#BrewEdIsolation

Graham Andre - @grahamandre

The man, the legend, the shell suit.

What more can be said about the Isle of Wight's Man of the Year 2020?

Rockstar teacher, equality champion and BAFTA award nomintated Graham is a Year 4 teacher and all round good egg. Known as the Nicest Man on Twitter for all of the great things he does, Graham has been an absolute colossus during this lockdown, organising online karaoke evenings, talking about his new book and organising the amazing #BrewEdIsolation.

What is #BrewEd?

#BrewEd - in the form that Daryn [Daryn Egan-Simon - @darynsimon] and I developed it though we see events happening under the #BrewEd hashtag that look a lot more like TeachMeets to us - always strives to bring people together from a wide range of education silos. We want to see a cross range of roles primary, secondary, ITT, PRU, Special, EYFS, governors and whatever else represented at an event. The reason for this is that our primary motivation for the work we put in to set it up and get it going was to break down some of the suspicion and division that comes from the siloisation of the education landscape.

Because we want to appeal to people from a a very wide range of sectors and interests we try to ensure that talks have a really wide relevance. We say we don't want to give you something you might try in your classroom on Monday - we want to give you something that might change your perspective forever. Presentations trend to have a deeper philosophical questioning than a handy classroom tip. We also - at the events we run and in events that follow our guidelines, try to have as much time for discussion as for presentation. The reason for that is to give everyone in the room a voice and break down some of the hierarchies that are present in the usual conference setting.

TeachMeet had similar aims when it set up but their format - lots of very short (5 minute as standard) presentations and their focus on 'what works in my classroom' meant that often the content wasn't very universal. As a primary teacher going to them I often found that they were not of great relevance to me. Not always of course but as a rule.

A rough idea might be that at a TeachMeet you might hear a teacher talk about how they have used the iPads in their class while at a #BrewEd you might hear a teacher talk about problematisation of inclusion practice followed by a discussion looking at that issue from a variety of perspectives.

The main difference is a practical one. TeachMeet has usually been an evening thing and is time limited by that while #BrewEd happens on a Saturday and can go on longer so there's more time for networking, the pub quiz, the rucksack of shite... People will travel for a #BrewEd and stay on after for a curry and a chat so the social side of it has become important for some frequent fliers.

At the end of the day TeachMeet came first and BrewEd is a reiteration of its first principles rather than anything particularly new.