1. What does the Commonwealth mean to you?
2. Do you think being part of the Commonwealth is a good thing for your country – have you experienced the benefits of being on #teamcommonwealth?
3. How does the history of your country’s connection to the Commonwealth affect your feelings towards The Commonwealth now?
4. Make a list of positive and negative things you feel about the Commonwealth and make suggestions for how those that are negative could be improved.
5. The Commonwealth Charter includes 16 core values and principles of the Commonwealth. Which of the Commonwealth values and principles do you hold as most important to you as a leader and why?
6. Is there anything you would add to the Commonwealth Charter?
Author: Nushelle
M0A3: A headline from the future
Prompt: Imagine a newspaper or website from the future – five or ten years from now. They are writing a story about you. What does the headline say? What is the story about? Add it to your future timeline.
Response: I absolutely hate assignments like this, because they require you to be fairly transparent about the extent of your ambitions. I’m an extremely private person, and I also hate being wrong. What if my super ambitious dream never comes to pass? How utterly embarrassing. Ugh. So this assignment is a bit of a challenge, and I’m cringing inside as I write this. FYI, I used NewsJack to create my remixed newspaper headline. H/T MIT Codesign Studio, 2014.
The headline discusses teaching arts-based strategies I use in Building Bridges, and announces that these will be used in general teaching practice for secondary school education, to replace current methods that depend heavily on outdated textbooks and rote learning. Wouldn’t that be fun?
M0A2: Timeline – Triggers and Targets
Prompt: Try to plot the key moments in the development of your idea starting with the thing that began it all. That’s what we might call the “trigger”, so put that down as the first event on your timeline. Add in other key events, and try to remember important conversations or meetings.
Response: I used Timeline JS for this exercise, even though I’m usually very much a hands-on, coloured pens-and-post-its kind of girl. I like its ease of use, its media-rich format, the ability to keep adding events as I progress through QYL this year, and the fact that it is so darn pretty. I don’t do my best “thinking” work on a computer, though, so I’m using notes I started scribbling over a year ago when I was (entirely independently!) trying to figure out my trajectory. Continue reading
M0A1: Defining leadership
Prompt: List three definitions of leadership, and then describe your personal definition of the term.
Response: It was difficult not to turn to the usual suspects, but I tried to choose quotes or definitions that resonated particularly well. Continue reading
From Independence to Interdependence
I wrote a piece for the Leading Change website that reflected on my journey as part of the Queen’s Young Leaders community and how it made me think differently about Sri Lanka’s Independence Day this year. You can read it here.
Tiger of the Week feature
My work with Building Bridges was profiled on the Princeton Alumni Weekly blog’s Tiger of the Week feature, in a lovely piece by alum and PAW writer Jeanette Beebe.
2015 in review
I haven’t had a proper personal blog in a few years, and I’ve felt its absence terribly. In 2012-13, I blogged a great deal for Building Bridges, which often functioned partially as a space to reflect on my own life, not just the project itself, and as a place to unload some of the terrible puns and extraneous detail I’m so fond of. These past couple of years, I’ve jotted down notes on my phone, in Word documents, on scraps of paper, and unpublished blog posts (some of which have been migrated over here). It frustrated me that I didn’t have one place that I could go to capture everything, and I realise in retrospect that I need this kind of space, despite my equal frustration that “everything” is fairly eclectic. So! I’m carving it out for myself now in readiness for 2016. Continue reading
2016 Queen’s Young Leaders Award
I’m thrilled to be one of 60 Queen’s Young Leaders for 2016, and I look forward to incorporating all that I learn into my work with Building Bridges. I’ve written more in depth about what the award means for me and my work on the BB blog.
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Notes on ‘Villa’
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a crew of stellar artists in putting together the South Asian premiere of Guillermo Calderon’s Villa. It was surreal, not least because the script elegantly tackled some of the self-same issues I grapple with in my academic writing (but people would rather watch a play than read a paper!). I’m especially grateful to Indika Senanayake for putting in a massive effort to bring Calderon and his work to Sri Lanka. After two of the three performances, there was an opportunity for a Q&A with Calderon, one of which included Radhika Coomaraswamy as panellist. The questions (and the answers) were all excellent, so I’ve jotted down some of my notes. Below is the expanded version. Continue reading
“Blowhards” – a review
“Blowhards: Braggarts, Boasters and Bastards” is the latest in Mind Adventures’ repertoire of thought-provoking theatre, albeit gentler and sparser in its conceptualisation and delivery than many of its predecessors. There are likely many reasons for this. The company’s method of devised theatre relies on the luxury of time and space to craft ideas, playfully improvise upon them, and keep the choicest interactions while brutally discarding the deadwood. However, Mind Adventures is currently in residence at the British Council, and (I believe) is tasked with producing twelve pieces of theatre during the year. With little time to work on content in danger of being jettisoned, they must necessarily follow a model that will allow them to be prolific in their output. The three short plays in “Blowhards”, written and directed by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke, have none of the ferocious intensity of, say, “Paraya”, but are light-hearted, laugh-out-loud funny satires that play out in the cosy confines of the British Council library. Continue reading