What are we doing again?

As CCE claim that Creative Partnerships will come to an end next year and the Arts Council insist that no decision has been made, I find myself thinking about the impact my projects are having, and whether it will last longer than the funding does!


I talked to a teacher today who described their enquiry as a 'Beautiful process' despite the onerous paperwork. There are many teachers out there who have benefited from CP support over the last eight years and will, as a result, be better equipped to apply creative approaches in school, and to encourage creative approaches in their pupils. I guess there are also some who have been unimpressed. There are a huge number of children who have been involved. Will we be able to pick them out as they grow and move through the education system and beyond?


I believe in creative learning. If CP is discontinued, creative learning will continue. What it is will no longer be what CP thinks it is, but the sum of what all those children, teachers and practitioners think it is.

It begins again...

Welcome back after the break!

After a few meetings last week this is my first day in school with pupils. Ninety year-sixers or thereabouts. Its about Maths, its about Ancient Greeks, its about film-making.

Pupils have heard a greek tale, solved a SATs maths problem, and then incorporated the problem into the tale. They have set the puzzle in physical space for other pupils to solve. Not all groups or pupils have produced the intended outcomes listed here, but many who have not, have worked creatively to produce other outcomes of good quality.

Going forward, the three groups will be doing further work on the myths and legends of ancient greece before commencing the main body of project work. They will be asked to create a resource pack, including DVD, for a year-six client group, that will help them explore different areas of maths through stories of Ancient Greece.

Pupils will also have the opportunity to work with other artists with specialisms of script-writing, model-making and maybe more.

Shine on you crazy parents

Way back last September when I was involved in a very enthusiastic planning meeting for the second year of Paganel's 'Change School' program we talked about lots of ideas that involved parental or community engagement. So why is it that today, on my final session at Paganel this year, I find myself for the first time actually working with parents? The short answer is that those parental and community engagement activities happened, but didn't involve me.
Today's session with four parents and one member of staff was a real joy! We were creating a video record of Paganel's 'Shine Day' and all the activities that the pupils were getting involved with. We started by watching the shine day film I helped year-six pupils to make last year. We went on to a whistle stop run through of video production, interviewing skills, visual composition and story-telling before going to work. It's that incredible mix of skills, all running in parallel that make film-work so powerful as an educational process.
The group worked very hard throughout the day and produced a rush edit that was shown in a whole school assembly at about 2:30. They were all enthusiastic and remained so throughout the day, and they all want to come back to finish the edit after summer.
Just as well today ended on a high as I then got a phone call from a member of staff from another school regarding a DVD that I'd worked all hours to get ready in time for their end of year show. Not to thank me, just to point out all the ways in which they felt the work fell short of their expectations. You know, if they'd have been telling me that the children weren't happy with the work, I would have felt much more concerned.

What did the Romans ever etc.

A 'Film-Skills' session at Lord Silkin High School but also involving pupils from Sutherland and Ercall Wood Schools.
Thanks to the demise of 'Find your Talent' this project 'If These Walls Could Talk' has had a 20% budget cut and therefore tomorrows film-skills session, like last week's story-boarding session has had to be cancelled. We covered a lot in the day though, and I think that what really came through was that for the film crew, your attitude and focus are as important as the technical skills. Two students who decided to stay for the school sports day instead of attending this session have been dropped from the project as, in order to be an effective crew member, the first qualification is that you really, really, really want to be there.

Do you feel at home?

At Paganel Primary School for the 'Home' project. Two missions, document the day on video and plan my remaining sessions in this term.

Documenting sessions run by artists Chris Bishop and Bobbie Gardner, both new artists in school I think. With my 'almost residency' this year and a series of projects last year, I expect to continue working with Paganel after the summer on a smaller scale, so it's great to see new faces, new skills, new ideas and new energy coming in!

Documenting was done by Year Six pupils with the minimum of support from me. All of year six have spent a term as 'Catseyes Kids' and making weekly reports, so are all reasonably competent film-makers and could have had a good go at this without my input. I always feel they could be reaching a little further towards greatness in their films and so any advice I give is nudging them in this direction. Improving the film they are making, but hoping to improve their practice in the process. The key approaches I'm pushing are relentlessness - always having your mind on what you're filming now, or what you'll be filming next - and active, evolving planning - keeping in mind a vision for the finished film and adapting it as the shoot progresses. Those Year Sixes do like to stop and chat, they just need to keep their chat focused.

When chairs shrink...

At St Peter's today I worked with some of the pupils to develop the visual elements (backgrounds, characters and props) of our animatic while Hayley worked with the others to develop and record dialogue.
This was my third attempt to produce an animatic with pupils via a 'rostrum camera puppet show' approach, whereby characters are moved around a background on a table in real time, and filmed with a camera over-head. What I have learned improves the process each time but another big factor is skill and supervision ratios. Last time it was just me with two teachers, two TAs and two classes. This time it was Hayley and I with one teacher, one TA, one parent helper and one class. This much more manageable situation meant that the pupils were able to turn the production round in a day, overcoming communication, group working and technical problems to do so.

