The smell of warm herbs and sound of clattering plates waft in from the subsequent-door room, where a vegan lunch for 70 is being cleared away, and where every so often a child loses balance and thumps against the door.
But, bent over pieces of scrap paper, students on the Thursday afternoon script-writing course within the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project are concentrating hard on today’s assignment.
There are two of them – Richard Ince, 72, and Ben Woodling, 38 – and so they were meeting their tutor, Niall Drennan, a performance writer and previous probation officer, for 2 hours another week since early summer, although nobody can remember exactly when. Tutoring them within the alternate weeks is Alison Fisher, a former scriptwriter for EastEnders. Others have attended on occasion – they recall a Spanish group under the impression it was about improving English language skills, and a French woman who was living in a tent and writing a unique – but Ince and Woodling are the regulars.
“I’ve always been a pretty good reader and prefer words,” says Ince, who first came to the centre eight years ago to volunteer after retiring from his job as an administrator with IBM. “At my age i have never the drive to do something with it, but it’s something I’m fascinated about.” Woodling, who studied geography at Hull University greater than 10 years ago, says he likes learning, but being on incapacity benefit meant he couldn’t afford adult education. He has done a music course on the centre after which drama, “which was very challenging for my mental health issue s and shyness”, and he just happened to be around when the scriptwriting course started. “It has been interesting and fun and made me consider things, simply by entering into the heads of characters,” he says. “So I’ve just kept coming.”
The scriptwriting course is one in all dozens of free courses, workshops, lectures and discussions advertised by the hot Free University Brighton, tagline “education for romance not money”.
The “free university” is the brainchild of Ali Ghanimi, a Green party activist who has worked within the public sector managing organisational change The speculation, she says, is to give “something for the complete community, irrespective of their financial means or previous education”.
Recent free learning opportunities advertised at the website range from a lecture at Sussex University by philosopher Simon Glendinning on “The top of history”, to a knitting group at Hove Library. It also has a wish list of subjects that folk wish to learn more about, from introductory philosophy, to the Brighton sky at night, to furniture upholstery, with an appeal for potential tutors to return forward.
Many have already got, and when the FUB officially launches in May, Ghanimi will put them involved with their students in spaces offered, without cost, by local libraries, community centres and cafes around Brighton. In addition they have the usage of a caravan and 1950s Airstream trailer.
“It’s nice to do things in a gaggle and learn and share skills and information,” says Ghanimi. “But it is also really important within the current economy.”
This year has seen rising interest in alternative university models, inspired not just by a troublesome economy, but additionally by the upward thrust in tuition fees to as much as £9,000 and by the success of Tent City University, which organised lectures, discussions and workshops with anti-capitalist protesters occupying the realm around St Paul’s in London last winter.
Funding changes in higher education were encouraging different ways of observing learning for the past couple of years. The Social Science Centre in Lincoln, which welcomed its first nine students this term, was conceived by Mike Neary, dean of training and learning on the University of Lincoln, in 2010, by way of proposals to chop the teaching grant to arts, humanities and social science subjects. It charges no fees, but stude nts and teachers, who meet at locations around Lincoln, may be able to pay one hour in their income a month through PayPal. On the end of 3 years of research, students are promised the equivalent of a better education degree.
The Free University of Liverpool, which also operates from different locations around its city, offers courses delivered voluntarily by academics and others in culture. It was also a protest against the privatisation of better education. the same project, the Really Open University, was started round the same time in Leeds.
Just before Christmas, the movement even had its own first conference, Sustaining Alternative Universities, which happened in Oxford. Its organiser, Joel Lazarus, says: “plenty of people are motivated by the exclusion of an increasing number of people from education, and especially higher education opportunities. It is a response to the commodification of education and privatisation of university.”
Tim Huzar, a Phd student in philosophy at Brighton University, who has helped to establish the FUB, says the response also is practical. “You need to realise an alternate and demonstrate it,” he says. “However it is not just a political act. It is a real service. It gives people access to education and it makes them realise that learning is something they need to expect lifelong – not only something you do in the event you can afford £9,000 when you find yourself 18.”
Organisers of other models insist they decline to threaten existing universities. Both Neary and Lazarus, who teaches international politics and international development at Oxford, Reading and London, indicate that they continue to work inside the system to switch things, and plenty of of these interested in these projects hope they’ll encourage more people to think about higher education as something potentially open to them.
The want to make learning more accessible to these without the time or resources to wait a proper course is additionally prompting many traditional universities to place materials online, and has inspired other online projects, equivalent to the tutoring-free University of the folk, founded in 2009. But Ghanimi argues these cannot replace the advantages of people meeting face-to-face of their local area and learning together. “It is a way for folks to share common interests and build relationships,” she says. “That’s about building stronger communities.”
