This week, I had two options for my Friday night: the birthday party of a much-loved colleague at Katzenjammers in central London, or a CPD event at my local library focusing on creative reading strategies. Technically, I could have attended both, but even the much-loved colleague nodded indulgently when I said I ‘might make it’ to her birthday bash. At 7.5 months pregnant, bedtime is an exhausted 8:30pm, nightly wake ups average around three – once for the toilet, once for parching dehydration and once for a hot flush. Who was I kidding? If I wanted to have a Friday night, it would be with my one-glass allowance of free wine at Merton Arts Space.
The twilight session worked beautifully in that my husband works in an office pod just upstairs of this great community space, familiar with the children and babies that attend their various story time and arts events. After collecting my 18 month old from nursery, he sat with me surprisingly calmly during the introduction to the event, was served dinner from his father’s work microwave and then got a bit over-excited about a cold urn and its plug before being picked up by dad to be taken home to bed. This all gave me the chance to talk to Anna and Gwen, the facilitators and learn more about their educational roles with libraries and schools in Mitcham and Wimbledon, as well as their experience as art teachers and with institutions like the Royal Academy of Arts. This formed some great connections that could potentially benefit my own school during our Activities Week, or as part of our Duke of Edinburgh programme.
When my son was picked up, I was left with an unusually independent and therapeutic evening to enjoy the workshop, which focused on using visual arts to engage students in literacy. The majority of the attendees were primary school teachers from one of our feeder primaries, which was a fantastically unexpected additional networking opportunity. As Gwen introduced us to artists such as Barbara Kruger, Bob and Roberta Smith, Jasper Johns and Christopher Wool, my brain started whirring, and I could immediately see how these bold, controversial typographers and graphic designers could make my KS4 English lessons more exciting – from building debate for Language Paper 2 around Barbara Kruger’s statements, ‘I shop, therefore I am’ or ‘money can buy you love’, perfectly linked with themes explored in An Inspector Calls – to memorising quotations and exploring the connotations and importance of language and semantic fields in any of our set texts.
For my Ignorance and Want lesson, though, I am going to ask students to focus on just one word that describes these creatures, or the contrasting semantic fields that describes what they are and what they are not, for an entire period. Then, I’m going to ask them to justify their colour, texture and font decisions to explore the connotations and significance of these words as Gwen and Anna asked us to do at the workshop – a creative and calming approach to language analysis, as appropriate for high ability students, as it is for students for whom literacy is a significant barrier to learning.
With a demanding toddler, working full time and this far on in pregnancy, there’s not a great deal my brain can do at the moment, but this was such a peaceful and focused workshop, free from the high-alert status so familiar to many parents. I had the headspace to calm down at the end of a long week, but also to allow my mind to wander creatively in a way that will benefit my students over the coming half term before I leave.
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