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Björk-style Education: The Islander Influences Nordic Curriculum

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With a multimedia project “Biophilia”, Björk is now a big part of an educational system teaching students the wonders of the universe through a thoroughly innovative format.

Björk’s 2010 release, Biophilia remains one of the most revolutionary albums of all time. The album combines Björk’s music with an innovative vision of nature and technology and resulting in an extraordinary multimedia project. With the album and interactive app, Björk produced a flourishing, affordable, aesthetic universe in miniature and one which unfolds before our very eyes and ears.

Six years on, the whirlwind around Biophilia hadn’t ceased detonating transformations. The album’s impact has even infiltrated an unexpected field: education. In fact, Björk’s unique educational proposal is entirely organic and focused on an enhanced understanding of nature, and humankind’s role in the universe.

Any exploration of the cosmos, through the ties that bind us to that same cosmos, should represent some fundamental knowledge of our own origins. But this is too often lost among the pages of tedious textbooks. In answer, Nordic pedagogues joined Björk in getting students out of the restrictive classroom environment and to demonstrate a universal interconnectedness. Multimedia technologies allow the project to simultaneously resonate with young students and to shake up an otherwise outdated educational system.

The program has been implemented through a series of workshops in Iceland, and these moved to New York in 2012, as Björk took up residence there in the Hall of Science. To date, the program has been taught successfully in Paris, Oslo, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Manchester, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s been particularly successful with students who have attention deficit disorder.

Björk is one of those figures who both resonates, and who makes change itself resonant, too. She flows from one area into another and, behind her, she leaves a very different path to follow. It’s one which vibrates with the elements that should have been there all along. In this sense, more than in any of the multiple areas in which she’s active, Björk is an exemplary character, an architect of both individual, and collective destiny.

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