SCHOOL VISITS & INSET/CPD DAYS
I work with all age groups in schools and colleges, and also on INSET days and CPD for teachers. I've been offering this work since 1991. Much of my work comes through Devon Arts in Schools Initiative and I frequently work with artists in other disciplines on joint projects. I also work outdoors each year with a group of Swiss Baccalaureate students who come over specifically to do this work with me. I'm occasional writer-in-residence at Dauntseys School, Wiltshire.

I'm happy to be booked for single day or blocks of days to work on a variety of projects, including the use of writing in environmental awareness (see below). If you have a project in mind – or even if you haven't but would like to spin ideas with me, please be in touch!

GROUND OF BEING

environmental arts workshops for schools

 


How might we better look after the earth, each other and ourselves? Everything that we know depends upon a complex and subtle web of relationships. It is through the creative imagination that people can become aware of this, and learn the importance of compassion and empathy – ‘walking in another’s shoes’. Drawing on emotional intelligence, environmental awareness and creative expression through words, these workshops help children to experience and explore a sense of kinship with each other, with other species and with the earth as whole.

I have been working with every age group throughout the education system since 1991, and have worked as a poet and creative writer for DAISI since 1998. I'm passionate about the arts and about the environment, have a counselling qualification, and have been poet-in-residence in a number of schools both here and abroad (currently at Dauntsey's, Wiltshire). I've written widely on this and other subjects (see too the journal Writers in Education, NAWE, Issue no 51, Summer 2010). I've been CRB checked. Numerous testimonials to my work appear elsewhere on the website.

PLEASE NOTE that these workshops are not geared to Reception classes, although a variation might be possible. The workshops normally take place on the coast of Devon or Cornwall and on Dartmoor. Days can be tailor-made for different age groups, requirements and locations.

EDUCATIONAL (AND CROSS-MEDIA) WORK

Over twenty years now I have worked with creative writing projects throughout the education system, frequently in primary and secondary schools, starting with my daughter's school Tavistock College in 1991, but also in tertiary education. I've offered workshops too in places as diverse at Oxford University, Emerson College, the Isle of Iona, libraries and museums, for the Arvon Foundation, Dartmoor National Park, on Saunton Sands and Croyde Bay, on Bodmin Moor for Caradon Council, and in wilderness quest work on Dartmoor. Each year I work for 3 intensive days with Baccalaureate students from a Swiss school: we spend a day on Dartmoor, a day at Plymouth Aquarium or at Dartington Hall, and a day at Tintagel castle, all designed to inspire creative writing. 

DAUNTSEYS SCHOOL
2011: I'm just back from my fifth block of days at Dauntseys Independent School in Wiltshire, where I'm currently poet-in-residence. This time, I've taken creative writing into the maths department (the Fibonacci sequence, and probability) the chemistry department (creative writing on the periodic table and on the arrow of time), plus the biology lab (metaphors in relation to photosynthesis, and the cranial structures of omnivores and carnivores[!]). The big highlight was two days with pupils exploring the neolithic site of Avebury from a poet's point of view...

November 2007 (see also below):
Switzerland
I led a very intensive week in Bern, where I gave 11 workshops, readings and/or talks to up to an audience of 60 in baccalaureate colleges, schools, teacher training colleges, universities and for the Swiss-British Society in three and a half days. It was exhausting but very rewarding, and the feedback was excellent. If you would like to organise such a thing anywhere, let me know.

In the winter of 2004/5 I was poet-in-residence at Sherborne Boys' School – to my surprise this turned out to be one of the most fulfilling times of my life. I was given carte blanche to infuse the whole school with creativity in any way I saw fit. I was dropped in the deep end with an inaugural talk to 600 boys and staff on why poetry matters, and whether it should be political. After that I: infiltrated the electronic noticeboard with haiku in between the rugby fixture notes; inveigled my way into almost every department for the purposes of poetry; gatecrashed the chemistry lab to get the students to write poems on the periodic table; put up a Poem of the Week; initiated weekly meetings for The IT Gang (The Interesting Times Gang, from a Chinese proverb); booked in well-known poets and storytellers; worked with the staff on their own writing; collated an anthology; wrote a long poem in collaboration with The IT Gang which was performed, printed on T-shirts and choreographed; liaised with the town library; and generally ensured that we all had a creative time.

