PROJECT TITLE: The Future of Transport

Creative Name: Olive Cheng

Creative Practice: Visual Artist

School: Bob Hawke Secondary College

Teacher: Sian Geldenhuys

Year Group: Year 9 Science

Number of students in the class: 28

Main Curriculum Focus: Science

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About our project: The Future of Transport

Teacher Sian Geldenhuys and visual artist Olive Cheng challenged 28 Year 9 Science students to imagine the future of transport. Or more accurately, to think about efficient modes of motion, the physical forces affecting motion and so on. In some ways this series of workshops revisited the fun and ‘enchantment of the senses’ of the early childhood classroom. However, the conversations around the learning and the hands on fun were very much Year 9 level and beyond: the perfect balance!  

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What happened:

The project was essentially a tasting plate of many different ways to engage with learning in a hands-on and fun way, providing our students with options for showcasing their learning INSTEAD of doing a test.

Before any sessions took place we asked our students what they wanted out of the program and they responded through words, a worksheet, drawings and their behaviour. From this initial session, we made a collective poster about what we do and don’t want and generally used this to guide how the sessions would look. For example, students all said they wanted to do more arts and crafts and hands-on learning, they wanted to have fun and to be outside and sit where they like. So we did all of this.

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It’s good different. We normally don’t do this stuff in school. We are learning in a different way. You might be a visual learner and this is a different way of expressing yourself. It’s been really fun. Student

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We tailored these sessions to activities which would genuinely appeal to our students to promote their inclusion and motivate their engagement and participation. We did everything from baking ‘layers of the earth cakes’ to making collages of waves, to dioramas, to drawing the earth on oranges, to rolling cars through paint, to outdoor animal yoga to painting: you name it! Each session offered many different options, activities and experiences our students could use to experiment with ways of showing learning.

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We aren’t on our laptops, it’s good to be off the tech. We are using a different part of our brain that we don’t usually use. I like the freedom in Creative Schools. With this we get to put something of ourselves in the learning. Student

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How did we use the Five Creative Habits of Learning?  

Each week we reflected on the ways that we might already be using these skills, and how they are relevant to our activities and experiences. For instance, in some of our hands-on lessons like building paper planes or rolling cars through paint, students knew it was related to science but they didn’t know quite how. We would use the Five Habits poster to show them the connections between learning and creating.  Making planes and making cars move hands-free help us understand the science concepts more because these activities connect with principles such as how objects move, the forces acting upon them and how some vehicles are more efficient than others.  We regularly got students to pop a smiley face sticker next to the Habit they used most that session, so we could see which ones the students were identifying with and which we could tease out more in future sessions.

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I’m learning about creativity. Usually in Science my mind is confined and we just use certain apps. And when we do art at school, we can be more creative, but we are usually confined to one prop in art lessons. But in Creative Schools it is much more open and we get to explore so many different activities and ideas. Student

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What did we discover?

We could see that the students were genuinely having fun. With some students facing challenges and a lack of engagement from school with some recurrent truant problems and disengagement, we noticed that the students came to class and they actually came to school more often. The days they came to school were the ones we had Creative Schools! They didn’t want Creative Schools to end, they wanted these experiences and this type of learning to continue beyond the official program.

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I didn’t enjoy science before. Now I look forward to it. We are putting our learning together from all the different lessons in Creative Schools. It is helping me understand the science better. Student

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The impact on the Creative/Teacher team

The program helped the teacher forge a stronger connection with what was initially a more challenging class. It helped her bond with the students due to the shared participation in the Creative Schools journey. As a result, she has adopted some of the philosophies in her teaching and has embedded them into her teaching style going forward.

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For me it’s been really rewarding. Some of the kids are focussing on the art but they are seeing the relationship of creativity and linking it to science. Working with a Creative Practitioner has been great. The way we are delivering the lessons is different to anything I would have tried on my own. My motto is to say ‘yes’, even if I’m out of my comfort zone, and I’m really enjoying it. Olive’s mind thinks so differently to mine so it’s been good to have that different approach. Teacher

The creative also found she was pushed out of her comfort zone. However, this challenge was also so fruitful because the only way to connect with these older students was to appeal to their tastes in fun and enjoyment. Once they could see how much fun the sessions were, students warmed up and became genuinely motivated to participate. Some went above and beyond with project output, and others simply relished in the activities for what they were, emerging with some profound and interesting insights about learning and the connections they made in the process.

It’s so cool to see the transformation in the kids who are hard to win over. They are now getting so much out of this more creative process. Holistic learning is so valuable. It’s been a breath of fresh air working with this age group. Creative Practitioner

I did Creative Schools three years ago and it is now deeply embedded in everything we do in English. It’s nice because there are kids that I taught in Y7 who are more open to this approach now that they are repeating it in Y10. I’ve heard them saying to other students who are in the program for the first time ‘wait and see it’s great, you’ll get it.’ It’s had a massive impact. Creative Schools Coordinator

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