In 2020 and 2021 amidst a global pandemic, Government restrictions saw most young people throughout NSW learning from home unless provided with an exemption. Whether at home or within in the ‘traditional classroom’, learning looked vastly different in 2021 to what it looked like pre-2020. The spaces where learning happened differed, the people learning happened with transformed and the objects young people learned with radically changed.

*FUTURE SCHOOL was co-created with Kandos Public School and teacher Rachelle Connellan. It was conceptually developed and delivered in collaboration with Bonnie Cowan (Theatre Maker) and Ankit Mishra (Video Producer) for Cementa 2022. FUTURE SCHOOL featured four key parts; a film, performance, installation and a student-led public program.

FUTURE SCHOOL was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

FUTURE SCHOOL was a creative reimagining of the pre-pandemic ’school’, capitalising on the cracks and the fractures exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. It welcomed a renegotiation of the place, purpose and point of school.

FUTURE SCHOOL dissolved the concept of ‘rules’, instead, young people created a set of guiding ‘Principles’ to be gifted to new children to the school as a way of reinstating the type of ecology they wanted to be a part of. Thus, FUTURE SCHOOL hoped to radically transform the role of the school in the creation of building and developing young people and the function of the school within a community.

In the spirit of Rees and Graham, 2013, it was important for FUTURE SCHOOL to redefine what school could be, “not only a site for learning but also as a place for cultural production” (p. 213). By understanding the school through this lens, it made it possible to practice and facilitate knowledge sharing through acts of exchange and generosity.