depARTures.

1996 - 1997

Introduction

The depARTures programme took form in the Spring of 1996. It grew out of a desire, both on the part of the St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre and of local artists, to develop a service for at-risk kids from the inner city of Winnipeg whereby these young people could, literally, make a departure from their quotidian environment and discover new and enriching experiences in a calming, rural environment. The St. Norbert Arts & Cultural Centre, located as it is on a forested elbow of the La Salle River, provides the perfect setting for a project of this nature. The physical barriers that participants feel fall away in this wide open place and, by extension, so too do their psychological barriers. The creative spirit stretches and expands as the kids recognize the serenity and pastorality of this place and the desire to explore and experience rises up as the walls, streets and urban noises fall away.

This programme has developed in partnership with Winnipeg School Division No. 1, with sixty students from five different inner city schools having participated in the inaugural session of the programme in Winter/Spring 1997. The programme garnered very favourable reviews in the community, most notably from the Canadian Society for Education Through Art, which nominated the depARTures programme for the Fitzhenry & Whiteside Award for Excellence in Art Education.

This programme represents a vital service to the community. By providing innovative art instruction in a rural environment, the St. Norbert Arts & Cultural Centre opens new doors for Winnipeg's urban youth. There are numerous societal challenges which are addressed directly by this project:

  • there is a high level of "at risk" children living in our inner city. Kids who, due to the environment in which they live, are subject to serious psychological and social setbacks.

  • many of the young people living in Winnipeg's inner city face daily limitations and difficulties that they are powerless to overcome in their present condition.

  • art instruction in Winnipeg's schools is extremely limited. Winnipeg School Division #1, for instance has only one school employing a full-time art instructor.

  • young people living with hardship and daily setbacks often turn to violence and self-destruction as a way of communicating their frustrations.

Through sophisticated art instruction aimed at providing participants with better skills for self-expression, communication and the development of self-confidence, the depARTures program will seek to address these difficult challenges.

Plan

depARTures is a year-round programme split into two distinct components. The first component is an inaugural summer program, administered in association with community centres within Winnipeg's core area. The project consists of four, week-long sessions in July-August, 1998. Each of these weeks will be attended by twenty-four children each day, with two artists on hand to instruct them in various mediums. The second component, the depARTures school program will take place from January, 1999 to June, 1999 and the audience will come from Winnipeg School Division No. 1 "inner city" schools. In total, 144 students will attend, which means twelve students from twelve different schools. The total "per unit" cost for the 1200 programming days from these two sessions is $75.86.

West Broadway Community Centre, Turtle Island Community Centre, Andews Street Family Centre and Rossbrook House are participating in our first summer of programming. Our winter programme through Winnipeg #1 School Division includes Sister MacNamara, Dufferin, Mulvey, John M. King and David Livingstone/Machray.

Twelve children a day are expected to attend winter programmes while twenty-four children a day will attend the summer programme. Children participating in winter depARTures are 10-12 years old, but the children participating in summer depARTures could be anywhere from 6-15 years old. The summer programme will not have the high number of adults accompanying the children to the Centre (teachers and parent volunteers). In order to maintain a high instructor/participant ratio the Centre will hire two artist/interns to assist with the delivery of the programme.

Background (what we know)

  • participation in constructive recreation programming helps to ensure that desirable peer associations are formed and appropriate socialization occurs. (Stolowski, Lee, 1991)

  • the arts convey knowledge and meaning not learned through the study of other subjects. They represent a form of thinking and a way of knowing that is based in human imagination and judgement. (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, 1995)

  • early, community-based action has more success than institutional care and treatment. (Children & Youth Secretariat, 1996)

  • students need to learn how to see to interpret data from the world, the canvas, and the page. (Language Arts, 1994)

Mission

  1. to assist at-risk kids from Winnipeg's inner city in developing self-esteem through self-exploration as fostered by an exposure to and understanding of art, and to provide these young people with alternate means of self-expression and vocalization (venting, purging) to violence or harmful behaviour.

  2. to promote an appreciation and an understanding of aesthetics and beauty, and to develop visual and tactile literacy, perception and abstract thought, as tools for communicating and coping with daily realities.

Goals

The depARTures program exists as a way to help at-risk kids from Winnipeg's inner city to develop self-awareness and self-expression through art. It is our belief that art as an alternate means of expression, communication and ventilation, may help these young people to overcome the barriers that may characterize their neighborhoods, their families, and even their own behaviour.

