TED X live stream event
Students from EF Academy Torbay traveled just down the coast to the brand new arts center in Teignmouth , The Pavilions. Pavilions Teignmouth is an arts and community venue committed to providing a diverse program of live performance and cinematic events; offering a welcoming space for commercial, educational, health and community events; providing opportunities for development, engagement, education and growth.
TED is a resource that teachers across the school use on a regular basis as their on line videos offer a unique perspective on issues covered in a range of academic areas. This was an amazing opportunity to watch a live feed from Exeter University, just a little further down the coast, to this amazing new arts center.
The topic of the talk was dreams to reality and covered a range of topics from isolation to the state of race relations in modern day Britain. The speakers come from a range of backgrounds and bring an incredible perspective to modern issues that really engaged the students and challenged them to think about things in a different way. Highlights included:
Cormac Russell:
Mr Russell is the managing director of Nurture Development, Europe’s leading asset-based community development organisation and advocates how institutions can support ‘bottom up’ community driven change. He supports both communities and organisations to create conditions where any neighborhood can identify, connect and mobilize assets to the benefit of the whole community. It is based on the premise that the ‘only people who can build community are the people who live, sleep and work there’.
Pragna Patel: Pragna Patel is a founding member and director of the Southall Black Sisters advocacy and campaigning center. She has over 30 years of experience in advocacy, policy and campaigning work with some of the most marginalized women in British society. She has been in the forefront of key case and campaigning milestones in the history of Southall Black Sisters and is also a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism, which formed in the aftermath of the Rushdie Affair in 1989, to address the rise of religious fundamentalism in all religions and its specific control of women. Pragna has written extensively on race, gender and religion.
Marcus Lyon: Marcus Lyon is a British artist. He began his career with Amnesty International and The International Children’s Trust photographing street children in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He has an international reputation as a conceptual landscape and portraiture artist and has photographed notable public figures including the last four British Prime Ministers and Queen Elizabeth II. His most recent bodies of work on urban expansion, Brazilian national identity, mass migration and modern dance have been shown globally. Marcus is also a committed social entrepreneur. He currently serves on the boards of Somerset House and Leader’s Quest, and is a founder ambassador for The Consortium for Street Children, Photovoice, BLESMA and Home Start.
Manwar Ali: Muhammad Manwar Ali is the chief executive of Muslim educational charity JIMAS which pioneered Zakat distribution in the UK. He is chaplain for University Campus Suffolk, Suffolk New College, and the Ipswich Hospital; a member of the Local Scrutiny & Involvement Panel for the Crown Prosecution Service in East England; a member of the Police Crime Panel for the Suffolk Police & Crime Commissioner; and a member of the Suffolk Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education. Manwar Ali has more than 30 years experience teaching Islam and is one of the few scholars in the UK who has been directly involved in Jihad. He fought in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Burma.
Lindsay Levin: Lindsay spent the first fifteen years of her career building entrepreneurial companies. In 2001 she founded Leaders’ Quest as her ‘last start-up’. She has since worked to connect leaders from all disciplines and sectors, to explore solutions to some of the big issues in the world today. Currently, much of her time is spent working with corporate CEOs and their leadership teams on the role and purpose of business, company values and culture change. She is passionate about bridging divides – between cultures, perspectives and opposing voices. She also works extensively with leaders from non-profit institutions and NGOs and in 2004 founded the Leaders’ Quest Foundation to build leadership capacity in grassroots communities. Between 2008 and 2012 Lindsay was Chair of the International Steering Committee of OneVoice, working to amplify the voices of Israelis and Palestinians committed to peaceful coexistence. Her first book, “Invisible Giants: changing the world one step at a time”, was published in March 2013.
Fiona McNae: Fi McNae is the co-founder and CEO of Space Doctors, an international consultancy specializing in strategic cultural and semiotic insight for brands. She has had an important role in bringing academic semiotics into the commercial sphere, using cultural and semiotic techniques in brand strategy, new product development and communications. Space Doctors is focused on making client teams both informed enough and brave enough to make a positive difference to culture and society through their activities, and to use their brands to this end in a more purposeful and imaginative fashion. Fi also has a doctorate in molecular toxicology and an MBA specializing in marketing effectiveness and agency accountability. The interaction between the speakers and their slightly distant audience was amazing and at no point did they forget that Teignmouth was watching. This type of live streaming is becoming ever more popular and it opens up the world with great possibilities.