The seventh in a series of articles looking at the work of Creative Partnerships around the country; this issue continues to look at the ways in which arts activity can impact on the teaching of science.
Stan?s Cafe is a theatre company that devises and tours unusual art nationally and internationally from its base in Birmingham, writes Craig Stephens. Plague Nation is a performance installation, made with 11 to 13 year-old students, which uses rice to represent human statistics. The Wellcome Trust funded the piece through its Pulse initiative, which aims to engage young people in science through collaborations between artists, scientists and educators. It aims to encourage debate about scientific issues and developments and how these impact on the world, through creative projects involving drama, dance, live art and digital performance.
Visual statistics
For Plague Nation we took 989kg of rice into school halls and gyms around the country, with each grain of rice representing a person in the United Kingdom. Over two days, the students, challenged to represent a range of human statistics with a focus on infectious disease and vaccination, weighed out this large pile of rice into smaller quantities. The piece aimed to take normally abstract and difficult to imagine statistics and make them real, give them a size and a shape. Statistics measured and displayed ranged from the number of students in the particular school to the number of children who die each day from measles. It is difficult to imagine what it means when you read that 15 million people died last year from infectious diseases but when you can see this number, when you can touch it, see individual grains and compare it to the population of your home town, it suddenly becomes a very real and moving figure.
To make the project work we knew we would have to find schools that were committed to creative learning and this is where Creative Partnerships really made a difference by locating the schools. We worked with the Birmingham, Bristol and Nottingham Creative Partnerships offices who acted as matchmakers for us, finding suitable schools and suggesting particular groups within those schools to work with. They were able to link us to schools that they thought would benefit from the project and be open to it. The show is quite a difficult one to describe and for people to get their heads around ? piles of rice on the floor of the hall perhaps initially doesn?t sound very exciting, so Creative Partnerships provided valuable support in our approaches to schools. Once the four different schools were on board (two in Birmingham, one in Nottingham and one in Bristol) Creative Partnerships provided a vital co-ordinating role. This made our lives much easier ? it sounds simple but sometimes trying to get a message to a busy teacher in a large school can be quite difficult. They were able to negotiate with staff on our behalf in terms of time and resources needed. They provided a central point where we and the schools could go to discuss any problems and highlight issues.
Beyond this advocacy and co-ordinating role, Creative Partnerships also offered some financial support, allowing the show to run for two days in the schools, rather than just one. This meant that more students could be involved and that word of the piece had time to spread around school.
Sustainability
For the schools and us, I think the project was very successful. It involved the students in a number of tasks and on a number of levels. In each of the schools we made preparatory visits to explain the project and introduce concepts. In these they learnt about the history of epidemics and the science involved in immunisation. They used algebra to work out how to translate numbers of people into quantities of rice and they had the opportunity to suggest and research their own statistics.
When the piece moved into the hall, the students worked in small teams to carefully weigh out the rice. It was amazing to see the sense of ownership and understanding of the project that they developed. One girl in Bristol at the end of her performance shift remarked, ?I never knew rice could be so interesting?. They took the work seriously and were proud to explain what they were doing to their fellow students and visitors. Plague Nation helped them to see how important science is in their world. They were able to graphically see the impact of vaccination programmes and the new challenges posed by HIV and other diseases. I think it touched their world ? they saw themselves in piles of rice and saw that if they lived in another part of the world their life experience and expectancy might be very different.
Future plans
The project will continue in the future in a slightly different form, again with the support of Creative Partnerships. At the beginning of the year we became lead partner for a cluster of schools in the Frankley area of Birmingham and one of the projects we will be co-ordinating will be another version of Plague Nation. This one will focus more on refugee and asylum statistics to help people to more fully understand this controversial area. It will also involve the students in researching both local and international statistics and, we hope, help them to engage with both their immediate world and the wider world in which we all live.
Craig Stephens is a member of Stan?s Cafe. t: 0121 236 2273;
w: http://www.stanscafe.co.uk