Creative outcomes from live online workshops 

For those trainee teachers starting their degree in September, university life began under Covid restrictions. The following outcomes were created by first year students resulting from a series of live online workshops (in Semester 2) that explored how animal characters have been used in illustration and animation to communicate important ideas. 

The workshops, which formed part of the Broader Curriculum module, were intended to help students: (i) to develop their own creative skills; (ii) consider how to nurture the creative skills of pupils; and (iii) to think carefully about how when planning lessons cross-curricular links can be made between specific programmes of study in the national curriculum, including Art and design, Music, Literacy, Numeracy, Science, History, Geography, PE and Computing. 

The workshops looked at a range of popular children's authors and illustrators from the past and present, including some of the students' favourites. The primary task was to think about how children's characters communicate ideas with audiences and how these techniques could be employed when relaying important messages to children, for example, about climate change.

The students were challenged over the course of a series of structured live online workshops to design their own children's character. They researched several animals of their choice and selected which one they believed would be the most effective for promoting the message they wanted to communicate (thus following a design method that values and prioritises experimentation and evaluation). Live online workshops then encouraged students to experiment with various illustration and modelling techniques in order to translate their characters into two- and three-dimensional forms. Final outcomes were fulfilled by realising these forms into either a comic strip or an animation. 

The examples below show how the students extensively engaged with thinking about the importance of play and experimentation when creating their responses to the challenges. 

"It's funny, when I think about doing these kinds of tasks I think I won't enjoy them. But 99% of the time I absolutely love it!" Quote from a teacher training student who produced the above illustration, models and comic strip during Lockdown as part of a series of live online workshops exploring making an animal character that communicates an important message . 

Developing cross-curricular learning resources for cultural venues 

For those students finishing their degree in 2021, Covid restrictions meant that the usual opportunity to participate in a short cultural placement at one of the many cultural venues in and around Oxfordshire was not possible. These placements and the venue collections assist students in creating their own learning resource (as can be seen in the 2020 exhibition). However, because the placements were not able to go ahead, instead all students were asked to independently visit a cultural venue and/or to explore cultural collections online. 

Many students visited cultural venues near their homes, sometimes reflecting on their own childhood memories of visiting these places. 

The following learning resources were created by students under Lockdown conditions in early 2021.