Jamie Beddard: Writer and performer. Photo: Lou Birks.
Changing the Scene with Graeae
Alex Bulmer tells DAO about Graeae's new education programme for disabled people who want to train in the performing arts.
Let me tell you a bit about the history of Scene Change. In 1999, Graeae Theatre Company launched its first full training and education project called Missing Piece. This project was geared to provide high quality training in the arts for disabled people who were just not being accepted into the mainstream colleges and training institutions. This exclusion wasn't on the basis of talent, but quite simply on the basis that schools weren't prepared to have disabled students. So in order to ensure that the company had actors with a performing ability of a high standard Missing Piece was launched. This ran successfully for a number of years and eventually became a part of London Metropolitan University's performing arts programme. Over the years, the success of those students was phenomenal - most of whom have now embarked on careers as performers - most of them as actors. The actual objective of the programme was to give those students a foundation so they could then access higher education in the mainstream. But we just found that no one could break down these barriers. So the students simply just went straight into the profession and they've done very well.
At the end of the academic year 2005/6, we were faced with the decision whether to embark on another full 9 months of training or whether to look at an alternative way forward. We decided it was time to start to focus on the colleges themselves - in a sense to start a programme that was almost like a bridge between what we had been offering and what the colleges could offer with our support. In other words, we wanted to start getting the colleges geared up so they could take on the training themselves and that in the future disabled people could get through the doors and access mainstream institutions.
This is also a reflection of recent changes in the law: the education act with regard to disabled students basically insists that all institutions have to provide adjustments so that disabled students can participate on an equal level.
In 2006/7, we are running a programme called Scene Change. This is a 1-year project which involves three separate areas. The first is outreach where we offer taster workshops to disabled people interested in training for a career in the performing arts. The second area focuses on administrative issues which include recruitment practice, assessment practice and curriculum. We are going into the schools and saying we need to look at what is happening administratively to identify the hidden barriers which are inherent in curriculum and assessment practices. And we need to look at how these barriers can be removed. Here we are offering seminars and workshops on inclusive practice. The third area we're focusing on is the training of the educators themselves. We're going in and offering workshops and getting teachers to be really honest about what their fears are about having disabled students in their classrooms. We help them to address these fears and then look at the reality of the situation and how performing arts training can be more inclusive. And then carrying that through to how one would assess the ability and talent of a student who may be completing an exercise in a slightly different way, adjustments having been made.
last updated: 2007-02-01 00:00:00
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