The chairs in the title were a part of the session picked out by Jane, the class teacher, as being particularly interesting. I asked pupil X to stand at a distance from the others and then asked them close one eye and frame pupil X's head between their fingers. They then moved this measured distance down the body to prove the 'five heads' rule of figure drawing (It turns out that the rule is actually eight heads, but five seemed to work for us! Probably explained by the facts that children's heads are proportionately larger than adult heads and that when you're looking down at someone the body and legs are somewhat foreshortened).
http://www.realcolorwheel.com/human.htm
I then asked them to frame a nearby chair and a more distant chair to prove that objects appear smaller as they move further away. I also demonstrated this by drawing a little girl the same height at different points on a background scene. She went from appearing to be a normal height in the foreground, to being nearly as tall as the castle in the background, to being a giant on the horizon!

Old friends

Creative Practitioners can be a 'new face' in school, it's one of the reasons we are employed, and consequently most projects involve meeting new students. It's always nice then, when one sees familiar faces in a group. Today I worked with year three at Paganel Primary School who I last worked with around this time last year. I took small groups out of their regular lessons to interview each other on the subject of their recent school trips. With each group, I began by asking them what they remembered about last year's project. In most cases they began telling me this without being asked!
Why talk about last year's project, when it has nothing to do with what we're doing now? I wasn't sure at all, and it was some time before I realised that what we were doing replaced the 'getting to know you' activities that I would do with a new group. We were reestablishing a working relationship that was a year old. I believe that our experience of time is roughly relative to the total time we have lived, therefore one year for an eight/nine year old would be equivalent to over four years for me. After this kind of break, reminiscing is a natural way to begin again.
We then had a whole class session for the last hour and a half of the day, editing the interviews together with video taken on the school trips. We edited on the smart board with the students taking turns to come up to the board and work on the video. After about twenty minutes of this, the teacher took around half of the class, who were unable to focus on what we were doing any longer, out to allow the other half, who were benefiting from the experience, to continue. We edited two comments together with two clips over the whole period of time. Pretty slow going to be sure, but the we were working to a standard above anything that has been edited by pupils of any year in school up to now.

Life's a beach

My first experience of working in my own children's school. Interesting. I'm not sure if I'm being treated as a parent or as a practitioner. Probably because I'm not sure which I am being.
The project idea fits in with a seaside theme and the end product is a video depicting beach scenes of the past present and future, designed to be shown across the school's three adjacent big screens.
This was a non-stop day in which I filmed all three, year-two classes in groups of one to six. The pupils had a very exciting day, dressing up and waiting for their turn to come down to the hall to be filmed. They'd show me their planned scene, then I'd have to figure out how to make it work within the constraints of the ten-foot wide green screen.
Like many parent, I don't hear much from my children about what they do at school. Today at least I knew what one of them was doing. For fifteen minutes.

Where have all the pirates gone?

2nd Session at St. Peter's, a full day this time in the company of Hayley (Script Writer).

The initial challenge was for the reporter from each of the four groups to tell their 'maths problem' story to the class. Did all the group know/agree on their story? Could one member of the group summarise it coherently? Answers: 'no' and 'no'. After an hour of further work around the tables, those answers were 'yes' and 'pretty much'.

Hayley and I worked over break to find an overall narrative that would link the four scenes into one story. This came together nicely, and was a hysterical conversation, haunted by the spirits of the pirates that had been cut from the first scene and were keen to re-enter the story at any point.

Led the pupils through acting out the whole story together to introduce our narrative.

Joined after lunch by Creative Agent, Nicky. Back into groups to role-play, develop and record the scenes. All this acting out has really energised the development process and got the groups working together in a focused way. Finally watched back the four scenes. Over to Hayley now to run the next session on Script development.

My fave pupil idea today: 'The sea-horses have to eat odd numbers of fish because it is called the 'Odd Sea'

I like to go a wandering...

Started a new project today at St. Peters Primary School in Shropshire. I spent the morning there and the afternoon at Wroxeter Roman City, about half an hour away. I'm starting to quite appreciate driving time as time alone to think and also to catch up on phone calls, using headset, of course!

The St Peters project is all about using video to set maths problems. First, the problems must be expressed as stories. I rashly picked an example puzzle on the spur of the moment to make into a story. No one, myself included, could really fully express the puzzle as a story, but it certainly got brains working. We then moved into group work, with each of four groups having a different puzzle to work on. Introducing the roles of Chairman, Writer, Reporter and Researcher allowed the groups to progress from working in ones or twos to really focused work in groups of up to seven.

At Wroxeter, Pupils from Lord Silkin, Ercall Wood and Sutherland Secondary Schools were to storyboard their film, which is a time-travel drama, educational resource for KS2 pupils. The script is written, albeit in draft form, and so the task was to imagine and draw each camera angle required. From a quick try at this yesterday I could see that the Students imaginations far exceeded their drawing ability, so instead of drawing the angles, I came up with the idea of setting up the scenes using boxes and buildings and cut-outs as characters. Luckily, Tony (Drama Practitioner) and I arrived ten minutes before the group and had a chance to discuss this plan. Tony suggested that the students themselves walk-through the scenes and we photograph that. This was a 1.5 hour session, and we really used every minute to cover all but one of the locations called for in the script.

Back in time...

I took the scenic route to Wroxeter Roman City. Half an hour longer than on the Motorway, but much nicer.