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Serpentine Galleries

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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
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MOVING UP

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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.
The Perfect School? Classroom Game for Transition
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The Perfect School? Classroom Game for Transition

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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.
Here Is The Place: Transition Resource for Teachers
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Here Is The Place: Transition Resource for Teachers

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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.
Cracks in the Curriculum Resource 3: Barby Asante, Countless Ways of Knowing
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Cracks in the Curriculum Resource 3: Barby Asante, Countless Ways of Knowing

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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.