Serpentine Education redefines the role of the arts during periods of transition and social change. We connect communities, artists and activists to generate responses to pressing social issues.
The programme is guided by four questions:
How can we work in solidarity with those facing struggles around racism and migration?
How do we care in times of austerity?
How can we survive an increasingly competitive schools system?
How do we navigate an increasingly surveilled and gentrified city?
Serpentine Education redefines the role of the arts during periods of transition and social change. We connect communities, artists and activists to generate responses to pressing social issues.
The programme is guided by four questions:
How can we work in solidarity with those facing struggles around racism and migration?
How do we care in times of austerity?
How can we survive an increasingly competitive schools system?
How do we navigate an increasingly surveilled and gentrified city?
Moving Up is a series of artist led activities which support year 6 children in their transition from primary to secondary school. This resource is designed to give teachers the tools to work with children to express and communicate their feelings about this transition through discussion, images, movements and sound.
Access the Moving Up microsite here:
http://movingup.serpentinegalleries.org
Why
> A positive primary to secondary transition has been identified as a vital part of determining a young person’s development and lessens the risk of falling behind academically or dropping out of school.
At the end of the activities children should have:
> Increased confidence about their individual strengths and talents
> A better understanding of what is positive about secondary school
> Recognised and shared different emotions and developed ideas about how to represent these visually and through movement and sound.
> Developed group-work skills such as communicating individual ideas, compromise and group decision-making.
Key words
> Nervous, excited, sad, ambitious, reluctant, confident, anxious, intimidated, enthusiastic, vulnerable, letting go, looking forward, aspiration, future self, ritual, responsibilities, independence.
How to use the resources
> Each activity is designed to take 1-2 hours. Although you can use them separately, the activities work best when used in sequence.
Start by doing at least one of the discussion starters before doing an activity with your class or group.
This resource by artist Jade de Montserrat resource supports art teachers working with young people to consider the impact gender, race, class, religion, disability, culture, and politics has on our sense of self.
What is it to be Oneself? delves into Afrofuturism and digital culture, using the process of collage to normalise fluid exploratory approaches to the formation, deconstruction and reformation of identity. It offers ways we might imagine liberated futures where everyone can live freely and thrive.
‘Collage is a way to draw together a multitude of materials found in our daily lives. The process of layering and remixing mirrors our fluctuating, ever evolving identities, allowing us to experience them as both fragmented and unified. Collage enables us to time travel, to collect archival material and place it alongside contemporary imagery. It can also be a metaphor for repair and healing.’
– Dr. Jade de Montserrat
The resource features critical questions, creative exercises, sources of support and a short story by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It folds out into a poster designed by Jade de Montserrat which combines a quote from the 19th century abolitionist Sojourner Truth with the Progress Pride flag. This juxtaposition stresses how historical struggles can provide sustenance for contemporary campaigns.
You can download a pdf version below or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.
Cracks in the Curriculum is a multi-part series that addresses themes missing from or misrepresented in the UK school curriculum. It brings together artists, educators and organisers to ask how we can use creativity to collectively address pressing social issues.
Build Your Own Pavilion is a fantastic design education project for young people aged 8-14. Celebrating 16 years of Serpentine Pavilion commissions, we're challenging young architects to design a small-scale model of a summer Pavilion.
HOW TO USE THESE RESOURCES
- Download our teachers’ pack and plan your own Build Your Own Pavilion workshops and lessons around design and architecture.
- Find examples of the pavilions built from 2000-2014, and be inspired by the designers and their designs.
- Find out about the challenge with our flyer or display it in your school – it also includes the prizes which can be won.
- Enter students into the online competition before 9 Oct 2016 for a chance to win prizes and for your students work to feature on the Serpentine Gallery website and national media buildyourownpavilion.serpentinegalleries.org
Take a look at our YouTube channel for further inspiration www.youtube.com/c/serpentinegalleriesuk
ANTICIPATED LEARNING OUTCOMES
Through the workshops young people should:
Understand what a pavilion is, what it is used for and the role of architects in designing the structure.
Understand the creative design process from brief through to prototype.
Develop their creative thinking skills by responding to the Build Your Own Pavilion brief through drawing, 3D Modelling and CAD.
Experiment with a variety of different physical materials to express their ideas.
Develop more sophisticated visual thinking by translating ideas into drawings in four views.
Extend their understanding of geometrical forms and how they can be combined to create structures in CAD.
Evaluate and analyse their own work, that of young people in their group and the work of the world’s leading architects in terms of both function and aesthetics.
Develop the ability to work as a team through mutual support, cooperation and democratic processes.
Expand communication skills by sharing their thoughts about what makes good design, including using appropriate architectural language to describe structures.
Keywords: design and technology, KS2, KS3, 3D Printing, art, creativity, drawing, model making, BYOP16
The Perfect School? is a resource and classroom game which invites children and teachers to explore the transition from primary to secondary school and rethink how schools can be.
