Nicole Gildea
NGildea@aberdeencity.gov.uk
01224 814736
The CreativiTEA Rooms were a series of bespoke events in Aberdeen exploring creativity in education, providing stimulating environments that promoted and facilitated peer knowledge exchange in this area. CreativiTEA Rooms provided a framework for practitioners of all levels of experience, from a broad range of relevant fields, to explore and engage in conversation around many aspects of creative learning. Some sessions were facilitated; others were open discussions around a theme or conversation prompt. CreativiTEA Rooms also ran daily during the Arts Across Learning Festival 2014, bringing creative and education practitioners together in productive conversation in a bespoke tea rooms environment.
2013/14. CreativiTEA Rooms facilitated workshops at Aberdeen’s Integrated Children’s Services Conference and at Aberdeen Learning Festival, with creative challenges and drop in CPD workshops highlighting the potential of combining a teacher’s toolkit with an artist’s toolkit to achieve high quality arts education. CreativiTEA Rooms daily during the Arts Across Learning Festival, bringing creative and education practitioners together in a bespoke tea rooms environment. CreativiTEA Rooms also explored creativity across the curriculum with student teachers at the University of Aberdeen, and through the CLD PgDip offered by the University with workshops which explored the role of an artist in partnership delivery.
Creative Learning wanted to explore creativity in education in a stimulating way, in unique environments, with a focus on both local and national contexts. During the Arts Across Learning Festival in particular, a vintage tea rooms space was carefully constructed for teachers, artists, cultural providers and students of art and education to meet up, engage in conversation and exchange knowledge, skills and ideas. Throughout the CreativiTEA Rooms series, a relaxed aesthetic was balanced by structured conversation starters and more formally facilitated sessions with the aim of delving into questions of quality, approach and connecting to the curriculum through arts education.
1 Artists from across Scotland and teachers, cultural providers and students of art, education and community learning in Aberdeen City were all impacted by engaging with the CreativiTEA Rooms, either on a drop in basis or through attending one of the workshops or facilitated discussion sessions. A CreativiTEA Rooms blog also documented and shared some of the discussions in order to reach a wider audience.
The project was coordinated by Creative Learning at Aberdeen City Council May 13, 2014 3:40 PM and delivered by Creative Learning and a range of creative and education
practitioners.
1 The Tea Rooms extended both the reach and the profile of the Creative Learning team both locally and nationally. It utilised a format we have not tried before over such an extended period. A significant amount of Creative Learning’s creativity in education programmes to date have seen the delivery of high profile conference style events that have reached a wide range of participants across different sectors. The CreativiTEA Rooms facilitated focused smaller significant discussions of depth, engaging directly with selected groups to nourish enthusiasm, generate discussion and ultimately generate ideas to further the creativity agenda across learning contexts in Aberdeen.
Participants were encouraged to develop core creativity skills through both the open and the more structured workshops and discussions. Sessions stimulated constructive inquisitiveness around creativity in education, bringing practitioners from the fields of art and education into contact in productive conversation and sharing of knowledge in this area, across a broad range of relevant topics. Some sessions were focused around practical creative activity, with discussions developing from this, and some involved group work and problem solving exercises directly related to the real work of delivering creativity in education and developing thinking around creativity in education contexts.
discussions were inspiring and practical skills were also shared between practitioners.
workshops, sessions and discussions were carefully facilitated and supported as appropriate, to include everyone’s voice who attended,
whatever their level of experience.
through group work, active sessions and the developing of networks of practitioners, informally and formally and both locally and nationally.
Artists, students and teachers who attended gave feedback through recorded evaluations to record impact and areas for future development, including: “An opportunity to share ideas and practice with other artists. New contacts and potential future collaborators! Interesting conversations that twice continued well into the evening. Oh, and nice cups of tea and cake.” “It was a great opportunity to meet others and discuss professional issues in an informal environment. I also attended Tracey Smith’s session which was useful and good that it involved a more structured activity with an opportunity for group discussion.” “Great to speak about opportunities as well as ways of overcoming issues…with applying new and inspiring learning experiences for pupils and teachers.”
