Refresher course You are competent yourself: Academy Mechelen

This is one of the trajectories outlined within the in-service training trajectory. Ge are competent yourself.
General information about this route.

In Mechelen, a collaboration would take place between the academy of Mechelen for visual arts and the conservatory of Mechelen. The academy and the conservatory are next to each other and are literally connected to each other. The wish was to establish a collaboration between these two.

Collaboration… no easy task

During the first meeting, several teachers from both the conservatory and the academy were present. Together we looked at what has already been done around interdisciplinary work, what the wishes are and what the possibilities are for further expanding this. An attempt was made to develop a vision. No unambiguous vision has emerged, but it was concluded that quite a lot had already been done around interdisciplinary work. In addition, it emerged that people wanted to collaborate more with other disciplines. Not in the form of a one-off collaboration, but with a focus on long-term sustainable development within interdisciplinary work.

Initially, the idea arose to collaborate with people from outside (outside the academy and conservatory). The difficult connection between the schedules of teachers of the academy and the conservatory of Mechelen was a difficult point for the collaboration. After consultation it was decided to keep the cooperation for the Ge art itself competent within the academy and the conservatory.

The teachers conducted various experiments on interdisciplinary work within their classroom practice. They could do this individually or in collaboration with another teacher. Ultimately, five teachers from the academy and one teacher from the conservatoire started working on this project.

Visual arts, dance and music trajectory

The first trajectory was a collaboration between two visual teachers from the academy. Together they decided to step out of their comfort zone and look for other disciplines that they would like to involve in their lessons. A research that resulted in a major experiment in which image, dance and music came together. One group of students created certain rhythms, another group of students followed a certain movement route through the class and another group made a large visual work with different materials. An experiment where little or nothing was predetermined.

Visual arts and theater trajectory

A second trajectory was an interdisciplinary experiment by a visual teacher. He wanted to work towards a form of puppet theater through characters from the circus. The teacher started by creating characters and character traits drawn by the students. These crazy characters were glued to the wall by means of post-its. All kinds of traits and characters were merged. Then they made new characters and let them come to life in a story.

Start with a different discipline, end with your own discipline (visual arts)

A third trajectory was a project of a drawing teacher who experimented within her own lesson with integrating other disciplines. Her starting point was to start her lesson from a different discipline in order to then work towards a visual result. The theme was naughty pets.

The lesson began with a guided fantasy about a pet moving around the house when the owners were away, destroying all kinds of things in different rooms. After playing this adventure, the children almost immediately dove on their drawing sheet to draw a cross-section of the house with the havoc the pet had left behind.

Trajectory drama picture

The fourth and final trajectory was a collaboration between a drama teacher and an image teacher. The objective was to have a meeting take place between their students. The experiment was divided into two lessons. The first lesson took place in the classroom of the academy's visual teacher. The students interviewed each other in pairs on the basis of a questionnaire. They could also come up with questions themselves. Then they made a present for each other. The second lesson took place in the conservatory. The drama teacher had prepared a drama lesson on the theme of encounters. The highlight of the lesson was giving the gifts to each other.

Evaluation

During the evaluation many things came up; both bottlenecks and positive points. An important aspect was that you look at students in a completely different way. Some students suddenly appear to excel at something or can give a different expression. Interdisciplinary working refreshes your view as a teacher on your own medium. However, it was considered important not to lose sight of the craft and their own discipline. Always returning to your own discipline is an important recurring condition. Everyone agreed that interdisciplinary does not always have to be something big, but that it can also be something very small. The time given was a major bottleneck. This project was followed up in a reasonably short time and due to busy schedules and tight schedules, the experiments had to be smaller than initially thought. The question was also how people could proceed in the long term themselves. It was desired to continue and deepen interdisciplinary work, ideally with teachers from both the academy and the conservatory.