Why and How? 2015
Engaging children with Special Educational Needs in creating art and cultural experiences
Saturday 21 March 2015 10.30am - 5pm
Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts
£65 / £50 (including coffee/tea and lunch)
Friends of the RA book first
In this conference, we explore approaches to engaging children with Special Educational Needs in creating art and cultural experiences.
This conference will provide a space for teachers and art educators to develop ideas around the nature and value of cultural and artistic engagement for children with special educational needs. Attendees will explore their own creativity while taking part in talks and practical workshops led by a range of experienced educators on a variety of subjects, including:
• Experiencing and making art with visually impaired students
• Collaborative art-making approaches
• Evaluation methods – quantitative and qualitative
• Multisensory materials and techniques
• Interactive gallery visits – ways of looking at art
• Sensory handling boxes – creating sensory collections to support creative and cultural learning
• Long-term and cross curricular creative sessions
Speakers include Lorraine Peterson OBE and Dr Melanie Peter. Lorraine will deliver the key note speech, discussing the current educational and cultural landscape surrounding creative engagement for children with SEN. Melanie will be involved in activities throughout the day and will deliver a talk that aims to evaluate and contextualise the ideas, creative approaches and good practice that we will be exploring throughout the conference.
This conference is kindly funded by GSK.
Further information about some of the speakers and workshop leaders contributing to the conference:
Lorraine Petersen OBE, Former CEO of nasen
From 2004 to 2013, Lorraine was the CEO of nasen and prior to that held a number of teaching posts within mainstream schools in Sandwell, West Midlands. She completed her 25-year teaching career as head teacher of two very diverse primary schools.
Lorraine has many years of experience working with pupils with an array of special and additional needs within mainstream settings. She also has hands-on experience of the issues relating to caring for and educating children with special and additional educational needs.
During her time with nasen, Lorraine was involved in a number of projects with agencies including the Department for Education. She was also a chair, a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator at many national and international events and conferences, as well as a consultant for a number of national organisations.
Lorraine is a Trustee of Ambitious about Autism and the Chair of Governors at Treehouse School. She is also a governor at Chadsgrove School and is currently the Director of the Chadsgrove Teaching School Alliance.
In June 2009 Lorraine was awarded an OBE for services to education and in 2010 she was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Education Research Awards, and in 2013 the Outstanding Achievement Award at BETT.
Since November 2013, Lorraine has worked as an independent consultant supporting schools, local authorities and academy chains to successfully implement the proposed SEN legislative changes.
Dr Melanie Peter
Melanie Peter trained originally as a specialist teacher of children with Special Educational Needs, and has been involved in teaching and research in special education ever since. She entered the profession with a keen commitment to enabling latent creativity to flourish, and this fuelled her in innovating developmental approaches to working in and through the arts. She is widely published, including two handbooks on art and special needs (Art for All, vols 1 and 2, David Fulton publishes), and authored the chapter on Art and Design in Enabling Access (Carpenter, Bovair and Ashdown, David Fulton Publishers). Melanie is particularly well known for her work in drama, movement and dance, and was the education consultant for CBBC’s BAFTA-winning early years dance show Boogie Beebies.
Melanie currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, and since 2008, has been working with the DfE to strengthen teacher training in special schools. She is also an Associate Lecturer on autism for the University of Birmingham, and as well as consultancy in the Arts, she is involved in advocacy work on working with families; one of her sons has autism and severe learning difficulties.
Abigail Hirsch
Abigail Hirsch is an artist and an educator. Since completing her degree in Art Studio Practice and Contemporary Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001, Abigail has provided access and supported marginalised communities and artists to enable their participation in the arts. She has been a key person in the development and delivery of the SEN Schools programme at the RA and has recently presented and delivered workshops at international museums and conferences, including Inclusive Museum (The National Gallery of Denmark, 2013) and Explore! Hands-On! (The Swedish Exhibition Agency, Sweden, 2013).
