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SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
This project involved forty-six 7/8 year old children (KS1/2YRS2/3) from Broadoak Primary School, Didsbury, Mancehster.
The project was based on a Scheme of Work for Religious Education – The Church – developed by Manchester School Improvement Service.
The project had three main aims. The first aim was to communicate to the children the way in which the design of a religious building incorporates and portrays the creed and culture of that religion and how that is expressed in the architecture.
The second aim was for the children to work with their teachers and the project artists in understanding the difference between the singular message of a secular ‘sign’ with the complex meaning of a religious ‘symbol ‘. To help with this they explored the work of artists who have used signs and symbols in their art. The children were introduced to the work of a group of European artists and sculptors who called themselves the CoBRa Group based on the names of the cities they came from. These artists used signs and symbols in their work and were inspired by the drawings and paintings of children.
The third aim of the project was to introduce the children to the values of collaboration in creative working. To illustrate the concept of collaboration to the children they were involved in the main outcome of the project, which was four, stained glass windows, on the theme of Signs and Symbols. When complete these were to be hung in front of existing windows in the school. The design and making of these windows would be a collaborative project between the children, teachers, artists and parents.
The project formed a part of the initial phase of the Manchester and Salford Creative Partnership Programme (CP). This programme had a number of action research aims that had been developed and adopted by each ‘cluster’ of CP schools. The aim of the ‘cluster’ of which Broadoak Primary School is a part is “to use the creative arts to improve understanding of cultural diversity in the school and the local community”.
The project began with a half-day visit to Manchester Cathedral by children, teachers, artists and parents. The visit was organized jointly by the Cathedral Education Officer and the staff of CUBE as part of the Education @ CUBE Urban Learning Programme.
The journey from the school into the city centre was an opportunity for the children to collect examples of commercial ‘signs’ – for example – logos, road signs, etc
During their visit the children were taken on an extensive tour of the Cathedral and their guides explained the symbolic meaning of the building and its contents in response to the children’s questions. Prior to the visit the children had been set the task by their teachers of looking very closely for the parts of the buildings that responded and defined the religious ritual – the alter, the lectern, the font, etc and to go in search of religious symbols like angels, lambs, crosses and doves of peace.
The children listened to the range of choral and organ sound that was possible in a building of such volume. They produced drawings of the various figurative sculptures and pastel sketches of the stained glass windows. Due to war damage the windows are modern and so contain more symbolic than figurative images.
The first two workshops were lead by a dancer and musician. In the dance workshop the children explored their understanding of the sculptures they had seen, the colors in the windows, the space and the enclosing structure of the building. In the music workshop they explored the range of sounds they had heard in the building.
The following four workshops concentrated on the children drawing and painting images based on their memories of The Cathedral, the secular ‘signs’ they had seen on the journey and the religious ‘symbols’ they had seen in The Cathedral.
In the first workshop the children produced a painting of their memories of the visit to The Cathedral and in this painting they were asked to concentrate on a specific aspect of the building that they remembered.
As part of this workshop the teachers and artists worked with small groups of children to produce drawings of different secular signs and religious symbols from different world religions. These were to be incorporated into the stained glass windows.
In the week between the workshops the artists went through the children’s paintings and selected four that could be enlarged in part or in whole to form the basis for each of four stained glass windows. The enlarged images were transferred to sheets of paper that would form the templates for the making of the windows. The different areas of color on the original paintings were marked on the template as a guide to the children when they were filling in the color on the windows.
For the next three workshops the children were divided into five groups.
Four small groups each worked with colored tissue paper cut up into small pieces and pva glue to create a stained glass window, This was done by laying a cut-to-size sheet of clear poly-carbonate plastic over the enlarged drawing/template and filling in the areas of color with small pieces of colored tissue paper stuck to the plastic with the glue. The drawings of signs and symbols that the children had done earlier were photocopied on to clear plastic sheet and stuck with spray adhesive over areas of the tissue paper to provide detail in the finished windows.
The artists and teachers realized from the outset that the color in these ‘stained glass’ panels would fade due to the sunlight when they were hung in front of the school windows. Although such fading was unavoidable with this technique such a medium term economic process was felt to be worthwhile because of the visual impact the panels would make in the school before they started to fade.
The larger fifth group drew and painted an enlarged version of their individual painting unto primed wooden panels that had been pre-prepared by the project artists. The idea for these panels came from the children who had seen similar panel paintings during their visit to The Cathedral.
The panels were to be set up in the form of diptychs in the project exhibition.
> Download
project overview
> Download
sample teaching plan
> See this project in the young person's gallery
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