V&A May 2002
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Interactive Learning in Museums of Art and Design 17–18 May 2002 ‘Interactivity and Social Inclusion: Art Collections + Audience = Opportunities for Creative Learning?’ Claire Ackroyd, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford In preparing this case study for public debate I have welcomed the opportunity to look up from the day-to-day world of gallery education: the setting up of workshops and negotiations with artists, and dealing with numerous inquiries from teachers and educationalists. I hope those of you more familiar with the academic world are equally intrigued to look in on a case study from an art gallery in Bradford, West Yorkshire. This case study tells the story of ArtIMP, a mobile education unit that incorporates art, interactivity and multimedia. Since March 2002 ArtIMP can be found in the galleries of Cartwright Hall, supporting visits from schools and educational groups. To help you understand how this project has come about and the relationship that has developed between the art collections and our audiences I am going to go back a few years and trace the foundations of this project in the ongoing work of the gallery and education team. You will see that both interactivity and social inclusion feature in the story as it unfolds. Background Cartwright Hall Art Gallery was purpose-built, commissioned in 1899 from architects J. W. Simpson and E. J. Milner Allen following a nationwide competition to design a building that embodied three concepts: a memorial, a building suitable for civic receptions, and an art gallery and museum. In May 1904 Cartwright Hall was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The gallery is situated in Manningham, about a mile from Bradford’s city centre, and is in the centre of Lister Park, which has with the aid of a major Heritage Lottery Fund grant recently been refurbished to include a new children’s play area, a restored boating lake and a newly built Mughal garden. The art gallery exhibits a combination of touring exhibitions and permanent displays. Of particular significance is the transcultural gallery, opened in 1997, which shows art works, on permanent display, from the Indo–Pakistan subcontinent alongside the work of contemporary British and British/Asian artists reflecting something of the diversity of Bradford’s communities. The district has a very diverse population drawn from different ethnic backgrounds, including a significant number of British/Asian Muslims, many of whom have cultural origins in rural Pakistan. Alongside this, the district is divided into sharply contrasting socio-economic areas. Gallery education and ArtIMP Over the past years the education team has worked hard to engage a wide range of visitors with the collections, encouraging debate and interaction. I am going to give you just a few examples, to help map this journey. In the early 1990s role-play sessions took place in the gallery: engaging young learners and their teachers in debates provoked by works of art. A popular workshop for 1 primary aged pupils was based on the Victorian painting The Emigrant Ship, by Joseph Staniland, which portrays parting moments on the Liverpool dockside as families wave loved ones goodbye as they leave to find a new life in another continent. This workshop successfully linked aspects of drama, speaking and listening with history and geography, and it was popular with both inner- and outer-city schools. Many students from inner-city schools empathized with the idea of leaving families and loved ones in another continent. In 1997 came both the opening of the transcultural gallery and the completion of the CD-ROM Art Connections: Cultural Links. This featured 70 works of art from across the collections. I have already mentioned the significance of the permanent display in the transcultural gallery, but the CD-ROM made these collections accessible through multimedia. Art Connections was runner-up in the Gulbenkian Award of 1998 for the most innovative education project of the year. It provided a new level of access to the collections for the virtual visitor and presented interpretation and educational case studies alongside more formal information. There are two additional projects I also want to mention. In the Picture was an exhibition for young children and their families, completed in spring 1999. Teachers’ placements were allocated by the gallery to four early years teachers, who worked alongside the gallery team in developing and researching the exhibition. The project also linked with Bradford College, and three student teachers were involved in ten- week gallery placements. And finally Navigation, an exhibition held in the spring of 1999 saw the artist Tom Wood set up a studio in the gallery and also on our website. As his work developed over the weeks in the studio/gallery the work was archived on the website and each week a selection of e-mail questions were answered. The residency was a collaboration with a local secondary specialist arts college and involved four Year 12 students working alongside Tom through the duration of the show. These projects laid the foundations for the application to the DfEE’s Museums and Galleries Education Programme in 1999 for funding to deliver a three-year project that culminated in ArtIMP, a mobile education unit with interactive multimedia resources. The gallery received £112,500 to realize this project, which was to involve primary schools, teachers, student teachers and artists in developing resources to support the teaching of art, literacy and ICT at Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11). This was a significant award and focused the work of the education team on a particular visitor group at the same time as providing the opportunity to build on established partnerships. The project was realized in three phases. ArtIMP Phase 1 involved 16 teachers – two from eight of primary schools – who had the task on their first training days in the gallery of selecting from the collections works of art that would be engaging and relevant for Key Stage 2 pupils. This initial selection has remained central to the project and includes: Zones of Dreams, a giant map of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent by the artist Salima Hashm, who lives and works in Lahore; Bell Metal Lamp, a Hindu temple lamp; and The Heart of the West, an imagined industrial landscape by the English Impressionist painter Bertram Priestman. Each of the eight schools involved in Phase 1 made a gallery visit, which included discussion and activities focused on one work of art. Work then continued back at school, and the funding allowed for artist-led follow-on work. We used a range of artists from the poet Levi Tafari to the visual artist Tom Wood and the photographer Lizzie Coombes. The 2 artists’ role was to encourage pupils and teachers to explore creative opportunities as the teachers made links to the National Literacy Strategy and various schemes of work for art and design, ICT and other subjects. Phase 2 of the project saw an imaginative and creative exhibition of work from the eight schools and artists, ArtIMP on Show. School and family visits were encouraged and the work was displayed in such a way as to encourage active learning. Teachers from 24 primary schools joined Phase 2 of the project and again they received training and planned for a gallery visit, but this time with the evidence from the exhibition to supported the idea of enriching learning in art, literacy and ICT. The Phase 2 teachers planned with a new-found confidence how to link a gallery visit and works of art with learning objectives, the National Literacy Strategy and the QCA’s schemes of work. Phase 2 visits took place during the exhibition and the phase concluded with a series of evaluation half-days for the 24 teachers involved, where each teacher presented a short case study of his/her school’s work. In the discussions during the evaluation days we got some very clear messages about what teachers needed from a mobile interactive education unit: they wanted information about the works of art, ideas, and examples of pupils’ work, and they wanted books and handling resources, and the flexibility to control the use of the resources themselves, but they didn’t want things they could have back at school, such as access to the internet. The education team began to sift out the information for the teachers’ pack, the material suitable for the website and projects that could be developed into interactive digital workshops for the gallery and the ArtIMP unit. Phase 3 involved creating the ArtIMP unit, commissioning the content and bringing everything together. It was summer 2001 and we had about eight months before the project had to be complete. First we made a decision about the actual company who would build the unit. We wanted them to work with an artist to create a unique design, which was something they had never done before. The artist we selected, Bhajan Hunjan, had worked with us before and has a piece of work on show in the transcultural gallery, called One and the Many. She had just completed a joint commission with the artist Said Adrus as part of a cultural mapping programme in Leicester. The finished piece, called Sacred Spaces, was a free-standing stainless steel and coloured enamel structure sited in Highfields, incorporating community information shown on an electronic display unit. Bhajan was familiar with the processes involved in designing in stainless steel and also with the techniques available to colour metals, invaluable in designing the ArtIMP unit. The preliminary drawings for the unit were completed in November 2001 and Bhajan spent a week in the factory in January 2002, finalizing details and overseeing the process of loading her design on to CAD.