Abigail’s credo is to promote corrective discrimination and encourage awareness and understanding between people from different cultures and backgrounds and with different abilities, providing support and encouragement to everyone in the community to choose and fully participate in the creative arts.
Paul Anderson Morrow
Paul is an artist and teacher who currently works at Westminster Special Schools as a Lead Practitioner of Creative Arts, working across both Queen Elizabeth Jubilee School and College Park School. He teaches a wide range of young people with barriers to learning such as Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD) Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD) Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Complex Needs and Emotional, Behavioural and Social Difficulties (EBSD).
Paul is a passionate advocate for inclusion; in both practice and within the wider community and is currently studying for an MA in Special and Inclusive Education. He considers that one of the key ways that inclusion manifests itself in his teaching practice is through Assessment for Leaning (AfL).
Harry Baxter
As a professional practising artist, Harry’s time is divided between creating his own art and working as a freelance artist educator and lecturer. For the last ten years Harry has been teaching practical art-making workshops, leading gallery tours and lecturing at the Royal Academy of Arts. In this time he has devised and conducted numerous workshops for primary and secondary schools students as well as workshops for adults, teenagers and children with a variety of physical disabilities, learning disabilities and mental health issues. He has run training workshops for PGCE teachers and staff from Leonard Cheshire Care Homes and he also delivers gallery tours for the general public, groups with specialist needs, corporate clients and competition winners.
Harry is extremely passionate about working with marginalised audiences. During his time as a member of the RA Access team he has helped to devise the 'InMind' program, working with people experiencing dementia, and he has created numerous multi-sensory handling boxes, tailor-made specifically for each major exhibition. These explore artist's ideas and techniques in a tactile fashion, enhancing and enriching the visitors overall gallery experience. He is also a fully qualified audio describer and works closely with our blind and visually impaired audiences at the RA, helping to improve the quality of exploring and creating art within the gallery setting.
Cash Aspeek
Cash has been working with marginalised groups for over twenty years, focusing on adults, teenagers and children living with learning disabilities. She has recently worked with Molly Bretton, Access Manager at the RA, to create a regular programme of creative family workshops for children with special educational needs. Her years of experience working in the field of art and design are reflected in her deep understanding of the opportunities that can be created for everyone through art. Cash recently completed an MA in Inclusive Arts Practice and her research focused on collaborative creative processes. In 2011 Cash founded Redstart Arts. The enthusiasm for the projects Cash is involved in is reflected by both the participants in the group, the public who visit Redstart Art events and the number of commissions the group already has, as well as Arts Council funding.
Jonathan Huxley
Jonathan is a full time professional artist working from his studio in Deptford, London. He is also visually impaired. For both these reason Jonathan has a keen interest in contributing to making art accessible to all. To this end he has worked as an artist educator on the Access Programme at the Royal Academy for over four years. Since studying in the Royal Academy Schools Jonathan has mentored other disabled artists, helping them to find their voice and means to make their art practice viable.
The teaching work he does often informs his own studio practice and has lead him to make collaborative installations in museums and schools. While Jonathan has twenty years experience of being a gallery artist in the commercial art world, he considers that working in education keeps him in touch with inspiring artists at the start of their journeys which is constantly refreshing.
Lucy Ribeiro
Lucy Ribeiro is a practising artist and artist educator. She has worked as a Learning and Access Manager for a wide range of national museums and galleries, establishing access provision and outreach projects to formal and informal groups across the 32 London boroughs. She has over fifteen years of experience co-producing art programmes and projects with SEN groups. She established the National Portrait Gallery's Access and Outreach programmes and has recently moved to St George's Healthcare NHS Trust as its Arts Director, developing programmes and provisions for children and young people within a clinical setting. Lucy joined the RA team in 2012 and works on delivering workshops for SEN Schools and Action Space, an arts organisation supporting learning disabled artists.