DAISI (Devon Arts In Schools Initiative) DAISI has given my some of my most exciting work for over a decade now. Here are some examples

In early spring this year I led some schools’ workshops on Dartmoor as part of a sound art project.

In 2010 I worked with a school in Teignmouth for DAISI; worked outdoors on trails, tracks, rivers and roads at Kingskerswell Primary; gave a day session at the 1000-year-old St Nicholas Priory in Exeter with pupils writing ghost stories; and ran several Inset days for local teachers both in museums and outdoors, offering ways of using the land, objects and sensory experience to stimulate new ways of thinking about the world. With artist Michael Fairfax I offered a day for teachers at Branscombe Mouth on the East Devon coast.

I was involved with two or three projects for DAISI in 2007, involving Castle Primary School, Tiverton (a beach workshop in sublime September sun!), and Bluecoat Primary, Barnstaple (looking at slavery). As well as working with pupils at Barnstaple Museum on the history, natural history and artwork relating to Exmoor and the North Devon coast, I also led an inset day for teachers.

September 2006 saw me starting work on a Children's Trust project in Tiverton and Barnstaple. This kind of work for DAISI is ongoing. This project has an environmental context: encouraging pupils' awareness of and interaction with their local environment. One of the best aspects is that I get to spend time – often in wonderful sun – on my childhood beaches, helping pupils to write poems about the shoreline, tideline and coastline. (AND I'm paid for it! How lucky can you get?) Look at this amazing poem by 11 year old Billy:

I was disowned I was tied up

And washed up

I was lost

I am trying to break free

Owning the thunder and the rain

(I should say that the inspiration was a piece of old knotted rope.) I think if I wrote a poem like that I would retire.

There was a project with four primary schools in Ivybridge on the edge of Dartmoor, in 2005 where myself, a painter and a photographer led workshops designed to inpsire the pupils’ creative response to their town’s history in order for them to produce a ‘children’s heritage trail’ leaflet.

I also worked on a ‘Colourful World’ project in Exeter schools, where we wrote poems and a long narrative to celebrate global cultural differences and similarities.

A piece of mine was commissioned on the element of Earth for another schools’ project instigated by DAISI.

My favourite was a commission in 1998 to write a long poem on Devon for DAISI’s ‘Song Cycles’ project. In seven sections, River Suite follows the course of a Dartmoor river from its source down through hills, past woods, farms and towns to the sea. This poem was then the inspiration for musicians Hywel Davies, Pete Rosser and Philip Robinson to create and perform, with nine different schools, new music. The results appeared on 4CDS, and the full text can be found in my publication River Suite: see Books page. (This pamphlet was shortlisted by the PBS, and is due out in 2011 as a limited edition book with photos by Vikky Minette.)

All these days focused on the attributes of observation, exploration, enquiry and imagination; four things I consider to be key in creativity – as in life.

 
Quinuituk, Plymouth University
Second year dance theatre students at Plymouth University in 2009 choreographed and presented a performance, 'Quinuituk', based on 'poems, tidelines and textures' and focusing on the contant changes of the sea, loss and waiting. Sequences of poems from my long prose poem 'West' were used by the students as starting points, and were recorded read out and 'collaged' by the students.

January, February, March 2008
Feast and Famine
For RiO and Cornwall Creative Partnerships I offered, with two other artists, a series of workshops in the Lizard area and northeast Cornwall exploring community issues, themes and needs. The idea behind the training workshops was to 'invite councillors, teachers, community leaders, health trainers and police to think creatively and co-operatively about the Local Area Agreements and how to implement them in a different way, communicating with people with whom they might not normally communicate and starting discussions and thought processes about the LAA from a different perspective, rather than just approaching them in a traditional fashion. The aim was to explore ways of making the LAA as effective as it can be and uniting the different factions of the community to make it happen.'