Teaching Sculpture in Schools

The premise of the programme was that both groups of teachers would explore the use or non-use of sculpture in classrooms and consider how to incorporate this practice into the curriculum. At the core of this exploration was an understanding of the power of bringing teachers together both locally and nationally, recognising the teachers as experienced practitioners and artists with the potential to unlock possibilities through peer-to-peer learning.  

In Yorkshire, the four Yorkshire Sculpture International galleries issued an open call to teachers in Leeds and Wakefield, with the YSI team overseeing the selection process to ensure the cohort contained a diverse mix of experience, from the type of school to the specific arts subjects taught. Simultaneously, we developed our programme at the Foundation to mirror this process, selecting ten teachers from the Greater London area. As the project centred around collaboration and ideas-sharing, we made a conscious decision to reach out to organisations we had worked with in the past to guarantee a broad range of skills, backgrounds and experience on the programme.  

The two programmes ran independently yet followed a similar structure of regular group gatherings and workshops across the year. In London, these sessions began by asking the core questions of 'Why should we teach sculpture?', 'What are the challenges to teaching sculpture?', and 'What is sculpture?’ The teachers’ responses to these questions instantly produced interventions into the classroom, and debates that continued throughout the entirety of the programme.  

Henry Ward, Freelands Foundation’s Director reflects, “It was important that the programme evolved organically, allowing the teachers’ ongoing feedback and experiences to shape the direction of the sessions. So, after we had devised the core structure, we deliberately avoided mapping out anything beyond the initial session for each cohort.” 

Underpinning the programme across both locations was a central belief in the significance of material literacy. The wider engagement programme of Yorkshire Sculpture International was developed around this concept, something which is explored further in this penned reflection from the time. This was rooted in Yorkshire Sculpture International’s own philosophy which was instigated by artist Phyllida Barlow who had provided the festival’s curatorial team with a list of provocations. While the festival’s exhibitions and public commissions responded to the provocation of ‘sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms’, several of Barlow’s other assertions were particularly relevant to this project and the wider engagement programme of the festival, and are still thought-provoking today in terms of arts education. These include: 

• ‘Sculpture is as simple as digging a hole or cutting a slice of bread’  

• ‘Anything can be sculptural – weather, speech, temperature, darkness, light, invisibility, reflections, movement, stillness, silence noise, chaos, order…’ 

• ‘All ways of making involve the hand-made.’ 

• ‘Sculpture changes the spaces it inhabits.’ 

• ‘Many people have access to a pencil and a piece of paper.'  

• 'Many people have access to phones with photography and video applications. Not many people have access to a lump of clay.’ 

Provocations such as these, enabled us to interrogate sculpture within arts education and reimagine what it could look like within statuary education settings.  

This continues to inform Dickinson’s teaching practice today. Eight years on since the project, she told us that she had spent a whole term teaching ‘from the bin’. Here, students are encouraged to think about materials that are accessible to them, free, and otherwise disregarded. She asks them to gather these using different categorisations to help focus them, or she simply selects something, puts it on their desk and asks them to make something from it. Through limiting sculpture to something readily available and accessible, Dickinson is centralising a materials-first way of approaching sculptural teaching.  

Another teacher, Stephanie Cubbin, also reflected on their time on the project and what she had taken forward in her teaching, and like Dickinson, it was the importance of ‘giving young people the opportunity to explore the material and play, which in turn allows them to find out what the material can do...’  

Similarly, in a reflection from the time of the project written by Meghan Goodeve and published in collaboration with Corridor8 called In Your Hands, a teacher from Yorkshire describes an exchange in a lesson: The teacher laid a sheet of A4 white paper in front of each student in a room. ‘Make the paper 3D’, she instructed the students. Some made paper airplanes, some other forms. ‘Is that sculpture?’she asked 'No.' She lay a paperclip on her palm. ‘Is this sculpture?’ she asked again. 'No.' She bends the metal. ‘Is this sculpture now?’ Silence. One student puts up their hand: ‘Yes, that’s sculpture’ they say. 

Recounting the project, Henry Ward states, "It was clear that so many teachers had previously struggled to get their students out of sketchbooks and into the process of physically making things. As soon as they did, the effect within their schools was transformative." 

Unlike works on paper, the teachers found that once sculptures were created and left in the room post-class, it completely changed the classroom dynamics for all subsequent lessons. Every new class now got to see the previous class’s work, creating instant cross-pollination and actively influencing the work produced subsequently. 

Furthermore, an additional key learning from the project, which continues to inform the Foundation’s thinking today, was the profound impact of connecting teachers together and the possibilities of peer-to-peer learning. Cubbin emphasised this when she stated, "I learned about learning, about being part of a collective group of teachers that want to develop their practice… We all benefitted from sharing process, being held accountable for our progress and being able to shape what we were going to take from the course. The individual approach."

The programme supported the Foundation’s belief that art teachers benefit significantly from accessing organic, discursive spaces in which to further their own artistic and teaching practices. By creating an environment in which teachers were able to view one another as artists as well as educators, they were able to reaffirm their own artistic practices, (to the additional enrichment of their students).

Prior to the project, many of the teachers were making a distinction between their artistic practice versus their teaching practice, and a major learning the participants took away from this experience is the belief that you can teach and retain your practice, that the two can benefit each other and ultimately enhance your own and your students’ experience of education.

While this partnership and programme came to a close in 2020, key learnings continue to inform the Foundation and weave a legacy when working with teachers, continued in subsequent programmes such as make. The significance of centring both the teaching and artistic practice of arts educators and creating the context in which teachers can connect and learn together is an ongoing concern of our programming and grant giving. Underpinning this is a belief in exploring ideas of material literacy, creating opportunities for educators to invest in their haptic knowledge and share this approach with their peers and students. We hope the impact of this programme has grown beyond West Yorkshire and London, and what began as a question of how to teach sculpture in schools has brought to light wider debates in arts education today.