Tangled Feet at Tallis

This film tells the story of a week long residency by Tangled Feet Theatre Company at Tallis. The work was commissioned by young people on the Creative Tallis Action Research Group following a long period of research and reflection about creative learning. The group felt that it would be interesting to begin to think about our move to a new school (scheduled for September 2011) and reflect on the emotional and psychological issues around moving home. Tangled Feet are co-directed by an ex Tallis student, Kat Joyce, and had created a play entitled "Home" which has been touring the country in a range of alternative venues. We wanted to see if a theatre company comprised of Tallis students and the Tangled Feet actors and technicians could work collaboratively for a week to create a series of interventions in the building designed to provoke thoughts and ideas about physical and emotional spaces.

"All in all, great congratulations should go to the ARG, for their courage in managing a very experimental piece, the school for allowing it to go ahead and have these seemingly random things going on, and the performers for incredible application and focus. I've worked with schools for over 20 years, and I can think of very few, if any, that have the staff, students and outlook to pull off something like this."
John Riches, Creative Agent

Here is what Kat had to say about the residency (the full conversation can be read on our Tallis Talk message board):

"We had a brilliant time working at Tallis, and I think the fact that we didn't stop talking about it over the weekend stands as testament to what an unusual, challenging, exciting and really rewarding experience it was for us as a company. It was great to shake up the concept of what a residency could be, and to be commissioned and to negotiate directly with the students about what we did and made. We were absolutely bowled over by the maturity, bravery, initiative and positive creative attitude of all the students, which made it possible for us to achieve a really really ambitious cycle of events and interventions. I felt like the normal line between 'visiting professionals' and students' was erased and everyone worked together as a company. The size of the group was just right to allow everyone to make a really significant creative contribution. Things just seemed to happen and order came out of a happy chaos! I think that the Tallis experienced definitely prompted us as a company to stretch our skill-set, and to set a new benchmark for what we might achieve with young people in the future. It's really made me start to think what we could achieve if we put our minds to a longer-term project; in a way I feel like we only just started to scrape the surface together of the incredible skills-set that this group had. We'd love to come back and develop the myriad of ideas even further. And we're also keeping in mind that it would be great to return the invitation and invite some of the Tallis students to work professionally with us in some capacity with us on future projects that Tangled Feet develop."
Kat Joyce, Co-Director of Tangled Feet

We decided to make a mini website about the residency using the excellent Wix.

We are very proud of the students from Years 7 to 13 who took part in the project and especially those members of the ARG who helped to commission and co-ordinate the entire process. They displayed a real maturity and sense of ownership of the learning journey that will hopefully have provided them with a memorable experience and range of transferable skills.

The Curious Minds School Council Conference

The Curious Minds Learning Network held their first school council conference on 3rd June at Columbia School.
The KS2 school council representatives from all schools came together to think about what things support their learning.
Guest speaker Ben Smith (AKA rapper and comedian Doc Brown) opened the conference and spoke passionately to the students about following their interests and talents.

The students then joined in with a series of different activities designed to get them thinking about how they learn best. Students learnt to juggle and build newspaper bridges!
Each student brought a piece of work to illustrate some work they had done at their own school that they particularly enjoyed and understood. These were made into a huge wall and students shared their work with each other.

At the end of the day, students thought about all the different ways they had been learning. They thought about how they like to learn best at school and with their school council colleagues they ordered their ideas.

The exciting and successful day was brought to a close by the Deputy Young Mayor for Tower Hamlets.

Creative Agents Conference

We are delighted that members of the Creative Tallis Action Research Group have been asked to make a presentation to the London Creative Agents about the role of young people in leading learning. The group has been very actively involved in advocating the importance of creative learning in school. They have written and published a Manifesto for a Creative Tallis, attended several staff and Leadership Team meetings and have commissioned a week long residency from Tangled Feet Theatre Company. They are looking forward to presenting their work, engaging the Agents in some creative learning activities and suggesting ways in which more young people can get involved in promoting creative learning in their schools.

Creative Tallis website

One of our challenges as a School of Creativity is to promote creative learning across the whole school. As a specialist arts college, we also have a commitment to sharing resources and ideas with our family of schools. Finally, we are keen to contribute to the national debate about the value of creative learning. Our Creative Tallis action research group has used a blog to keep communication going between meetings so the next logical step was to make a website that could gather together a whole range of evidence about creative learning all in one place. We chose Weebly, the free online web design application, to create the site and we have tried to use or highlight as many Web 2.0 tools as possible in order to demonstrate the ease and value of new tools for communication and presentation. The site has several pages, each with their own function and unique content. We will add to it and change the design on a regular basis to keep it fresh. We have a Creative Learning Forum so that visitors to the site can engage in a conversation with us. We would really like to know what you think about the site, especially if you have any constructive criticism to offer.

Year 7 Connections Day

We've just received the official documentary video of the Year 7 Cross-Curricular Connections Day that happened in April. Angus (Loaded Productions) has done a great job, in difficult circumstances, of capturing the rationale behind the day and the variety of activities that took place. I really like the student self-evaluations which demonstrate just how quickly they took to the idea of reflecting on the main themes, in relation to their learning, using new technologies. I'm looking forward to the Olympic Enterprise Day scheduled for Shine Week in July which has the even more ambitious brief of engaging the whole school!

Storytelling at Columbia 2

Our project kicked off with a grand storytelling day.

Didi Hopkins hosted 3 storytelling assemblies.

Storytelling at Columbia School

Since March, Didi Hopkins has been working alongside us to develop children and teacher's storytelling and storybuilding skills.

Didi is an experienced director and storyteller, more recently working with adults in the business sector. By the end of May, she will have met and worked with every child!

She has engaged the pupils at Columbia entirely and children are challenged to develop stories and dramas.

The workshops for each class, have been co-constructed by Didi, the children and the class teachers. The children have expressed to us a feeling of empowerment and teachers have shared that they are hoping to spread this way of working to other learning in their classes.