Living History and our Community: Nicki Smith & Dean Gibson Catholic Primary School, Kendal

School

Dean Gibson Catholic Primary School, Kendal

Artist

Nicki Smith, visual artist

Aims 

The project built on the strengths of the Change School programme the school were involved in for the previous two years, centring on
- The development of child-led learning
- Staff development encouraging ongoing reflection and flexibility in planning
- Building stronger sustainable partnerships across the school community.

Process

The Year 6 teacher found an interesting resource which became the starting point of the project- a box full of old unidentified school photographs. They invited all the parents to view their initial display of the images in their classroom. The parents' curiosity and interest in identifying people in the photos added to the research and archiving skills Year 6 pupils discovered through their trip to the County Archives in the following week.

At all the workshops in school, groups of mixed age children worked with their families, studying the photographs, considering what questions to ask each other about their memories of Dean Gibson School. These ranged from how Year 1 children felt on their first day a year ago to parents' and grandparents' memories of coming to school themselves. Groups made sound recordings of the families' interviews and created a range of artwork inspired by the photographs and their own memories.

Children also designed a specific questionnaire for the staff with an individual staff member's portrait attached to their form to encourage participation. eg "Do you like playground duty?" "How many injuries have you sorted out?"

The Year 6 children visited parishioners at their church to show the photographs and share the project. The children received a warm welcome and showed great confidence and care when asking the older parishioners questions and explained about the project developments. Everyone was invited to a project celebration back at school with films, projections, displays and of course, tables and tables of photographs!

Impact

Nicki explains how the project reaffirmed several aspects of her creative practice:
- “Encouraging the children to be active decision makers in their own learning ensures that all engage with the project.
- Inviting parents and community members into workshops can be really positive - all were very supportive.
- Promoting flexible planning with staff gives them opportunities to respond and support children’s ideas.”

Teacher Janet Thorn commented how the process positively challenged her teaching practice, “I was delivering a completely new topic, unlike in previous projects where I was working with a familiar year group and familiar topic. In the past I would have only tried something like this with a theme I was comfortable with. It was great to see where the children's interests led the project and I simply facilitated. The children's enthusiasm also sparked mine and it encouraged us all to do more..”

Reflecting on building community partnerships, Janet enthused, “This has been more successful than I could have hoped. I have attended our local parish church for the last 10 years and now have people coming up to me for the first time wanting to take part in future projects. It has opened our eyes to how beneficial to everyone spending time with older parish members can be..... We are definitely going to look at more ways of getting the children down to church to do activities with our parish members in future.”

Next steps

The child led learning aspect of the project was very successful and this has become embedded within planning and staff are keen to continue to be flexible with their planning in order to respond to the children’s ideas.

Find out more

Email Nicki Smith