Student volunteers ready themselves for the day. Photo: Peter Saltsman.
School Arts project brings art to kids
University students help fill the gap in elementary arts education.
(0)Veronica likes all kinds of sandwiches. Ryan likes sweaters. Rebecca likes painting and drawing.
Veronica, Ryan, Rebecca and seven of their friends are standing in the gym of St. Joseph's A. McKay School in Halifax, but they don't go there. They're university students.
These university students are there for the 50 Grade 5 and 6 students who ran, jumped and screamed their way into the circle with the big kids. Everyone's laughing, and a little hyperactive and a little apprehensive about the new kids at school. So they're playing the name game to introduce themselves - and to introduce the elementary students to arts education.
The university students are at St. Joseph's to run arts workshops from Nov. 17 to Nov. 19. It's part of the School Arts program, a student-run organization that brings creative experiential learning to elementary school classrooms.
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Andrew Bateman and Alex Neuman, then third-year students at the University of King's College, founded School Arts three years ago. They both worked as French tutors part-time in Halifax schools, and saw that there was an opportunity to give their students a kind of education they weren't getting in the usual curriculum.
"School Arts was a resource and a need meeting each other and figuring it out," says Veronica Simmonds, one of the people who took over as co-ordinator from Bateman and Neuman this year.
"So there's a lack of arts programming in schools and a lack of positive young role models for kids a lot of the time. And there's all these young university students who can do something positive in the community but don't have the opportunity. So you pool those things together," she says.
How a resource meets a need
That's exactly how it works. Bateman and Neuman created School Arts as a three-day workshop facilitated by a group of creatively minded friends, mostly from King's and NSCAD University. University students took over a school for those three days, running programs such as drama, creative writing, drawing and sculpture building.
Now in its third year, the program has grown. The workshop at St. Joseph's is just the first of four schools a small army of facilitators will visit this year. And instead of one-time-only events, they'll be working on extended projects throughout the term.
School Arts provides an important service to schools like St. Joseph's that don't give a lot of attention to arts education in neighbourhoods that don't either.
"It's an inner-city school," says Paulette O'Connor, Grade 5 and 6 teacher at St. Joseph's. "In my classroom it would probably be around 70 per cent African Nova Scotian. And for demographics, you're looking at a lower socio-economic background. So a project like this is really good for them to expose them to things. Many aren't in arts after-school projects."
But there aren't many in-school arts projects either. Students get just one hour of art class a week. The same art teacher rotates to several schools in the city to make up her hours.
Fun doesn't need a price tag
Some teachers at St. Joseph's lamented this as a funding problem.
The Halifax Regional School Board reduced arts funding in its 2009-2010 budget by more than a million dollars from the previous year's - a cut of about 15 per cent.
But the School Arts volunteers don't get discouraged by financial issues.
The program doesn't have any funding of its own. Its co-ordinators are working on getting government grants, but for this workshop its only capital assets are some cardboard boxes and a Gmail account.
The facilitators volunteer their time and whatever limited supplies they need.
"It's amazing that fun doesn't have to have a price tag," says Paige Littlefair, a co-coordinator of the program.
Rebecca Roher, another co-ordinator, remembers a project from last year that used recycled material to build structures. When it was over, the students ran around the school bragging about how they learned how to make art out of garbage.
"It was really cute, because that was exactly the point of the workshop and they figured it out," she says.
The "school" in School Arts
Even if it doesn't always seem like it, School Arts is still school.
"We look at the curriculum and we try to pull out points in the curriculum that fit with different workshops," says Simmonds.
One workshop this time around taught students about the history of Halifax and their own school. Another was based on geometry.
"But it allows for different outlets to express themselves, rather than just the normal reading, writing, math," says O'Connor.
As the day progresses, the students' eyes collectively widen. They're talking to the facilitators and getting more hands on. They're sharing ideas.
"It seems like over the three days the kids just open up. You can see it in their energy, how much they enjoy it," says Roher.
The teachers agree.
"I've been around for a while and I've seen lots of projects come into the school, but I've never seen the kids as enthusiastic and as engaged," says O'Connor.
The same can be said for the bigger kids. At the end of the morning, the fleet of facilitators mounted their bikes, talking about the talented, creative children they'd just met and the projects they did.
"I wish I wasn't co-ordinating so I could do this," sighed Littlefair.
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