Equality and Human Rights Commission

Group or individuals?

The awards are for individual artworks rather than group submissions. However, we have structured the activity plan to allow individuals to make their own personal journey into a topic, while sharing ideas or tasks with others. These activities assume you are working with groups and also note that collaboration and discussion are very helpful in enquiry-based work.

How much time?

We suggest that you need 5 hours of teaching time to deliver this plan. This could be in one intensive day or over several lessons or club meetings. Young people may also need some personal time to do further research or creative work. You will also need to plan time to photograph, select and upload digital images of work and for entrants to prepare submission statements. Not all students will want to enter the award, although they can be encouraged by the fact that judges will be looking at ideas and passion, not so much fine production skills.

Suggested plan for a Young Brits at Art workshop

You are of course free to organise activities in the best way to suit your group. The timings here are varied and are only offered as an indication. (Also see ‘Adapting for your group – Doing it your way’ below)

• Explain the purpose and structure of the workshop, using icebreakers or your own personal stories, and inviting questions (15-30 minutes)
• Warm-up activities to explore the key issues and ideas of equality and human rights (30-45 minutes)
• Model the investigation of an example topic (60-90 minutes):
  • choose a topic from this resource or your own idea;
  • explore the scenario as a whole group; look at examples of artists’ work;
  • make rapid creative responses to the topic
• Helping students choose an enquiry: Explain the choice of topics for individual investigations and briefly discuss them, supporting students to choose. More independent students might want to find their own topic. (0-60 minutes, depending on how much choice of topic)
• Support personal investigations: Facilitate students to work in pairs or individually to produce an initial ideas board on their topic, planning what media to use, what ideas to explore and what impact they would like to create (30-60 minutes)
• Facilitate creative production by individuals (90-120 minutes if within a one day workshop, or more hours if you are flexible)
• Facilitate recording of work to enter awards (30-60 minutes)

You will need to allow more time for processing the material that they record (e.g. dealing with digital photographs), allowing them time to reflect on their statements and making any adjustments to their work.

Dealing with a cross-curricular project

If you aren’t an art teacher you may wish to arrange a joint project with the Art & Design department or bring in an artist educator or digital technician to support you. If this is difficult, the following tips should help:

• Ask creatively skilled students to take the lead in choosing materials and training others
• Be minimal in the creative media used in your workshop: For example, stick to cameras and large sheets of paper and marker pens, whilst not restricting imaginative ways to use them
• Try to be more visual in your teaching (draw more diagrams, use visual metaphors to explain ideas, gather some photographs or artworks to show)
• Look at the Further Resources section for ideas from galleries or arts education agencies on how to support visual communication.

If you are an arts educator with less confidence in teaching about equality and human rights, you may want to arrange a joint project with the Citizenship department or bring in a guest facilitator. If this is difficult, the following tips should help:

• Focus on helping students to frame the best questions, and to follow a questioning process
• Tell students you may not have any answers but can help them find out
• Try to help students be as rigorous as possible, by focusing on a specific scenario or question, or conveying a particular emotion, rather than allowing them to pour any loosely related issues into their artwork
• Look at the Further Resources section for ideas from museums, campaigns or associations on how to support Citizenship learning
• Contact the Commission for advice on art@equalityhumanrights.com. We will do our best to answer questions, point you to information sources, and suggest guest speakers on equality and human rights issues. 

Adapting for your group, doing it your way

These activities are very open-ended allowing you to structure them in ways that work for your situation and letting young people contribute to the planning.

If you don’t want to follow the topics in this resource but would like to know how students can achieve work that will meet the award criteria, you may wish to follow this advice on creative enquiry learning.

Creative enquiry learning works well when it is organised into three stages:

• Stimulus
• Investigation
• Outcome

One: The Stimulus

• The stimulus chosen should be focused enough to drive through the project, but open enough to give rise to different personal investigations and outcomes.
• In this resource, we’ve provided seven stimuli: topics, each with some background facts, a story that gives rise to many questions, plus examples of artists who have explored similar territory. You may prefer to use an artwork as a first stimulus, or only to use a human rights scenario, or to use drama, poetry or a film clip, for example. Whichever you choose, bear in mind that students may need to access more information or examples of artistic practice to support their investigations and outcome.

Two: The Investigation

For some students these topics may seem complex and unfamiliar so they need to be broken down into small steps. In the workshop plan, we suggest that you go through the questioning process below as a group, exploring one topic together. Then when students choose an individual enquiry they can follow the same steps. The steps could be as follows:

Initial reactions: How does it make you feel? What does it remind you of? Can you draw these feelings or associations?

Finding out more: How can you understand this? Do you need to find out any facts? Why does this matter to us all? What would happen if...?

Your personal journey: What matters most to you? What do you most want to know? Can you imagine yourself or someone you know in this scenario? Can you imagine the inner feelings of these people? (Can you make some quick sketches or take some photos to show this?)

Your goals: Do you want to communicate a strong opinion about this, to change somebody’s mind? Do you want to tell a story or express how someone might feel? Do you want to show how you are confused about this? Do you want to make a positive artwork that shows how we could do things differently or accept difference? Do you want to take action to change this situation, for example, create a campaign?

Three: The Outcome

Before they begin making an artwork, promote discussion with others:

• What is your goal?
• What is the main image or emotion?
• What media are you going to try first?

Provide plenty of stimulus and research material, for example ensure there is access to artists’ work on the internet.

Provide art materials that can be improvised with. (For example, prepare a range of props and clothes for photography, so that students can act as models for each other. They can combine these with words, cut out shapes and textures. Photographs can be printed out and attached to or projected onto furniture or other surfaces. These are only intended as a suggestion, not to limit creativity.)

Make time for students to share their work with each other, and to make further adjustments or trials before recording work for submission. Use the final discussion to help students craft an ‘artist's statement’.

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