Wearable arts collaboration: Pre-planning
CP1002
After studying Fashion Design in the same intake at Wellington Polytechnic, Barbara and Kylie had worked in different areas before meeting up again at Wellington Teachers' College. The friendship established during this time has continued over the years and enabled an ongoing collegial relationship. This support proved particularly valuable when Kylie and Barbara, as first-year teachers in Wellington, were the only two beginning Textiles teachers in the city.
The two worked closely together during their first few years of teaching, meeting during every school holiday to discuss their planning and teaching strategies, and to swap ideas.
"There was paper everywhere as we wrote up ideas and assessment schedules for our classes," says Barbara.
During these early years they found it helpful to work on some joint projects which they adapted to suit their different schools, and which subsequently had different outcomes.
In addition to these planning meetings, Kylie and Barbara met regularly to share what they'd done in class, to consider how their individual or shared units had worked out, and to examine each other's examples of student work resulting from the units.
Barbara started working as an NCEA assessor in Design Technology and some time later Kylie also became involved as an assessor (at this stage the curriculum had changed to Technology). An advantage of working on the same assessment team, notes Barbara, was that it provided lots of travelling time in which the two of them could discuss their teaching and how the student work they saw related to their own approaches.
Although, as they have gained in experience, Barbara and Kylie haven't needed to plan together, they continue to meet at least once a term to catch up and discuss their teaching. They also keep in contact via email to share ideas and discuss any problems. Barbara says that if stuck, they'll help each other out: "Although we have different styles of teaching, experiences, and unit outcomes, we're on the same wavelength."
In 2006, and again in 2007, Barbara hand-picked two students to create a wearable arts costume for display in the front window at Te Papa. The students had to complete their costumes by August in order to have them displayed at the same time as the World of Wearable Arts show in Wellington (see the news article).
In addition to creating the costumes, the students had to install their work in one of the main Te Papa display windows. Barbara had discussed the project with Kylie, who volunteered to share her expertise in creating shop window displays to help the girls. She discussed her experience and specific examples of work she had done in this field, and advised them on how best to approach such a challenge – giving them tips on the characteristics of a good window display such as visual effects, materials, lighting, and distance.
The Queen Margaret/Te Papa partnership proved very successful, and in both years the school received positive comments from the public about the quality of the girls' work. Barbara and Jan Morris, Te Papa Store visual display manager, agreed to continue the partnership in 2008.
Barbara identified Year 13 student Kay Leary as possessing the knowledge, skills, and time management required to accomplish such a project, and they agreed that Kay would work on this as a whole-year assignment. Barbara met with Jan to discuss the project and how it would progress with just the one student. She suggested that this could be an opportunity to open it up and involve students from other schools, and proposed that four schools participate in the project with each responsible for one of the four main Te Papa windows.
Jan agreed that it would be easier having more than one student involved, and that it would be good for the public to see work from other schools, but decided against working with four schools. She was concerned about potential difficulties arising from dealing with a lot of people, especially as she wouldn't know how reliable other students might be in completing quality work to the deadline. Jan decided to limit the project to two schools, and as Barbara had discussed Kylie's teaching in detail over the years and knew what her students were capable of, she recommended that Wellington High School be included.
Te Papa formally invited Wellington High to work on the wearable arts project and Kylie selected two students, Megan Baxter and Ellen Gazdowics, who, she says, had both done really well in Year 11 and were working successfully in Year 12. She decided that as mature, high-achieving students they would be good candidates, and could work successfully with a student from another school. Kylie incorporated the project as a two-term unit in the students' programme – this enabled them to build on the wearable arts work done in a previous unit when they had created mannequins dressed in paper costumes.
Kylie met with Jan to ascertain Te Papa's expectations and notes that it was a privilege to work with the museum which usually only takes the work of practising artists and was taking a risk that another college's students would also be able to "pull it off".
The partnership between the two schools would entail the students working independently on their projects, but cooperating in terms of theme. Kylie and Barbara would update each other throughout the project duration on how their students were doing, and the students would organise to contact each other and discuss their progress.
Ellen and Megan would present their work for NCEA assessment in Achievement Standards 2.1 (conceptual design), 2.2 (one-off solution), and 2.7 (skills, etc). Kay would submit her work for assessment in Achievement Standards 3.2, 3.6, and 3.7.