Community Arts: Examples of 4 initiatives
Below are examples of four Community Arts projects supported through grants offered by the Catholic Education Office Melbourne (CEOM). These examples provide some ideas about how schools can use the arts as a vehicle for enhanced family / community engagement.
St Mary Magdalen’s School, Chadstone
The Community Arts Project enabled us to engage our student, parent and parish community in a meaningful and valued way, through the sharing of their skills and talents to enhance their connectedness to the community and build strong authentic partnerships.
Through negotiation with the students, we developed an Inquiry Unit, ‘I Dream My Dream’, that became the foundation for our Community Arts Project. This was instrumental to the students becoming the key drivers of the project.
As a step towards discovering the talents of the community, involving them in the life of the school and tempting them to be part of the Community Arts Project, the parents were personally invited by their children to share their skills and talents in the classroom. The families, whose time was limited during school hours, were interviewed by their children at home about their skills and talents. The report of the interviews was taken back to the class group. This approach ensured that all families had the opportunity to be involved. The response was overwhelming. Parents shared skills such as yoga, jewelry making, Sudanese quilt making, farming and nursing. Students gained information and affirmation about their families which led to a celebration of rich diversity. The children were excited about their family being involved and about sharing features of their culture.
The students then began the planning phase for our beautiful wall mural, ‘I Dream My Dream’ - a communal display of their dreams, some of which were dreams for a future in Australia. As a result of the previous activity, we had enormous enthusiasm from parents to be engaged in the creative phase of developing and creating the mural. The sense of welcome they had experienced in sharing their skills had translated into confidence they now felt to participate in this arts activity.
A huge bonus to the success of the project was that our artist is a parent at our school. She was instrumental in speaking with parents and inviting them to work alongside each other to ‘create’ with their children. The artist used her skills not to complete the mural herself, but to expertly guide the children and parents and assist with the dimensions and translation of paper designs to the larger scale mural.
Much of the mural creation was done during school hours, but to ensure all parents had the opportunity to work on the project, we held three twilight evenings. This catered for parents who were unavailable during the school day.
Our mural is now close to completion, however, the journey we have taken and the benefits achieved continue to grow. Our artist continues to work with parents, students and staff on a weekly basis and our new Prep parents have also become involved. The mural courtyard location has now become an inviting, colourful hub for parents to gather and chat. The children love to locate what they and their family have contributed to the mural.
Parents are still offering to come and work with students and as a result of the mural, parent friendships have developed. There is community pride and celebration for what has been achieved. The CEOM Community Arts project has invited us to think differently about the nature of family involvement and to develop an authentic opportunity to promote student and community wellbeing.
St. Paul Apostle South School, Endeavour Hills
Based on our School Improvement data, our goal was to increase parent satisfaction. We gathered parents to explain our goal and we collaborated with them to decide how we could use the Arts to build relationships. It became evident, through discussion with them in workshops, that telling their story and sharing their culture would be an enjoyable way of getting to know each other.
With deliberate and careful planning, parents came together in workshops and shared their story through discussion and drawings. They then shared the drawings with their children who went through a similar process during their Art lessons. Each family then produced a square of a quilt during family workshops at the school. Thus, the quilt was used as a vehicle for our families to gather, be engaged and build relationships.
Our data at the end of 2010 told us we had indeed succeeded in increasing parent satisfaction. The success of this project is not the quilt, but the increased parent participation in our school. Parent helpers across all areas of school life have increased; the Parents and Friends group has increased in number and in its capacity to share roles among the parents. We are thrilled that attendance at celebrations has also increased.
Holy Eucharist School, St Albans South
Holy Eucharist received a CEOM Student Wellbeing Community Arts project grant at the same time beginning the journey in the ‘Smarter Schools : National Partnership – Family School Partnership’ initiative. This allowed for the Family School Partnership Convenor and the project leader to work together linking the two projects and encouraging community engagement through the arts.
In a staff meeting, the project leader facilitated discussion and exploration of a medium and theme to be developed with the community. The theme ‘Common Threads’ was chosen, the double meaning allowing for the obvious, textiles, but also what is common amongst the community of Holy Eucharist, St Albans.
A community artist was employed to assist with the project, and over a series of Saturday afternoon and after school workshops, family members came together to develop pieces which were then collated to form the ‘Common Threads’ textile wall hanging. Concurrently in their art classes children were also exploring the medium of textiles which were used in the hanging.
During the workshops, at which a number of staff attended, a meal was shared, new parents were welcomed and music was played. The buzz of conversation grew in intensity as people weaved, sewed and experimented with colour and texture. Poetry writing, fashion design and story-telling were unexpected off-shoots of the project. The families involved in the project seemed transformed from the experience. New relationships had formed within the community between families and staff members and personal confidence had resulted from this authentic engagement with the school and from the sense of belonging the project had created.
Sacred Heart School, Diamond Creek
One of the goals identified in our last school review Annual Action Plan, was to further develop connections between the school, parish and wider community. Due to our location, this population is drawn from a rather large geographical area. This factor can present a challenge when attempting to encourage parents to become more involved in the school community.
The Community Arts grant, along with our own commitment, made the ‘Fairytale’ wall hanging possible. Through this project, the arts were explored as a vehicle to involve family and parish members within the life of the school. It was hoped that providing an arts-based project may help to entice members of the school community who had perhaps been reluctant to be involved in the past.
An artist was engaged to coordinate the felting process whilst both the Visual Art teacher and the Student Wellbeing Leader were responsible for getting the project out into the school community and encouraging involvement. All staff and interested parents were made to feel comfortable with the process through workshops prior to the children’s involvement. It was through these workshops that some of the components for the wall hanging were made. Staff members were able to increase their skill base and had a fantastic evening learning how to felt.
Several parent workshops were run and it was through these workshops that a team of parents became involved in the development of the wall hanging. They were able to make individual pieces of felt, contribute to the design through collaboration with the teachers and artist, as well as assist with the many hours of stitching after the felting process was complete. Every child in the school was able to make at least one piece of felt that was incorporated into the final product. They also made lots of flowers that will be used in our next wall hanging.
There was certainly a lot of hard work and effort involved in the process, and although initially the number of parents and grandparents involved within the classroom were quite small, after the first few weeks the school grapevine did seem to start talking. In the end we were very pleased with the level of involvement from parents and grandparents. What we were most thrilled about was that we were able to re-engage several parents whose involvement over the past few years had dwindled, and we saw parents and grandparents that we had not seen at the school before. Throughout almost every session the children were able to work with a parent or grandparent and in fact, we are now lucky enough to have one of those grandparents still assisting every week in the Art Room.
Whilst the school community was delighted with how the final wall hanging turned out, we were equally or perhaps more pleased with how the process of making of it, has been able to increase apparent connectedness and willingness to be involved in the school. The Parents Association has been revitalized and is making big efforts towards building the social life of the school, lunchtime clubs have been established with parents having volunteered to assist with the running of these and our new parish priest has established an ‘Open House’ afternoon at the parish that is being well attended. As a staff we feel that this Community Arts Project has impacted positively within the school community.
