Over view of planning the DACA workshop..

Group work isn’t something I’m used to, as when I’m working within weave, the work is all self initiated, we each complete a whole project ourselves, with no group work attached. Overall it has been quite a big challenge working within a large group for Unit X, having to get used to relying on others as well as myself has been extremely difficult, it has always seemed that something has cropped up, myself included at times. Getting everyone together at one time to meet as a whole group has been almost impossible until this last week before we do the workshop, therefore most of the talks have been missing at least one person. I do feel I played a big part in arranging the meetings to try and get everyone together, so this would allow us to form a plan of the day, as nothing really ever went to plan, it’s a relief now at this point as a group we finally managed to organise a brilliant workshop for the day.
Initially we were considering focusing the workshop on the Holi Festival, an ancient Indian/Hindu tradition that involves throwing brightly coloured paint at one another in a massive celebration throughout the county. Relating to this, we decided to have a powder paint fight at the end of the day, to recreate this idea of the Holi Festival for all the children, we thought it would be a nice idea for them to have an insight on other countries important cultures.
But when speaking to Claire about disaster management, we realised that we hadn't considered what would happen if the weather was terrible on that day. If it was raining for example, this would mean that we would have to complete the whole workshop inside. We had thought of covering the whole classroom with dustsheets but came to the agreement that the task probably just wouldn’t work as well and could be a major health and safety matter. This, along with the idea that students from the Hindu/Indian backgrounds may feel patronised that we are focusing a workshop around something that they know more about than we do, this could cause us more problems than what it would be worth, from this we decided to change our activities for the day slightly, and focus the workshop more on the general aspects of colour, with the hope that the weather is nice on the day to re create the Holi Festival, to cover the health and safety side of the matter we wrote a letter to be sent out to all of the parents of the children taking part in the day, to let them know what exactly would be going on during the day, so if there were any allergies we needed to no about or general causes for concern we would know prior to the lesson, we would also be supplying overalls, eye protection googles, hair/shoe protectors and face masks for all the children to wear so every caution is being thought about. Along with everything going on for this day, a risk assesment has been done to cover all areas.

We always had a rather clear idea of the activities we wanted to focuses on throughout the day, however we still need to revise it carefully to ensure we have covered every area that may encounter a disaster in lots of different ways.
Our final plan is to aim to focus our day on colour, as this is a very broad area to focus on, and we could really do a lot with it as well as the children getting a lot out of it we therefore will be able to come up with an extensive range of activities to complete throughout the day.

We are planning on looking at lots of different aspects of colour including the semotics of colour which will lead onto emotions within colour, we want them to do lots of experimenting with colour, involving a range of artist research that they can refer back too along with mark making and development work throughout the day, with a wide range of activities that we as a group have planned, all aspects of colour will be touched upon so that the children get a lot out of the day.
As well as ensuring that the children learnt something during our workshop, we also wanted to inject a clear element of fun, making it a day that they will remember for a very long time, this is why we left the final aspect of colour with in cultures till the very end of the day, when they will see what fun can really be within an art subject.  

At the end of the day we are aiming to gather feedback from the students, for an interest as to what they all thought of the day, but in a more exciting form than a paper questionnaire. Claire gave us many ideas for this, however we have decided to wear plain white t-shirts, and get the children to write their feedback on our shirts. I think this will be a fun activity to end the day on, and will hopefully be a successful way to gather feedback from all the students efficiently, it will also be a way that both the children and ourselves have never given or received feedback before.

 

                                                               Spain's Tomato Festival..

                                                           Manchester's Colour Run..

                                                                 Indian holi festival..

The picture below is of our final lesson plan for our workshop in Daca, on this lesson plan it has everything we need to know including time sceduale, topic infor, activity, resources, and the presenter, helpers needed for a particular part of the day.