/ 21 April 2005

Lessons in play with Creative Voices

Filling two and half hours a week with an innovative arts and culture programme is a lot to ask of many schools.

This is what the Department of Education’s (DoE) Revised National Curriculum Statement calls for. However, a lack of teacher training in the field of arts and culture and inadequate resources have hamstrung many fledging efforts.

To address this need an independent organisation known as Creative Voices was launched two years ago to champion the cause of arts and culture education. It is a collaborative project between the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg and the Royal Opera House in London, Britain. Made possible through the generous supprt of the Donald Gordon Foundation The Royal Opera House’s director of education and access, Darryl Jaffray, has implemented similar arts programmes in more than 20 other countries.

Through the programme, teachers are sponsored to attend weekend workshops where they are taught to incorporate music, art, dance, design and drama into their teaching in a way that will help ignite the imagination and confidence of their learners.

Teachers are provided with a structured programme to take back to their classes and given on-going mentorship and support to make sure that it actually works.

‘It was difficult to teach art because we are not specifically trained as art teachers,” says Grace Maseko, who teaches Grade 2 learners at St John Berchman’s School in Orlando, Soweto.

Maseko and her colleague Selina Tumiso have both been on workshops and say their teaching styles have been transformed.

‘They are given the tools to become competent and innovative facilitators, helping the learners to create an original piece of music theatre. Because it is orignal it gives the learners their own creative voice, through which they can explore their own life experience and concerns,” says Tumiso.

Maseko adds: ‘We’ve realised that teaching art doesn’t need to be about special equipment or anything. All we’ve had to buy so far for our play are a few plastic bags.”

Creative Voices uses playmaking as a way to integrate the different art disciplines into one project. It provides schools with art supplies and also loans out musical instruments.

In St John Berchman’s classrooms, children are currently preparing for the play they’ve created through Creative Voices’s playmaking training. Life-size posters of the principal characters have been drawn and pinned up on the walls and children busy themselves with turning old chip packets into sparkly additions to the set. The children were responsible for creating their own storyline and have been encouraged to be involved in every aspect of the play, which will be performed at the end of the year. Details can be seen below.

‘Around the images of the characters, the children add words describing the character and draw or paste in the kind of clothes that person would wear, and even link him or her to a certain kind of animal. It’s all part of character development,” says Creative Voices facilitator Palesa Rampou.

Rampou and fellow facilitator Mhlanganisi Masoga visit schools on a weekly basis to ensure that assignments are on track. ‘It’s been phenomenal to see how some of the children have changed over the months. Some who have been really shy have opened up. Through projects like playmaking, a child can find new strengths,” Rampou says.

Masoga says he has also seen teachers changing. ‘Some teachers only concentrate on the bright kids, but now they’re seeing that the quieter children also have talents,” says Masoga.

Eighty schools have already benefited from the Creative Voices programme. In order to reach more schools the organisation has increased its number of facilitators and this year introduced three different skills-building courses for teachers of drama, dance, design and music.

Although Creative Voices maintains a relationship with schools that have passed through its programme, Rampou stresses that it is important for teachers to absorb the new skills and adapt them to suit their needs.

‘It is about empowering teachers and therefore every learner they reach so that they all have skills they’ll always be able to use – even when we’ve moved on,” she says.