Eden Court's Engagement team has been travelling across the Highlands visiting rural primary schools as part of a Teacher Development Fund project supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Everyone is an Artist explores the use of Drama and Film as a teaching tool in the classroom - hear all about it from our Arts Practitioner, Andrew!
Drama has an interesting relationship with education. When you train to be a Drama teacher, you constantly analyse its purpose, not just as a skill that can be developed in students but also as a way to teach. I remember my Drama tutor routinely questioning us: Is the process more important? Or is it the product?
Are we creating the next generation of performers, or is Drama in the classroom actually a way of helping young people to understand and reflect on the world in a creative way?
Eden Court's Engagement team has been given a wonderful opportunity to work with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and help primary school teachers to see the benefits of using Drama, Film and creativity within their classroom. The foundation helps fund projects that "design solutions" to overcome social inequality within the classroom. Here in the Highlands, we recognise the difficulties and inequality young people face in rural isolated communities.
As part of the project we have collaborated with primary schools in Durness, Farr, Kinlochbervie, Kyleakin, Scourie and Tongue. We asked them about the difficulties faced by the young people in their areas, as well as how their education is impacted by things like travel time to and from school.
This is a two-year project aimed at teachers as well as students. We are there to share our knowledge and experience of Drama and Film, and to demonstrate how these can be used to creatively explore different topics within the classroom, so that students have opportunities to be innovative, independent and creative learners.
It is a two-way process in which we learn from teachers to think about our own practice as we take on the challenges of working in rural schools. These schools generally have 20 students in the whole school, while one teacher works with composite classes with students aged 4 - 11 years. This puts a lot of demand on the teachers to juggle the range of needs in their classroom.
We have kicked off this project by holding school takeover days. We posed the premise that an alien spaceship has crashed in the North Highlands and the students have to work out what we can do to help the stranded alien (with the help of a certain Secret Agent Cobra!). The activities look cross-curricular, including elements of Wellbeing, English, Science and Maths, but taught using Drama and Film techniques.
As Arts Practitioners the project really reflects our ideals of cultural democracy where, as facilitators, we are collaborators rather than dictators, and the young people solve problems with us.
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Everyone is an Artist is funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation as part of their Teacher Development Fund programme.