St. Aidan’s Workshops (March – June 2024) In collaboration with Cork City Partnership, the TLO worked with a Socially Engaged Researcher/Practitioner and the Behaviour for Learning and Level 2 Learning Co- ordinator in St. Aidans to support the engagement of young people from Spring lane in the schools programme. The "Self-Empowerment through Collaborative, Creative Learning" workshops developed and facilitated by a researcher/practitioner in social engagement, at St. Aidan’s involved students from the Traveller community. This student -led approach allowed the participants to take control of their learning, discussing and determining the themes they wanted to explore, the methods they preferred, and how their outputs would be represented and understood. The focus was on fostering longer-term, self-organised, collaborative efforts. The workshops provided a quiet, reflective space for the participants to explore themes of personal power and well-being in relation to themselves, their community, and wider society. Through creative journaling and painting, the girls examined how their relationships with others impacted them, and how they might exert more control over their self-representation. They produced a series of paintings, commemorating family members lost to illness and suicide, and experimented with abstract painting and collage techniques. St. Aidan’s Workshops (September – December 2024) In collaboration with teachers and support workers, a series of four weekly creative workshops were designed for teenagers from the Traveller community at St. Aidan’s school. Each workshop group was divided by age, and the themes focused on "visual literacy," self-expression, and self-representation. The younger participants explored how to visually represent aspects of themselves, their communities, and the environments that support them. The older groups engaged in more advanced techniques, including photography, collage, and drawing. They were introduced to zine-making and encouraged to create their own zines on topics of their choice. The culmination of this work will be exhibited at the end of the year. As part of the programme at St Aidan’s, Print Van Go, a travelling print studio, played a pivotal role in engaging Traveller teenagers in a series of printmaking workshops. These workshops, focused on self-expression and visual literacy, offered the students an accessible and hands-on way to explore identity and representation through creative processes. Print Van Go brought professional printmaking tools and equipment directly into the school environment, ensuring that the teenagers could engage with a range of traditional printmaking techniques, from rubber stamps to screen printing on textiles. The participatory nature of these workshops aligned with the core principles of the programme, using art as a tool for community engagement and social change. By allowing the students to lead and collaborate on their projects, the workshops fostered a sense of ownership, agency, and empowerment, contributing to their broader development of self-expression within the context of their community.
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