Evaluation as Intervention: Methodologies Towards Curriculum Transformation

In this article, Javiera Sandoval Limari, Project Curator of ‘Liberating the Curriculum’, offers insight into the structure and ethos of LTC, a programme that emphasises practices of evaluation and care for partnerships as a means of sustaining projects long-term and meaningfully furthering their impact. She describes how Cubitt’s working practices manifest through the programme, and the importance of effecting practical change in the daily lives of teachers and students.

Liberating the Curriculum (LTC) started from conversations between Joe Omotesho, who is the Head of Art at Arts and Media School Islington (AMSI), Jasmine Bhanji, Artist in Residence at AMSI, and Lydia Ashman, the Education Curator at Cubitt. They started to develop it from a previous programme called ‘Reclaiming Islington’ – which held two projects: Block C at AMSI and the Civic Fellowship. Cubitt secured funding for three more years for the Civic Fellowship, and Block C shifted to become ‘Liberating the Curriculum’.

In Block C, there were three resident artists, Niki Kohandel, Michael, and Jasmine Bhanji, as well other artists that did some work during this time, such as Meera Shakti Osborne.

The original programme was mainly focused on what happens when the artist is in the school, using the same space as students. In our case, located in a disused technology and design space repurposed by Cubitt.

The artists in the space had the freedom to do their practice there, and they also started connecting with the school, during lunch activities or after school. They then developed three projects with a public programme with Jamie Hammill and Sam Castro, which was about connecting all these resources that the artists had built with the students and the teachers, to see what students thought about art, which was very interesting.

That kind of builds up to ‘Liberating the Curriculum'... Because of these conversations between Jasmine and Joe, they started to question how the artist can actually intervene in the curriculum, but not from a perspective of lack, but from a place of support and uplift. And I think that is amazing. It's not that Joe thinks that something has to be radically changed, but it’s that she, as the Head of Art, recognises that there's only so much she can do because she's a teacher...

Joe, and Zealah Anstey (the art teacher), then worked to develop units that challenged the canon of art education, based on the curriculum that Joe's been building with other groups of art teachers. The art teachers had been building new units, which they wanted to improve and test. That's where ‘Liberating the Curriculum’ comes in. 

The first half of 2025 has been spent building the team, because it takes time. A new role, the Learner in Residence, was also something that we needed to think carefully through before doing the open call, because it's like a fine architecture.

What brings this project alive, and what makes it so special, are the people involved, who are all very interesting.

I like to think about it like: at the centre is Joe, the art classroom and Zealah. They are at the centre, because they express the need – so the structure that we built is to support them and their practice and, therefore, the students who they in-turn support.

Then there’s Jasmine Bhanji, the Artist in Residence. She has access to the studio during school hours, so she can do her own practice too, but she has some days committed to working with Joe to develop the art practice they want to reach, or what they want to focus on in the units that we are intervening in.

That's one part.

Then, because this will be done through Participatory Action Research with students, we have this other part, which is Dunya Kalantery and Eleonora. Dunya is the Participatory Action Research mentor. She's a very experienced educator. Eleanora is the Learner in Residence. She’s also very experienced in Freirean pedagogies and approaches.

The idea is that, between them, they are going to build the mechanisms to create a space for discussion with students using the provocations that Joe and Jasmine come up with, anchoring: how can we build a space, where they can really tell us, or tell themselves maybe, what is meaningful for them?

Then we also have Sam Castro, from Cubitt. He's always been supporting the artists at AMSI, and he will join LTC too. He will be working with Jasmine and Joe in the development and delivery of the project. I will be supporting the whole team, but more in the area of producing the data that will help us to understand, reflect on and improve the process in this iterative process of action research.

This kind of big brain that ‘Liberating the Curriculum’ is, it's amazing, because we will all get different kinds of information. We will all meet. Then, we start the work with students. It's basically more of this ethics perspective of, ‘We all want to build something together’, so first we need to define how we're going to participate, how we're going to talk about this, and those kind of grounding rules on how to build this space.

