A contemporary visual arts education project with special educational needs schools in an inner city London borough has provided a useful opportunity to evaluate the benefits and weaknesses of such projects. Leanne Turvey reports.
Chisenhale Gallery is a publicly funded contemporary art gallery promoting innovation and experimentation in visual arts by commissioning new work from artists early in their careers. The gallery has an integral education programme with a history of pioneering community projects, which aim to promote the accessibility of contemporary practice to local, national and international audiences. The ?Get Art? project has, over the past six years, given children and staff from the special educational needs schools in the local borough of Tower Hamlets access to its programme, to contemporary art and to local practising artists. Artist-led workshops run at the gallery and in their schools reach and encourage children who normally have little or no opportunity to engage with a contemporary exhibition programme. Pupils and artists take the gallery exhibitions as inspiration and then use their own ideas to create experimental artworks. At the end of each year the children hold a show in the same large gallery space where they experience the exhibitions themselves.
Project evaluation
Examining the project provides a useful opportunity to see how the project partners have responded to the various pressures they encountered running across two venues - the gallery and the school. One of the major strengths of the project has been the dynamic of establishing the individual artists as a ?team?. This has had enormous structural impact on the project. The artists came together for planning and evaluation sessions, exhibition previews and group dinners. They were encouraged to share problems, news, information, practice, skills, materials, equipment, emotional support, advice, cars and childcare. Get Art supported this cohesion by enabling them to have the time (paid) and space (the education room) to function as a group. As a result, the artists became the main line of communication between the teachers, the co-ordinator and the gallery.
The gallery benefited from making strong connections with a group of local schools, teachers and pupils and has been able to develop other projects and connections on the basis of the valuable experience of hosting Get Art.
The benefit for the schools came from having a sustained relationship with a local gallery. Most of the teachers now strongly identify themselves with Chisenhale and its programme. They value the contribution each artist has made to the learning and development of their pupils and have developed a confidence with using contemporary art in their classroom.
Pressures
Some of the problems appear to have arisen from a lack of facility for the participating staff to get together for planning and evaluation. This produced a growing crack in the structure of the project because pressure was placed unequally onto the artist to maintain the collaborative relationship between themselves and the teacher. Teachers have to work their planning and evaluation into an already overloaded timetable.
This was significant because the relationship the artist had with the teacher was pivotal to the successful running of the project. The artist/teacher relationship is fragile, and there are many potential internal factors that can destabilise it, including personality clashes and different styles of communication. However, the most destabilising influence on the artist/teacher relationship seemed to be the whole school culture, where decisions are based on consideration of subject priorities, ever-changing government initiatives and quantifiable outcomes (league tables). The products of these are fixed timetables, lack of dedicated art space, lack of storage space and lack of ?free? time to have meetings. In some of the schools, the teacher (therefore the project) operated as a guerrilla within the rigid and inflexible climate of their school. Under these pressures they often worked extremely hard to highlight their pupils? participation and achievement. In such instances it is arguable whether or not there was any measurable impact from Get Art on the whole school, beyond the obvious impact on the individual pupil participants.
Looking ahead
Chisenhale Gallery is hosting a series of meetings for the teachers involved to explore the impact of the project and to look at developing future projects and connections between the schools and the gallery. One issue that has already been discussed is the importance of raising a visual art project?s profile amongst senior management. Another effective way of by-passing some of the problems would be to provide the opportunity for the teachers to establish similar groups or networks to those enjoyed by the participating artists, and to have more direct contact with the gallery though invitations to previews, artists talks and events. Enabling the project teachers to meet as a group, by providing time (cover) and space, would raise the status and effectiveness of the teachers in their schools, and more broadly within special educational needs (SEN) and mainstream education in general. Teachers involved in other similar projects have built up new skills on top of their existing expertise that are a rich resource for art education.
One of the core strengths of Get Art has been the way it has taken contemporary art and practice into the heart of the classroom. It colonised a vacant space within special educational needs provision, and is a powerful recommendation for using contemporary art to cross all boundaries and inspire staff and children alike into exploring their own ideas and developing their own work.
Leanne Turvey is Education Coordinator at Chisenhale Gallery. t: 020 8981 4518;
e: leanne.turvey@chisenhale.org.uk; w: http://www.chisenhale.org.uk. Contact Leanne to order the book of the Get Art project (£5 + £1 p&p).