Creative Connections Conference & Launch of Contemporary Art Digital Catalogue
Art educators, artists and teachers gathered in NCAD Dublin on Friday, 21 November 2014 for a conference and launch of the Creative Connections Contemporary Art Catalogue.
The Creative Connections Conference was part of the Creative Connections project in which art educators and teachers from England, Ireland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Finland and Spain explored ways of developing links between schools and pupils in Europe. The project partners used Contemporary Art and digital media as a way of exploring emotional and symbolic ideas, to communicate between nations and therefore learn more about one another’s lives.
Creative Connections Website and Digital Catalogue
Click here to view the Creative Connections Website and Digital Catalogue
Educational Resources
The project has published the following resources on its website for use by teachers, pupils and other interested in these areas of the curriculum:
- A series of “How to...” guidelines for engaging school children in reflection and critical discussion of images that represent their personal and collective identifications. These include a visual survey tool for diagnosing school pupils’ identification with Europe; guidance on setting up online blogs within your classroom and beyond; advice for working in multiple languages and ideas for how to get your pupils asking questions to explore core citizenship themes such as Identity, Mapping Nations, Taking Action, and Cultural Identity.
- Resources for teaching about identity and diversity, human rights, interdependence and interaction in the European context.
- Lesson plans (in all of the partner languages) which provide ideas for helping children to explore their own personal and group identifications using visual and text-based media.
- Case studies which integrate citizenship education content, resources and methods (including a political dimension and human rights) into discussion of visual images.
- An image bank – the Connected Gallery and support materials for facilitating teaching about European citizenship in Art and Citizenship lessons. This includes (i) work by contemporary European artists that explore issues of personal and collective identity, (ii) artwork produced by the pupils in participating schools, (iii) examples of blogs in which pupils discussed their art work and the work of participating artists.
- Reflections and evaluation of working in mixed media for Art, Citizenship and IT curricula (this includes participants in the research and evaluations from teachers who reviewed materials independently).
For further information on this project contact:
Dervil Jordan
jordand@staff.ncad.ie