This is the expertise that Dunya brings as the mentor and that connects with why Eleonora, the Learning Residency's role, is key, because she has to do the analytic exercise to consider what is happening and then gather this data. I'll try to organise or transcribe whatever possible, but she will propose an analysis, and she then will present this analysis to the team. We will discuss it as LTC team, which includes Joe, and then we'll do it iterative until we're kind of happy with what we get.

There's a very art and scientific approach to LTC, because we want to build evidence. We've all been a part of this system for so long, doing one project after another, not starting from 0 exactly, but not gathering the evidence throughout that you would want to keep building on.

So, how do we keep building on the learnings?

We need to have someone, like the Learner in Residence, to do that part, because when you're trying to do it all, it's too much. It's also too much in the sense of freelancer’s work. We need to be very organised to collaborate in this building of knowledge, because we also want to share it.

I used to work at Gasworks too, and at Gasworks there is an evaluation board that was built by Andrea Francke, artist and teacher at Chelsea College of Arts. It's a way of putting evaluation as a daily thing and not something that is just done at the end.

There was this quote from Block C that Jasmine recalled, which was a student that wrote, ‘Art is my third most boring subject.’ Which were the others? We don't know. But Block C really revealed for the artists the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards art. And that accumulated knowledge informs this project.

It’s also great how the two projects, Block C and Liberating the Curriculum, have been merging together with the people, because we know these kinds of programmes, which depend on project grants, can be very precarious.

We managed to keep one of the artists that was already at AMSI (Jasmine Bhanji). I joined the team, then we kept Sam, so we are steps ahead, because we are building on all of this and, furthermore, on the relationships that Jasmine built with Joe and that Lydia built with them as curator from Cubitt, too.

It's something I’m eager that we all do, which is to keep building from these other places of knowledge development.

That board has been set since 2018, and it's still running once a month with budget specifically for that. In the evaluations with the participants of the residency and previous residencies, we share and we discuss, and we analyse the project in those meetings, so then evaluation is not an afterthought.

It can also give you actionable things to do, like: you can decide things in the middle. You can prevent. You can shift. You have to be very flexible when working in arts with people, especially with young people in a school setting. There's so many things that we have to keep an eye on.

Evaluation in that sense is something that I will push forward from this experience, facilitating an evaluation framework that puts the focus on daily and actionable evaluation, where you register not only numbers, but different moments, like meetings, notes or reflections. The evaluation framework that was developed by Gasworks also stipulates that for the reports, the participants provide a narrative as well, which is paid, so that allows the participants’ voices to be a part of the reports.

From my perspective as practitioner, evaluation is always in the forefront. I also used to be a primary school teacher, so there is a lot of building from different areas, and it's amazing that this team has a lot of accumulated knowledge.

The work that Cubitt has done in the school is beautiful, because it has been slow and built on trust. Cubitt created a really safe space for artists to be in the school. Then with this question mentioned before of ‘What's the artist’s role in the school?’ – the artists together with the team at Cubitt have continued thinking about this, and always putting at the forefront art for art's sake.

The trust that Cubitt has built in AMSI through the artists is something that allows this programme to keep existing.

Also, as staff at AMSI have changed, it's been Lydia, Cubitt’s Education Curator, who has been following up with all of this and looking for spaces or moments where there could be a continued involvement in educational settings.

Something that is very particular is that we always offer Joe, the Head of Art, is to run activities at Cubitt. Usually, they're reluctant – and I understand it now – because they want to bring things to AMSI. They want the school to be transformed.

The role of Cubitt at AMSI is to bring art to AMSI.

Also, because AMSI has a specific demographic that puts it in a ‘vulnerable’ position, that remains the primary impetus of bringing artists first to coexist in the school and then, through time and space and trust, this starts to happen, which is beautiful.

