirit in 2 dimensional boxes of hierarchical control- much education flattens out individuality and the chaos of human potential to follow linear paths of social control. Life is pushed into narrow beam of stages as encultured through the socialisation process- age expectations are aligned with role allocations within the economy and rights and responsibilities are distributed according to how well conformity and deference to authority is maintained.

16) seeds of change project seeks to seed the possibility of social change within one of the most economincally deprived group of young people in the UK by drawing upon the sociology of youth.

17) Susatainable cities event – met jacksons bread- £1000 – bought fruit trees in first act of direct action. Direct action is needed to take control of the situation- built upon this idea lots as is fundamental to creating progressive social change from within middle/ lower/ teaching positions- Reached out to local businesses.

17) youth in post www 2 period demanded social change as they wanted to create a more colourful and vibrant world beyond the grey conformity of hierarchical society that existed during the war. Youth culture grew from inside capitalism and both threated its existence- counter culture- and fed capitalisms advance (new consumer markets of youth) this contradiction is fractal reality. In many ways the generation baby boomer helped to shape an individualised version of capitalism that came froward causing both problems and freedoms- fractal.

18) Wanted to highlight the significance of shared experience of social reality and to counter the dominant narrative of ruling class hegemony we are just atomised individuals and to try and demonstrate the potential of six form education as an opportunity to focus college wide/ community wide attention on deep rooted inequalities that are iterations of the fractality of social class inequality. Intention was to re-socialise health inequalities as a way of harnessing the power of community engagement in tackellling deep rooted and systemic negative attitudes towards health, where low expectations and standards of food quality are normalised and internalised ways of owning poverty as a shared ‘choice’ that. Smoking is seen as an exression of liberaty and higher quality foods are shunned for being too posh or exotic for the likes of us.

19) use deviance/ gurilla guaredning and graphiti culture to encourage the development of an edible campus, where upsyceling and student art can be used to grow foods around the college- making the place greener and placing young people in nature- to see food grow not just pick it off the shelves in supermarket.

20) Neolibearalism and postmodern lifestyle choices/ www and youtube, shifts in youthculture have dislocated youth from the earth/ locality / community. Now live in online augmented reality between memes and videos of social influences from around the world. Manisfested as youth mental health issues etc. Containers are where reality is shipped to the UK from china (photo stuff from cricklade)- put in bid.

21) City of culture- energy of transformation – used this to compel me and apply for funding- city of culture = drive for change in the city – used energy to spread the ideas

22) Jamie Oliver

23) not in order- at social science centre introduced to the idea of perma culture and growing projects – how people connect in growing projects for relationships beyond

21) reached out to other growing projects like rooted in hull, edible cities etc, food and fish company , York university, York led science park, rainbow gardens, hull cc, local primary schools, bayswater etc

18) got in touch with hull cc health survey- figured the best way to

20) the future is becoming less fun and more dictated by sytems of social control , new cctv system , more systematic online monitoring of students

In sport there are two forms of pain, physical and mental. Physical discomfort needs little explanation, especially if one is starting off from a low level of initial fitness. After time and practise this initial discomfort dissipates when a higher level of fitness is achieved. In time there is a new pain to endure when you first run a on a treadmill and where everything jars. These aches are conquered, and you find yourself outside running around the block swearing and sweating. A few months later you run your first 5km Park Run and collapse on the floor at the end, lungs tearing up inside you. Then you enter a 10km race, a half-marathon, and a marathon. Each progression needs more effort and vary degrees of pain, followed by a tremendous sense of achievement, each time you work through the pain to a better iteration of yourself.

The other type of pain that might not be so obvious to the non-sport-doer, is that of mental anguish and lack of imagination. The first hurdle to overcome is fear of failure and a nagging sense of self-doubt, where should one take up a new form of physical activity after leading a sedentary life or one sat watching rather than doing, it seems impossible to imagine yourself living in a different world. The biggest challenge to overcome, is that of the necessity to see one’s current state of existence for what it is and face up to the facts. It is only by shifting one’s perspective can things improve from what you know deep down are not the best for you. To progress in life as in sport, you need to take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror. Then, once we have made put into focus the reality of now, we need to imagine a better world where we take ownership and are the solution.