Through the employment of various artists working in various mediums, it is our goal to give participating students as broad an understanding and conception of art as possible. depARTures programming has been developed to include songwriting, pirate radio broadcasting, video, and performance. All of the workshops are designed to encourage self expression and give voice through diverse practices. It is our intention to expose students to as many mediums as possible in order to provide them with a broad range of skills and experiences as possible. Similar to someone who learns many different spoken languages, an individual who becomes versed in a multitude of art forms is better able to communicate with the people and forces in the world around them.

The St. Norbert Arts & Cultural Centre is the only multi-disciplinary arts organization in Manitoba. It is thus consistent with both the organization's mandate and the mandate of the depARTures programme that participants work in as many artforms as possible. St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre contracts professional artists to deliver these programmes. Artists are drawn from a variety of cultural backgrounds and bring a wide range of experiences and life lessons to their respective sessions. All of the artists invited to participate in depARTures are working in non-traditional mediums; "Bad Transmission-Art on the Air" instructed by Erika MacPherson, teaches students how to set up a transmitter and broadcast their own radio station, "Revealing the Spirit of the Grandfathers-A Personal Journey" instructed by Natalie Rostad take participants on a personal journey through the use of native legend, spirituality and philosophy and installation artist Jake Moore will lead the students , through the construction of a three dimensional space towards a greater awareness and appreciation of the community which they occupy.

Through a wide variety of workshops, we hope to allow these young people to experience emotive and aesthetic sensibilities in more elements of their own lives. Academic instruction is built around the inculcation of rational thought in young people. The intention of this programme is to assist them in developing perceptive thought. We believe that this balance of rational and perceptive thought will equip the participating kids with better social and coping skills for the challenges they will face throughout their lives.

Priority Group

The audience for the depARTures programme is to be drawn specifically from the inner city. The basic philosophy for the program necessitates this at it is the St. Norbert Arts & Cultural Centre's objective to draw children out of their hectic, claustrophobic and often dangerous surroundings of Winnipeg's core area and to place then in the rural, wide-open setting that the Cultural Centre occupies. As suggested in the program's name, participants must make a departure from the limitations of the inner city and of their quotidian lives and for a short time, discover new experiences and sensations in a nurturing, freeing and transforming environment.

As outlined, the depARTures program at the St. Norbert Arts & Cultural Centre is a unique and groundbreaking initiative in the use of intensive art instruction with at-risk kids. As we know, little quantitative or qualitative research exists on the subject of art instruction and its positive effects on at-risk kids in Canada. By extension, it is an obvious next step that the depARTures program provide a model for research into this question. Under the tutelage and training of the Manitoba Children and Youth Secretariat, staff of the Cultural Centre will undertake extensive evaluative research into the impact that the depARTures program is having on participants, both throughout the sessions and, wherever possible, pursuant to the completion of the program. The data and findings collected from this research will not only inform future sessions of the depARTures program, but will also provide some general indicators of the success of art education in working with at-risk kids.

Our pilot year of the depARTures programme was so successful in terms of evaluations by the participating teachers and schools that demand for the programme far exceeds our capacity to accomadate this need.

Research and Evaluation

The St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre is engaged with the Children and Youth Secretariat, Province of Manitoba, to develop, establish, and maintain the parameters and means to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the depARTures programme. Within this, the research tools will be configured in such a way to facilitate a cohesive set of parameters allowing for a consistent approach where information gained from depARTures will have commonality and relevancy when contrasted with the findings of other kids-at-risk programmes such as the Winnipeg Children's Festival, Magic Camp. The findings of this research will be incorporated into our internal system of programme evaluation and will inform our planned secondary initiatives for these children, notably the development of Internships where depARTures experienced children can be engaged and remunerated to act as assistants to the artist instructors, and Mentorships where depARTures experienced children will be engaged and remunerated to act as Mentors for other depARTures participants.

Conclusion

Through a gradual increase in the scope and ambition of this important and innovative initiative, it is the intention of the St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre to make the depARTures programme its flagship public programme and, by extension, to become a leader in services to at-risk kids in the Province of Manitoba. This goal cannot be reached without significant work and perseverance. But with committed links and partnerships within the community, including organizations such as Winnipeg School Division # 1, and the Children and Youth Secretariat of the Province of Manitoba, the depARTures project can be expected to reach and positively impact on hundreds, if not thousands, of young people from Winnipeg's urban core. The long-term sustainability of the programme will be affected by a combination of continued foundation support and a Corporate scholarship programme to be enacted in the Fall of 1998.