GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

teachers from one school for more than a
year and overhauling the entire curriculum in
the process. Sally Tallant explains the radically
innovative approach:
We invited a collective called Ultra Red
into St. Albert’s School, sound artists
whose members are based in nine different
countries. And they decided, because
the secondary education curriculum has
opened up a little bit here, to turn the
entire learning for the school, across all
subject areas, for the whole year, to the
Edgware Road. So, they rewrote the entire
curriculum for the school across history,
geography, English, everything—I didn’t
ask them to do this, they did it… The Head’s
great there, and she said ‘we don’t just
want art, we want to really practice art’.
She’s amazing. So the whole school, all
subject areas, maths, everything, studied
the Edgware Road. And the person who
went into the school from Ultra Red is
an educator at Columbia. By training he’s
actually an ethnographer but he’s an artist.
He was really interested in this whole
process, so that was quite helpful…
What they ended up with was looking at
migration stories and citizenship, which
they started in their geography and history
classes, and then they ended up writing a
libretto, which became the first part of an
experimental opera. And this will be staged
in 2011 on the rooftops up and down the
Edgware Road.... Ultra Red have been in
there all year, on and off. Not all the time.
All the teachers have been brilliant. And
they did something incredibly radical, which
I also didn’t expect (and this is what artists
do that you can’t plan for)—there are
teachers who are performing alongside the
students in the work. And they love it. So,
that project is going really well, and that
takes it into a different level of engagement
for us.
It’s amazing to find schools that are willing
to rewrite the entire curriculum. The artist
did it because he was really interested. And
he did it with the teachers… and we used
the expertise in the school…
Delivering through the teachers isn’t
something I’ve ever tried before. The
traditional method would be that you send
the artist into the classroom, and they do
all this stuff alongside the teachers. Actually
empowering the teachers to deliver the
work, and be part of the project in that way,
it’s working really, really well. Suddenly our
reach is like “foom!” we can literally send
one artist in and work with 2000 kids… And
the teachers… they’re really on board, and
they’re all excited. It’s great.
As examples like these suggest, artintegrated
teaching and learning approaches
can energize and expand school curriculums.
At the heart of this approach is the valuing
of authentic partnerships in creative learning
and innovation.
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 59