Teacher Inset Workshops

For the past thirty  years I have provided INSET (InService Training ) workshops to teachers, in primary schools but especially for secondary school art teachers. After their training, I am sometimes invited into their school to teach their groups of their pupils, with  teachers   teaching alongside  me, putting into practice their newly-acquired skills, and listening /watching me for my teaching approach with teenagers.

For schools to invest in INSET training of this kind ensures the sculptural skills remain  and develop further within the school –  rather than evaporate the moment  the freelance tutor ( myself) leaves the school after a completed workshop. If it is at all possible, my preference is to teach art teachers in my own studio  rather than at their school, as this environment is so much  more sculpturally stimulating; that way teachers glean a great deal about my studio and teaching practice, that might be relevant to their own art room in school. However, I teach both in my studio and in schools.

My  teaching approach encourages  :

1. acquiring sculpting confidence through technical skills, tool use, and understanding  3D form .

2. As most art teachers have a 2D background ( painting, textiles  or print making), the emphasis lies on using the already present artist-skills and expand them open the novel 3D medium of clay. So 2D based art teachers know a great deal about keen observation,  lines and negatives shapes (all  very relevant to making sculptures)  – but have less experience of particular ceramic and 3D skills ( keeping the sculpture at eye-level; using many viewpoints; thinking about volume, mass, weight and balance)

3.Despite the emphasis on technique, I  hope to enable a creative and imaginative process, an experience they can give on to their pupils; relying less on planning, and  trusting  that the sculpting process will bring along its own intuitive solutions and creative decisions.

4. Learning about equipment, resources ( library of books and laminated sheets,  teaching aids, toy animals; natural objects) and tools in my art studio; working out how these could improve or be relevant  to the art room in their school

As art teacher are fully trained artists in their own right,  many creative, aesthetic and practical skills relating to ceramic sculpting will be learned and practised Intensely in the one-day INSET trading workshop

3.  I refer a great deal to the work of other sculptors: current or modern 20th century, or from other periods or cultures from all over the world. A well supplied sculpture  library supplies books that can be borrowed.

Many creative, aesthetic, technical and practical skills relating to ceramic sculpting will be learned  and practised informally, as and when the need

for them arises as part of the sculpting process:

– Understanding the nature of clay, its behaviour towards weight and wetness

– Armatures and support structures, dealing with gravity and balance

– Precise observation of planes and outlines when accuracy is the goal

– Awareness of proportions, relationships of variously sized parts

– Shaping smooth planes and curvature. in both representational and abstract works

– Knowledge of tools and their particular use,  applying fine motor skills

– Surface textures and contrasts

– Bonding, modeling, carving

– Coil, slab and solid sculptures

-Training the eye to see  afresh; zooming in onto parts, and  out onto the whole of the sculpture; using many viewpoints

– Creative decision making:, relying on one’s eyes rather than one’s thinking or imagining;  testing and trying various options on the sculpture