Abstract
This article investigates the collaborative and creative methodologies behind a project that sought to involve secondary school students in making art that responded to conversations with academics about research. This became the basis for a virtual gallery of their work representing university research. The article describes a particular university–school partnership, with a focus on creative, innovative methodologies for engagement, on young people's meaning-making and maker skills. We explore the potential of digital technologies for supporting this work, and the need to work collaboratively with artists and other skilled individuals to realize young people's capacity. This model is not focused on transmission, but on joint knowledge-creation and co-production. The article also explores the potential of arts-based methodologies to support young people's creative engagement with university research as a widening participation oriented methodology.
Highlights
Widening participation (WP) is a philosophy and an approach that has had a particular place within universities
We reflect on how the artistic methodologies opened up different ways of considering widening participation as a process, and we consider some issues that we identified in the course of doing the project
We considered the relational nature of the university and the community
Summary
Widening participation (WP) is a philosophy and an approach that has had a particular place within universities. The conversations begun in the more formal interview settings had established familiarity between the young people and the academics – enabling open and free discussion and positive, intergenerational interaction This was very much a case of doing with, working together – literally collaboration – taking place in a bespoke social space that existed outside of established boundaries for the duration of the project. Outputs from the creative VSS workshops (including poetry, drawings, comic strip art, outputs from the animation workshop and street art) were handed over to Human, a leading graphic design studio based in Sheffield They took this high-quality raw material – all created by the young people – and developed it into a series of virtual reality artworks to populate a bespoke CGI gallery space navigable by an Xbox gaming controller.
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