I've started a new project within the residency. It's to do with ways of learning and developing and a number of teachers from the school are doing projects and we have meetings and evening sessions to discuss our ideas. Anyway, I've decided that my project is to based around the idea of a 2-way collaborative exchange (if that makes sense). When I began the residency, it was my hope that my work would influence the pupils work, and vice versa. So far it has I believe. To kick off my 'research' I took a group of year 8's, about 27 of them, and after giving a presentation of my work and my influences, I asked them to 'set me some homework', for them to give me instructions for what to do on a blank canvas that I presented to them. Now, I did make suggestions and give them a materials list as I didn't want to do anything crazy. I ended up with an interesting batch of instructions, and I can safely say that this will be an odd piece of work, but this is a test run. They seemed really keen to give me a task to complete, as they are used to being told what to do by a teacher, I'm not sure how it has effected their classwork yet, but they have made visits to my studio which is probably the most important thing. I next plan to do some quicker tasks with different groups.
