SecondaryThe Arts
Give your students a whole new appreciation of art and design via a school-wide art week – Hannah Day shows you how…
A whole-school art week allows you to celebrate students’ achievements through participation. You can focus more on how students can engage with, and support one another, rather than on the evidence they can produce. At the same time, you can encourage students for whom creativity is at the heart of how they connect with the world.
Put simply, an art week is about celebrating loudly the joys and benefits of the arts. Here are some ways of doing just that…
Get organised
Decide when and for how long you intend to hold your art week. If an actual week seams too long, perhaps look into organising a two-day event and expanding next year, once you’ve had more time to plan ahead.
Will there be any budget available, or will you need to organise some fundraising? Will some elements – like organised school trips – involve any additional costs? What will be the key roles and requirements expected of staff once the event is up and running?
Having given due consideration to those areas, you’ll then need to reflect on the following questions regarding logistics:
- On what days of the week will your arts sessions be taking place?
- Will you repeat any sessions for different classes or year groups?
- How many students should there be in each group?
- What is the cost per head likely to be?
Thinking about these sorts of questions will enable you to create an art week timetable, complete with costs and details of how you’ll resource the event.
Where possible, try to offer more options than you’ll actually need, so that students are more likely to get their first choice of activity, and end up in manageably sized groups.
Give it breadth
Make sure that art week is a school-wide project. If it’s the end of year, your art team will have just completed timed assessments, marking and possibly an end-of-year show, so may be quite tired.
Who else can help, and who will be responsible for what? Your art week can, and should be about creativity in all its forms. Yes, include the visual arts, of course – but don’t forget about dance, drama, music, creative writing and poetry.
If you give students a broader range of options to choose from, you’ll be able to spread the weight of responsibility more evenly. This way you can ensure that there will be several different departments all contributing to making the event work.
Beyond that, what skills might teachers from other departments be able to contribute? You may well find a maths teacher who happens to be a keen watercolourist, or an RE teacher who regularly writes poetry in their spare time.
Think big, think small
For some students – those who love creativity, and who feel confident in their creative ideas and skills – art week may be the most exciting week of the year.
For this group, think big. Devise a couple of week-long projects they can choose between – such as:
- painting a mural on a school wall
- mounting a mini theatre production devised by the group themselves
- a group composition that combines the musical talents of a mix of students
Others might prefer to dip their toe into a wide range of comparatively low-stakes activities. For them, a series of day-long options, combined together to form a full art week, could up open up many different creative avenues they’ve yet to experience.
Think workshops for teaching knitting; collage; basic photo editing and more. Without the requirement to produce and evaluate a specific outcome, the pressure will be off, allowing students who might not normally consider themselves as ‘creative’ to find out that maybe they are, after all…
Art week resources
Need some further inspiration? Then take a look at what these providers can offer…
The National Gallery of Art, New York: Curates a wide range of short videos viewable online that can be used as good starting points for various sessions. ‘D.I.Y. Art: Fabric Stamps Inspired by Henri Matisse’ is a particularly good example.
The National Gallery: Here in the UK, The National Gallery goes one better by offering schools access to live, Zoom-delivered sessions right from the classroom, entirely free of charge.
The National Society for Education in Art and Design: The organisation’s website includes a ‘teaching inspiration’ section, covering drawing, design, craft, digital and more, providing a wealth of interesting ideas to help get you started.
Mix and match
Not everything has to be 100% creative. At my last school, we’d offer a two-day photography option within our art week.
Day one entailed a trip to the zoo, where students received tips on how to take a range of different shots, while day two involved a mix of darkroom and digital work.
Look at what’s nearby and consider how the trip could offer both enjoyment and opportunities for creativity.
Enlist some (free) support
Local colleges and universities will always be keen to visit and provide information sessions. But rather than serve up the usual ‘death by PowerPoint’, have them do something genuinely practical.
We’ve previously hosted a variety of sessions from local universities, including ones on stop-frame animation and publishing a zine.
What’s more, they’ve all been free, since they’ve allowed the universities to build much-needed links with us, as a local feeder institution.
Include a careers element
We have a number of interesting people who live locally, and are willing share with our students the details of their creative working life.
Could you organise a Q&A with a local writer, painter or dancer? I remember one particularly good talk where a local illustrator brought in his A Level work.
By his own admission, it wasn’t strong – and yet here he now was, regularly designing album and book covers, winning competitions and even teaching part-time too.
The encouragement he gave in showing where he started, compared to where he was now, was incredibly valuable for our students. So often, we’ll see the finished professional work, while easily forgetting that everyone started somewhere.
Be nosy
Artists have also invited us to their studios. Such visits may necessitate a small group, due to the size of most artists’ working spaces. However, being allowed in to see how and where people work can be truly inspiring.
It can make just the very idea of living and working as a creative person seem that much more attainable.
Add some STEAM
Much of art can be linked to science. Could your school’s physics teachers perform a practical session on how light and colour works?
Alternatively, a chemistry lesson could explore how dyes can be made from natural sources. This might appeal to those students who view themselves as firmly scientific, or at least help them see how all subjects can be linked in different ways.
It could also help to bring on board staff from other departments, who may in turn further contribute to the variety and dynamics of your programme.
Make space for less grand activities
For many students, the joys of learning how to crochet, book bind, marble or applique within the quiet confines of a small group will amount to their perfect week.
Including smaller, calmer groups will allow for the building of important relationships between students and teachers.
These activities can further help to improve students’ dexterity and precision – both of which are vital for any aspiring engineers or surgeons…
Don’t forget to evaluate
Finally, get your students to rate the sessions – out of ten, via a traffic light system, whatever works for you. That way, you’ll know more reliably which sessions they loved and which turned out to be… not so great.
(Also, if there were any sessions that your teacher colleagues found to be especially challenging or disappointing, they can be dropped next year and potentially replaced with more workable alternatives).
Within a few years, you’ll have all this down to a tee, with your art week (or day, or even month) widely considered to be one of the highlights of the school year.
Hannah Day is head of art, media and film at Ludlow College.