Something in the Air – a year-long project at Castle Wood School with Richard Hayhow and shyster.inc September 2010 – July 2011
Castle Wood School is a broad spectrum special primary for children with profound and multiple disabilities to those with moderate learning difficulties including those on the autistic spectrum. The school was amalgamated in September 2008 from two previous special schools – Deedmore and Hawkesbury Fields – and moved into its new building in September 2010. For the period of this project the school was focussed on settling into the new building and addressing the changes in relation to this, part of which is the creation of a new curriculum that is suitable for the way in which the pupils communicate, learn and think.
Over the previous five years I had worked with shyster.inc in both Deedmore and Hawksbury schools developing the theatre practice of the Shysters Theatre Company into a way of engaging with pupils and staff in special schools. This is now called ‘shystering’ and is structured around the exploration of the physical, musical, sensory and essentially non-verbal interactions around the concepts of playing, pretending and performing. Key elements are the full body engagement of the children and the development of imagined contexts & individual imaginations through the emphasis on the use of mimed objects and settings at all times.
The practice I have developed is very individual-based, developing always in response to each child and his or her connection with the work. Anything that a child does or says within the working room is seen as an ‘offer’ and as such is validated as part of that child’s journey through the process. The way in which it is validated is highly dependent on the circumstances at the time and on the child in question. The same offer by two different children may be validated in entirely different ways by the adult working in relationship with them.
Something in the Air
The project was designed as a whole school experience – involving all staff and pupils in both creating and sharing the work at the end of the year. The theme ‘Something in the Air’ was chosen for a variety of reasons:
- to convey a sense of the shyster experience
- to build anticipation of more exciting developments to come after five years’ work
- to provide a stimulus to the imagination to create new work
- to define the nature of the props that might be used as starting points for the work
- to indicate an identifiable ‘shyster’ intervention in the life of the school
- to act as a metaphor for the freedom found in notions of floating and flying
The project would be delivered over the year by myself and three co-workers, who had all worked on previous projects at Deedmore and Castle Wood. Sessions were delivered over a period of three days a week in ‘clusters’ of classes: KS1(4 classes), lower KS2 (3 classes) and upper KS2 (4 classes). The project was kick-started by a full day staff training day in what shystering was about and what the project was setting out to achieve.
The long term residency of shyster.inc in Deedmore and subsequently Castle Wood was set up to initially look at how theatre practice can support the development of children with learning disabilities. In the last three years when Deedmore became amalgamated with Hawkesbury School, Castle Wood school looked at how the practice can be developed to work with children with a broad spectrum of disabilities. This long-term partnership has been important for the school as staff and practitioners have discovered together ways of working, witnessed the impact of the approaches, gained understanding from the experiences, and looked at how they can be sustained within the school.
In the light of this we identified two key priorities for ‘Something in Air’: firstly to continue the integrated work (broad spectrum disabilities) to support the transition into the new school site and secondly to develop the staff through sessions, CPD and reflective meetings (learning conversations) to enable them to deliver shyster approaches for themselves. For the work to be sustained beyond the CP programme it had been identified that it was crucial that staff understood more about the shyster methodology, its impact on children and how they could deliver it as part of a creative curriculum.
As with much of the previous work there was no master-plan for how the work could or should develop. What was essential was to identify starting-points that could make connections with all staff and pupils. Alongside a particular choice of music to accompany the development of the work the key element that was used for this was tissue paper. These tissues were used to explore blowing and breathing, and to establish communication between us all by blowing tissues at each other. The tissue became the thing in the air. We managed to get through a couple of boxes of tissues in each session and quickly found out that Sainsburys was the best place to get these from at 35p a box….
As time went on the tissues began to take on other meanings for us as they were used in great quantities as snow, as a means of burying and subsequently revealing people, we made paper darts and aeroplanes and we substituted our breath with makeshift wind-machines. We brought in bubble machines, and made little flying machines, we used scarves and cut-up material and tried to keep these floating in the air. We threw lots of things in the air and hoped they would float. We carried each other around to see what it would feel like to fly. We found white sheets and together made wind with these, and tried to fly with them, attached like wings. Sometimes we just pretended to fly. We pulled each other around on the floor sat on the sheets, we made hammocks of them, and then out came the parachutes and we were up in the clouds flying again. We made stories up about people who could fly and birds and other airbourne creatures.
In the summer time after all this experimentation and in each cluster we looked at what we could bring together to share with all other children in the school and invited guests. By this time each cluster had run away with their own ideas and ways of doing things so we had four distinct experiences to offer. We decided to stage these in four different areas of the school, two indoors and two outdoors, and get the ‘audience’ to promenade from one space to another and aimed for the whole experience to last about an hour. To add to the experience for all the children and the invited audience we brought in some ‘special effects’ for the occasion – two giant wind machines and a ton of shredded paper to be blown about in the hall, a snow machine, a hammock chair that swivelled and rocked, tents knee-deep in tissue, kites, huge angel wings, and white puppet geese with white puppeteers to lead the promenade. It was an extraordinary day.
So what did we achieve?
“Children have been noticing each other, crawling towards each other, recognising other people in the room and the children are drawn towards each other, they communicate more and understand a little more about relationships between people. More able children have developed different ways of communicating with other children and also with adults. The fact that they communicate more means that they acquired new skills of collaboration and interest in other people.”
‘The safe structure of the sessions created through the relationships in the room enabled the children to take many risks that are not normally seen in the classroom. When children were asked they indicated that they were “not so scared”, “more confident”, “got braver”, “I’ve learnt how to fly”’
‘Staff noted that children with very little confidence over time began to join in “some children are watching and have started to move their hands in time to music or in a way that they haven’t done it before.” Other children have got up and taken the lead “children in the scarf dance, they get up and go with that themselves, doing something in front of an audience when a child wouldn’t dream of doing something like that before.”
‘Staff were discussing the work with a greater level of understanding and using more creative and teaching and learning vocabulary. The combination of the inset day, sessions, public events and the learning conversations have resulted in staff developing the ‘theatre skills’ that are used by the practitioners as well as developed language and understanding to describe the practice and the creative behaviours of the children including impact.’
“The relationships have developed between the staff and children, it has changed through the work. It’s less of a caring only model and more of a learning model within the school. That in itself engenders more understanding that then moves into knowledge to pass onto other people. There is a greater understanding of the children’s needs, responses and abilities.”
“Richard has created a willingness in staff to move and engage the children in shyster sessions, because the staff are more willing to take the children out of their chairs. This first happened in shyster sessions when staff realised they had to take risks. Because of all that the children are out of their chairs much more than they were before which enables children to move in different ways and engage more senses in more situations.”
Over the six years there has been a steady shift in focus from children to staff. Something in the Air’ was the first real attempt to engage staff fully in the creative process and in shystering in order to help develop a creative curriculum and the ability within staff to interact more creatively with the children. I’m back in Castle Wood now having developed a pilot project around staff training and mentoring their use of creativity, and am now developing with the Head Teacher a seven-week Professional Development course for 12 members of staff in the art of shystering…..
Email: richard@shysterinc.org
Phone number: 07802 770257
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