The project is about establishing an informal educational program that focuses on art and creativity - and within this, has an emphasis on developing competencies in relation to the creative process, to creative and artistic expression and entrepreneurship in the creative sector. A program that aims to give young adults the space for learning and experimentation that will help them in a process of finding their direction further on, whether this be further education or into work-life. This will be the only art based Folk High School in Iceland and will provide a whole new educational option for many young adults, both from Iceland and abroad. The project is mainly organized by the LungA School and Seyðisfjörður municipality which is also the applicant of the project. The partners in the program comes from seven institutions: From Iceland; Seyðisfjörður Municipality, The LungA School & Iceland Academy of the Arts. From Denmark: Kaospilots, The Folk High Schools Krabbesholm & Engelsholm From Sweden: Performing Pictures a cultural operator/educator. The project has several components that takes place over 1 and 1/2 year. Some of these activities are: - three prototype programs with a total of approx. 60 students. These programs are to test out components for the final curriculum and design. Each prototype will be full-length which means 12 weeks each. - knowledge, and teachers exchange, debate and discussion with the collaborative partners on developing the program design. - Communication, seminar and promotion of this new program. Methodology to be used in carrying out the project: As said before the project consists of four test semester ,12 weeks at a time with various art workshops. Evaluation meetings and processes will be ongoing through each semester, leaded by teachers and collaborators from the partners institutions of the project and the LungA School team. Examples: '- Life journey' process and choosing personal project (starting the personal process of finding direction and establishing personal learning goals). - "The senses" Several smaller workshops that centers around sharpening our senses and sensual perception of the world. - Evaluating, rounding off the program with teachers and projects partners. - Ongoing elements: Throughout the program the students will have time to work on their own projects that they have designed in relation to their personal learning goals. They will receive personal guidance every month and group guidance every second week. - Creative entrepreneurship week (focus on utilizing creative and artistic skills to create new ways for making a living from this practice) On a longer term we see this project opening up the Icelandic educational system for other alternative educational options and that it will be easier for others to follow these footsteps and start programs that focuses on non- and informal learning and capacity development. The specific results and effects that this project will have on the students is that the program they go through will be of a high quality in all the different components and thereby be a strong foundation for the direction they wish to pursue afterwards. On an organizational and European level, this project aims to establish a strong collaborative network, and through the project period there will be much sparring and sharing of knowledge and experiences. We wish to establish a strong network of institutions dedicated to non formal education within the creative sector in Europe. We plan in the future not only to exchange teachers but workshops and students as well. For many years it has been possible for people to travel to Denmark, Norway and Sweden to attend Folk High School which has provided for a great platform for cultural exchange between the countries. This project will contribute to establishing the possibility for people to attend a similar program in Iceland and therefore open Iceland up for a lot of people. It is both really important for the LungA Folk High School to learn from the Folk High Schools in Denmark and other co-operative partners in Europe, and for these partners to see new ideas being brought forth by the new LungA Folk High School in Iceland. Regarding dissemination to a wider audience, the finished program and curriculum will be fully available to everyone as it will be put up for download from the website. This will also feature a description of the development process and descriptions of the parts of the program that is more specifically tied to the Icelandic context. We see this being very valuable for institutions all over Europe that works with creative education. The expected result is a fully tested and developed curriculum based on the tradition of Folk High Schools and non formal art education in Europe. All the stakeholders will learn new methods, get knowledge and experiences, exchange of teachers and students. The plan is to develop special workshop that will travel around.
This project has been about establishing an informal educational program and curriculum on art and creativity with an emphasis on developing competencies in relation to the creative process, creative and artistic expression and entrepreneurship in the creative sector and as a general ability to realize your ideas. The project has been a collaboration between six educational and artistic institutions from various levels in the educational systems in Scandinavia. “What would an extraordinary, artistic, experimental education look like that would provide the students with a strong foundation for their further artistic practice and life in general?” was the question that guided the development of this program and the various forms it has taken and will take. This question does not seem to lose it’s relevance. What has been developed is a program that aims to give young adults the space for creative and artistic learning and experimentation that will help them in a process of finding their direction further on, whether this be further education or into work-life. This project has focused on developing a new kind of curriculum which can be transferred and applied in various contexts. But such a curriculum is not just an intellectual endeavor and in order to base this development on practical experiences, the activities in the project have been concerned with running three test programs at the LungA School in Seyðisfjörður and through this develop both the curriculum and develop a school in which this curriculum is applied. The project has had several components such as: - Three prototype programs with a total of approx. 45 students. These programs are to test out components for the final curriculum and design and to slowly implement the new curriculum at the LungA School. Each prototype has been full-length which means 12 weeks each. - Workshops done at the LungA School by the collaborative partners. This has been done so that the partners would get an intricate understanding of the LungA School in order to qualify the collaboration on the curriculum development. This has also been done so that the collaborators would be able to understand the foundations of the LungA School and the new curriculum in order to bring that knowledge and understanding with them back to their respective institutions. - Curriculum development workshops with collaborative partners. This has been done both while they have been in Seyðisfjörður and during visits from the LungA School to the partner institutions. - Ongoing evaluation, sparring and conversations with the partners on status on the project and concerning the development of the program and curriculum. - An ongoing communication department at the LungA School, documenting everything that has taken place during the test programs and communicating this to a wider audience through text, images, sound and video. This has also served as a way of promoting the LungA School programme and therefore to put focus on this kind of educational program. - Dissemination seminar in Seyðisfjörður where the new curriculum and the findings from the project was presented to an international audience. Generally, the activities of the project has led us much further than we could have hoped for and the quality of the collaborations has far exceeded our expectations. We have been able to both build a very solid foundation for the LungA School and develop a strong, coherent curriculum and approach to running creative educational programs in general. The impact of the project on both local and national scale has also been greater than we could have hoped for which means that we, locally, have become more and more integrated into the life and culture in the community of Seyðisfjörður and that we are already starting to develop another program which will hopefully start up in the fall of 2017 so we will expand with another 10-12 students pr. program. On a national scale we have been in an ongoing dialogue with most of the parties in parliament which led to a decision in parliament in early 2016 concerning the development of legislation for Folk High schools in Iceland. So in this way we have both been pushing for the recognition of informal education and we have become a test platform for this development process which will begin 2017. The response on the program and the curriculum from both external collaborators and program participants has been overwhelmingly positive and we have started engaging in conversations with a range of educational institutions within the field of arts throughout Iceland and Europe that are showing interest in understanding more about how we are working and designing our programs. The field of arts education as well as the file of informal education are in a process of enormous change these years and many of them want to move in the direction of doing things similarly to what we have been exploring in this project, so the dissemination of the project continues.