How can we narrate contemporary art to children? How can we take the museum to the school setting? How can we combine art and the English language? The project I Speak Contemporary, created by the Educational Department of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as part of Progetto Diderot, tries to answer these questions, proposing an itinerary that uses e-leraning and laboratory activities in schools as effective educational tools for students and teachers. Art at Times is a series of video lessons in English that was designed specifically for this purpose: it is a unique, flexible and interactive learning tool. I Speak Contemporary has involved more than 11.000 students from primary schools in the Piedmont and Aosta Valley regions, in the school year 2016/2017.
Thanks to Progetto Diderot, each year thousands of young people between 6 and 20 years of age can attend for free workshops, laboratories, video lessons, visits, seminars, lectures-debates with experts and testimonials, and even concerts and plays. All of these activities are aimed at familiarizing the younger generations with the founding values of civil society, examining specific aspects of the basic teachings provided by schools, and developing a creative, challenging approach to subjects such as mathematics, computing, civics, journalism, philosophy, ethics, health, sustainable development, art and history. Over the past ten years Progetto Diderot, promoted by the CRT Foundation, has involved 26.000 classes, 37.000 teachers and 526.000 students.
Within the framework of Progetto Diderot, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo proposes its program I Speak Contemporary, which gives the primary and 1st-grade and 2nd-grade secondary schools of Piedmont and Aosta Valley the opportunity to get acquainted with contemporary art and its different languages and tools, through an interdisciplinary learning itinerary. This itinerary includes a session at school, in the classroom, where short video lessons in English will be viewed. These are designed to address the key notions of contemporary art through the use and practice of the foreign language. Introduced by an operator of the Educational Department of the Foundation, each video lesson proposes a way of reading a contemporary artwork, as well as a possible practical reworking of it in the laboratory setting. Teachers can further develop the itinerary on their own, using the video lessons both as a teaching tool in the reading and creative reworking of the images and their contents, and as an aid in the learning of the English language.
Numbers: over 12.000 children and young people each year
Target: primary schools and 1st-grade and 2nd-grade secondary schools
Duration: the whole school year
