“We want to give all children the chance to shine.”
These are the words of artists, Paula Briggs and Sheila Ceccarelli, co-founders of AccessArt.
Since its inception in 1999, AccessArt the online visual arts resource has been committed to promoting and disseminating the fundamentals of art-making to all members of the community via a comprehensively interactive site. The AccessArt website features a host of invaluable mini workshops for art makers, children and teachers; and indeed anyone wanting a way-in to the nitty gritty of how to make art. The online resources cover art forms as varied as dance, photography and installation art and have been designed primarily for school-age children ranging from seven to sixteen years of age.
Briggs and Ceccarelli, graduates of The Royal College of Art Sculpture School first started developing the site in 1999 with a grant from the Department for Education and Skills, DfES. As artists and educators they quickly discovered the dearth of resources aimed at facilitating the actual creation of art at a hands-on level. We “…recognised the need for a ‘place’ where ideas relating to visual arts teaching could be shared and disseminated and realised that there was scope for creating and delivering a visual learning experience via the Internet.”
The site was designed to be an ever “evolving collection of visual arts learning resources with free-to-access modules available to all,” says founder Paula Briggs. ”The…animated online workshops enable learners and educators to directly access ideas based upon artist-led teaching approaches. The site is very well used by pupils, teachers and home users across the UK and overseas.”
The AccessArt site offers a range of resources including; the free mini “how to” online workshops on drawing, photography, video, dance, installation art, sculpture, colour, and the impressive Immersive Learning Space. It also provides excellent teacher’s notes, pupil worksheets and explanations of techniques, tools and materials. Printer-friendly PDF’s are available for purchase, for use in the classroom, home or wider community. And the AccessArt Shop and Resources Centre are linked to the Amazon site.
Visiting the website itself is an adventure. The module on Colour is entitled; Red, Yellow and Blue. In a whimsical, informative and experiential way it explores the fundamentals of colour theory. The module is beautifully designed for the use of children as young as three years of age. The colour module does not require the child to digest a lot of abstract information about colour theory, but seeks instead to create a colour event. What the viewer experiences is the particularity of three individual colours and then what happens to those colours when they are mixed to make new colours. There is more than just a hint of magic at work here.
Above a blue sea, a red plane flies over the yellow sun and produces an orange sunset. The red cut-out car drives across the page and a blue bucket pours blue paint over the car. The blue paint merges with the red car and we witness the miracle of red and blue becoming purple. A child’s voice, subtitles and other atmospheric sounds “explain” what is happening in each animated sequence. Each module’s presentation is richly layered in terms of its imagery, words and sound; which independently address the senses so that visually and hearing impaired web users can also experience what the site has to offer. Paula Briggs comments that the aim was to create a site where, ” All resources and services within it are fully navigable by visually, hearing or mobility impaired users. And beyond this… that all users can access a richly textured, dynamic and inspirational site.”
It’s difficult to fully describe the content without visiting the site and doing the workshops. AccessArt has not only created a wonderful online art portal for art lovers at every age and stage but it has also succeeded in pushing the envelope in terms of making people think anew about what art actually does. For instance in the Drawing module, “Thinking, Looking and Drawing” are noted as the fundamental skills required to draw. The drawing page explores how to think about drawing as well as how to make a drawing. Each subsection sets a task which is as much about intuition and perceiving the world, as it is about technique. The gentle accumulation of information and tasks makes one realise that drawing is actually a very complex human activity. There’s nothing vague about it and eventually drawing is revealed to be a vital tool in forging a relationship with what we see and how we see.
Their latest initiative, the Immersive Learning Space Project – (aimed at young people between the ages of 12 and 16) is inspiring thousands of teenagers and teachers every week. Biggs explains, that the question of “When, where and how does learning happen best?” was central to its development. “As was the full participation of teenagers throughout the project. The starting point being their own experience of space and the built environment. The ‘inspirers’ -creative adults – and the ‘explorers’ – creative teenagers, worked alongside each other.” This included architects, dancers, sculptors and digital artists working with young people in order to pilot the new teaching and learning ideas. “The digital resources have encouraged teachers and schools to adopt appropriate teaching strategies for young people whose natural way of learning is by doing and seeing. The hope is that the project informs future curriculum making policy and encourages a space within the curriculum which recognises the importance of this type of learning, and the transferable and creative outcomes to which it can lead.”
The resulting website “validates learning through ‘active doing and seeing’ and is packed with examples of learning at its most exhilarating. It has been enthusiastically received by teenagers and teachers across the globe. The project employs the power of the web as a visual and aural tool to advocate the importance of time, space and place for creative action to take place in the physical world. It places inspiration over education, and searches for new models to engage and motivate the learner” says Paula Briggs
Through practical workshops and events held “beyond the school gates, brainstorming sessions, one-to-one conversations and finally the co-creation of the digital space itself. The process embraced a diverse range of practices, professions and shared interests. The online Immersive Learning Space is not a linear, logical pack of lesson plans with reliable outcomes, but a dynamic collection of starting points, stimuli, considerations, processes and diversions with which schools, home-users and community groups can engage on their own terms. It is a celebration of teenagers’ creativity.”
The Arts Council and South Cambridge Shire District Council have also supported AccessArt’s work. The website www.accessart.org.uk carries no advertisements and is available free to all users. AccessArt has won a host of awards including the Guardian/Becta Educational Web Site Award, Whole Site award, a School Zone site award, Topmarks Excellent site award and 24 Hour Museum’s website of the week on several occasions.
Interestingly visiting the website’s feedback page, where site users (from every walk of life) share their unabashed pleasure in the art tutorials and express their gratitude for such an important resource; is where the heartfelt expression of how important art really is can be found.
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