At Cubitt, we are mainly people of colour or migrants. We have carer responsibilities. It's very easy to say in applications, ‘Yeah, all these workers are POC’ or whatever, but then we happen to have experiences sometimes that are harder or are shocking. If I get a xenophobic insult in the street, there is something that is happening now in this climate, and students might experience the same. There’s something very nice about Cubitt and the Director Seán Elder that we know when we need to pause. Things cannot keep moving, because there are things that come with working with people that otherwise might be discriminated against. The direction of Amal Khalaf previously and Seán now builds this trust and this understanding that we are all struggling in something.

‘Liberating the Curriculum’ has a point of difference [to previous projects] that we ran, in that we are informed by the Head of Art, Joe. That's the first key distinction. It's something that came from the school to shift school dynamics and the curriculum., and really challenged: How can children take more out of the hour a week of art they have?

That's different to the Block C programme from Reclaiming Islington which was more focused on conviviality and what happens when artists are in the school.

Then there's also another level of evaluation, which is how that works when we build the support for the teacher who wants to make this change, because that's where you can really make any difference in school: in the day-to-day practice of teachers.

We were amazingly lucky to meet Joe, who is a very passionate art teacher and wants to keep improving the experience for students.

The idea is that now we will also try to engage the local community more. We dream that we can get students excited about something that is beyond their one hour of art, connecting them maybe with artists from the neighbourhood or with their families, and thinking about art in more broad terms that can connect them to where they live, who they are, the languages they speak, how they are now inhabiting this space.

I think it's all connected in terms of the local knowledge, the local gathering that Cubitt has been building and keeps building, because Joe really prefers things to happen at AMSI. It makes it daily, because the students have gone to Cubitt, of course, and there was the public programme where students’ work was presented at the gallery and (of course) they are always invited to visit, but then that becomes something kind of extraordinary that doesn't translate to day-to-day relationships in the classroom.

Through art, in art, relationships are different, should be different. Maybe we'll see a transformation in the way that students relate to each other. Things can happen when it's the daily life of students, so we are always working to trying to bring these two – art and the day-to-day lives of students – together. There is this trickiness of AMSI always preferring to have things at AMSI, and obviously, the bureaucracy of bringing something else to the school. It's complicated...

But what we also do is that we have some budget for all of Cubitt’s practitioners to join, so that's another way that the whole organisation can still inform our work at AMSI.

Then, through roles like Sam’s and mine, we participate with the whole team and we also inform other programmes at Cubitt, especially in terms of continuing the methodology of evaluation that asks: How do we keep building on programmes like this, with these kinds of different elements and this brain? This part is also very important for us. Three units of curriculum might not sound super huge, but it's an experiment of how we can support teachers who are the ones that are on the building education daily.

‘Liberating the Curriculum’ (LTC) is a programme led by Cubitt at Arts and Media School Islington (AMSI), London, that engages teachers, students, artists, art workers and the local community in a project of curricular transformation. Employing Participatory Action Research, LTC aims to develop more inclusive and representative art curricula through a series of proposals, tests and analyses based around discussions held with students across Key Stage 3.

Drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the programme builds on the relationships and learnings established with AMSI through Cubitt’s previous programme, ‘Reclaiming Islington’, while furthering the ongoing efforts of AMSI’s Head of Art, Joeanna Omotesho, to develop new units of curriculum in her teaching. What emerges is a ‘fine architecture’ that pools together relationships and resources from previous projects in service of building tried-and-tested and future-led resources for more inclusive curricula, while continuing effective programmes and community-led collaborative practices held by and beyond the institution. 

Javiera Sandoval Limari is an artist, educator, and researcher.

At the time of writing, she is curator of the Liberating the Curriculum project at Cubitt, undertaking a mentorship in music production with Laima Leyton, and preparing to release her first studio album with her band, Imperio Bamba. Having migrated to the UK in 2014, she now also cares for her son and continues to imagine and develop projects that weave together her artistic practice with her background in education and research – creating work that meaningfully impacts her community and surroundings.