Tinderbox and X11 International Collaboration

In October 2020 we were lucky enough to be accepted onto a European Union funded programme called Learning Labs run by an organisation called Creative FLIP (Finance, Learning, Innovation and Patenting). They brought together a really inspiring group of around 15 creative hubs from all across Europe who were partnering up with educational institutions in innovative ways. The hubs were able to meet every Friday to share our work with each other which was great for developing our practice, but also very interesting to hear about peoples’ first hand experience of how the pandemic is affecting things across the whole continent.

In one of our breakout sessions we were with a group called X11 from Utrecht, Netherlands, and discussing that one of the most interesting developments of the pandemic has been the way that the move to online teaching has removed barriers of physical distance for people to work together. We realised that, given that our delivery was all online at the time, there was a brilliant opportunity to run a project together.

X11 are a really interesting school for 12 – 16 year olds that specialises in Media, Design and ICT. They have some really progressive policies which include; no hierarchal system in the school; no rules of the school instead students and teachers would develop the rules together; students work on projects and are given a high degree of freedom to create and innovate inspiring pieces of work. Clearly a lot of crossover with our youth led approach.

After a bit of discussion we realised that one of the desired outcomes of a partnership would be for participants to develop their English as a foreign language so a songwriting project seemed like a natural fit.

The setting was on Microsoft Teams with all participants at home on their own individual devices. We started with the question, ‘What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given’ and it all went from there. Have a listen to the song and see what you think.

It has been fascinating to see how something like this is now possible and we hope to develop more similar partnership projects like this.