The Perfect School? developed following the Serpentine Galleries 2015 Moving Up commission with artist Paul Maheke. Through collaborative dance, drawing and conversation children at Gateway Academy in North Westminster reflected on their experiences of primary school and explored their expectations about moving up to secondary school. Using spaces around the school the children choreographed and performed short dance pieces to articulate their feelings about transition from primary to secondary school. In small groups they mapped out their visions for a perfect school. Their proposals ranged from smaller class sizes, access to school outside of school hours and more art and music in the curriculum.
This resource is developed to support teaching staff working with Year 5 and Year 6 students preparing for transition. The resource contains a poster, a set of cards and a booklet, and is designed to prompt discussion, drawing and imagination.
Please email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org with your postal address for a free copy of the resource.
The Perfect School? is part of Moving Up – a series of commissions bringing together artists, teachers and children to reflect on the transition from primary to secondary school. The projects create temporary spaces where children can develop the tools to support one another and think about how schools could be better.
Teach your students about architecture and the built environment – download our print-friendly Teachers’ Resources and run Build Your Own Pavilion workshops in your classroom! Our free teachers’ resources provide a framework that will take you from exploring ideas around public space through to creating small scale architectural models. There’s ideas for lesson plans for up to 7 weeks, but it can be easily adapted.
Here Is The Place is a resource to support teaching staff working with Year 5 and Year 6 students preparing for the transition from primary to secondary schools.
The resource aims to support children to develop the tools to work together to form democratic communities. It invites children to think about difference, acceptance, trust and empathy through play.
In May 2016, Year 6 children from Gateway Academy, artist Adam James and theatre director Jamie Harper created a game about living and working together, using strategies form Nordic live action role-play (larp). Over the course of a week, the young people visit the Cockpit Theatre, formed groups, created community identities, devised maps and built group shelters. Following the sessions, the children were encouraged to reflect on their experiences of belonging and not belonging and think about how this relates to the transition to secondary school. Here is the Place can be read as a rehearsal for a more democratic form of school and society.
The handbook contains a poster and leaflet designed as a group activity to encourage staff and children to work together to think about this transition through movement, mapping and making.
Please email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org with your postal address for a free copy of the resource.
Here Is The Place is part of Moving Up – a series of commissions bringing together artists, teachers and children to reflect on the transition from primary to secondary school. The projects create temporary spaces where children can develop the tools to support one another and think about how schools could be better.
Barby Asante‘s Countless Ways of Knowing – A Mixtape on Education as a Practice of Freedom, is an invitation for educators in primary, secondary, further and higher education to create safe spaces for people of colour (POC) to feel confident to speak their lived experiences. It aims to open up a space for teachers and students to talk about race and racism in the classroom.
The resource features a series of questions for critical discussion, activities for the classroom and a reading list for further study. On the reverse is a quote by James Baldwin selected by Barby Asante, alongside a still from Asante’s project with sorryyoufeeluncomfortable Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED.
Why do Black Lives Matter?
How do we as educators develop discursive and creative opportunities to support understanding of why Black Lives Matter?
What opportunities are there for young people to critically and creatively transform the polarising narrative around race?
You can download a pdf version below or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.
Cracks in the Curriculum is a workshop series and publishing platform for teachers, which aims to bring artists and educators together to think about how to address pressing social issues in the classroom.
The Cracks in the Curriculum series explores key questions and themes that run through the Serpentine Education, Exhibition and Live programmes. The content for each resource emerges from workshops with artists, activists and educators.
Barby Asante is a London-based artist, curator and educator whose work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and re-enactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing.
Recent projects include: As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence. For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa, an ongoing project that performatively collects stories of Women of Colour, of which an iteration was shown in the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice 2017 and Run Through, a collaboration with architect Gian Givanni which showed in BLUEPRINT: Whose urban appropriation is this?, curated by Metro 54 at TENT, Rotterdam. She is also part of agency for agency, previously working in collaboration with Serpentine Youth Forum with students from Westminster Academy.
Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe‘s Sweet Rebellion, responds to the histories of British sugar plantations and the black activism that contributed to their abolition. It uses art and storytelling to fill in the blanks and build on the narratives of resistance that have been hidden or erased. The resource is an invitation for History and Art teachers in Years 7–9 to rethink the ways we talk about colonialism and its legacy in schools.
The resource offers a series of activities, which look at the histories of rebellion on British Caribbean plantations through drawing, discussion, group investigations and further study. On the reverse is an illustration by Rudy Loewe and Jacob V Joyce, which depicts people who have resisted British colonial rule and injustice.
How can we resist colonial ideas within the National Curriculum and reinsert Britain’s accountability?
How did Britain build its wealth and how does Britain continue to profit from colonialism?
