Teaching Things Differently: Artist Call Out
Overview
The Forge requires two photographers/artist practitioners experienced in working within educational settings to join the team as part of a new Paul Hamlyn Foundation-funded Teacher Development programme – Teaching Things Differently. This new programme aims to use photography as a medium to support the teaching of reading and writing skills within schools. This project builds on The Forge’s previous research work that explored the impact of a photography/creative writing intervention on the attainment of year 6 and year 7 transition children.
The Forge believe that photography is an inclusive medium that offers an exciting pathway for literacy development. Creating and analysing photographs has been shown to offer students alternate ways to communicate their understanding, make meaning, and develop metacognition. In their experience, the use of a visual art-form to explore literacy simplifies narrative craft, making it more accessible to children who do not have a strong history of reading or writing.
The Artist Brief
This Continuing Professional Development and Learning programme will focus on improving the way teachers deliver literacy lessons within primary settings. The programme is informed by the belief that traditional notions of literacy and the way it is taught should be challenged and replaced by a more inclusive pedagogy that includes visual and digital literacies.
This will counter the narrow formulaic and behaviourist approach to teaching literacy through a more open-ended exploration of alternate visual literacy approaches, co-created by the two lead photographers and the participating teachers. Teacher participants will be guided to explore the importance of learning through photography in order to improve pupils’ literacy and creative writing skills, as well as learning in photography, opening up creative opportunities for communication and meaning-making within an alternative artform.