How can drawing and storytelling be used as tools to make visible the people in history who fought for liberation from the slave plantations of the British Empire?
What are the ways we can highlight colonialism as an ongoing issue that impacts people’s lives today?
How can we collectively imagine a future beyond slavery and colonisation?
You can download a pdf version below or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.
Cracks in the Curriculum is a workshop series and publishing platform for teachers, which aims to bring artists and educators together to think about how to address pressing social issues in the classroom.
The Cracks in the Curriculum series explores key questions and themes that run through the Serpentine Education, Exhibition and Live programmes. The content for each resource emerges from workshops with artists, activists and educators.
Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe are London-based visual artists working with drawing, mural painting, printmaking and self-publication. Afrofuturism, black histories, gender and sexuality are some of the key themes which connect their practices and reflect their experiences of being black, queer and non-binary in the UK. Both artists have a pedagogical and community focus in their work, and regularly lead workshops inside and outside of art institutions that are open to the public, as well as sessions for specific community groups. Their practices routinely amplify histories of resistance and nourish new queer and anti-colonial narratives.
Bedfellows: Sex (re) education, is a research tool for educators to develop anti-sexist, LGBTQ+ positive and anti-racist Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). It can also be used to teach sex education as part of Personal Social Health Education (PHSE). It aims to create space for teachers and students in Years 9 and 10 to talk about sex and relationships in an anti-sexist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ positive way.
The resource features a series of questions for critical discussion, activities for the classroom and a reading list for further study. On the reverse is a Humanifesto developed by Bedfellows.
Who decides which bodies are on our screens? Does everything that looks good, feel good?
How can someone make their own fantasies without filming them?
What are the pros and cons of exploring your desires solo?
If there were no penises and no vaginas, how could someone lose their virginity?
How do you know if you’re feeling good?
How would you know if someone else is enjoying themselves?
You can download a pdf version or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.
Cracks in the Curriculum is a workshop series and publishing platform for teachers, which aims to bring artists and educators together to think about how to address pressing social issues in the classroom.
The Cracks in the Curriculum series explores key questions and themes that run through the Serpentine Education, Exhibition and Live programmes. The content for each resource emerges from workshops with artists, activists and educators.
Bedfellows
Developed by Chloe Cooper, Phoebe Davies, and Jenny Moore, co-founders of Bedfellows. Bedfellows is a group of people making tools together to re-educate each other about sex. The tools include a discursive forum to get political about sex called SEX TALK MTG; a queer porn screening with discussion, dinner and dancing called Porn as Pedagogy; a series of workshops for practicing consent and an open-access research centre called Clubhouse.
Octavia Poetry Collective‘s Poetry from the Personal, is an invitation for English teachers at primary, secondary and beyond to re-think conventional understandings of poetry and build strategies for identifying all of ourselves in literature. It leads out of current discourse around migration, movement and identity, exploring the potential of poetry to address diverse personal histories.
The resource features a series of questions for critical discussion, activities for the classroom and a reading list for further study. On the reverse is a collective poem produced by Octavia, alongside a photograph by Amaal Said.
How can we encourage our students to write from the personal to create art that includes and reflects them; art which allows them to delve into themselves and find validation from and within their truths?
What can we do as educators to live by the tenet that every story and person is valid, and how can we make space for this within the classroom?
What are the benefits of a group/class/gathering of minds and ideas?
How can writing from personal experience help students find their own place within existing curriculum poems?
If English is not a first language, how can we promote a ‘third tongue’ within creative writing?
You can download a pdf version below or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.
Cracks in the Curriculum is a workshop series and publishing platform for teachers, which aims to bring artists and educators together to think about how to address pressing social issues in the classroom.
The Cracks in the Curriculum series explores key questions and themes that run through the Serpentine Education, Exhibition and Live programmes. The content for each resource emerges from workshops with artists, activists and educators.
Octavia Poetry Collective for women of colour led by Rachel Long and housed at Southbank Centre. Octavia was created so that women of colour could come together to read beyond the canon, write without fear of condemnation or exoticisation, share openly without censorship and support each other. There are seventeen members of Octavia, they are poets as well as educators, dancers and astrophysicists, making their collective voice zoetic and nuanced. Octavia have performed at Southbank Centre’s Women of the World and London Literature Festivals. They’ve featured in the Guardian and on the BBC World Service’s Cultural Frontline show. Octavia have run workshops at Oxford University and for Africa Writes.
Octavia are: Amaal Said, Sunayana Bhargava, Amina Jama, Belinda Zhawi, Zahrah Sheikh, Anjali Barot, Ankita Saxena, Josette Joseph, Rachel Long, Raheela Suleman, Rhonda Rhiannon, Tania Nwachukwu, Theresa Lola, Victoria-Anne Bulley, Sarah Lasoye, Virginia Joseph, Hibaq Osman and Anita Barton-Williams.