Arts-in-Action (AiA) is an applied creative arts company that uses the creative and
performing arts to address the educational and developmental concerns of
communities and educational institutions within the Caribbean.
The mainstay of Arts-in-Action?s work is located within the primary and secondary
schools. In its 21 year history, AiA has successfully partnered on environmental projects
with Rotary Club (Tidy T&T), BPTT Spirit of Community Awards, and more recently
with Cropper Foundation.
There is a disconnect between the education of our young people and the knowledge
lodged in traditional festival practices; knowledge that may be useful in addressing
some key biodiversity concerns.
Arts-in-Action?s involvement with environmental projects located within primary
schools has made the organisation aware of the challenges and potential that school
communities hold for work in environmental advocacy.
Arts-in-Action proposes therefore to collaborate with Caribbean Yard Campus (CYC),
whose mandate is to network traditional knowledge spaces and to validate that
knowledge as integral to Caribbean education and development. CYC provides us with
access to traditional practices/communities and gives guidance on how these practices
speak to the project objectives. Arts-in-Action will seek to leverage its relationship
with the UWI to gain access to its expertise.
Hence CLEAN 2015 will seek to increase the awareness and understanding of
biodiversity among primary school students by 2020, through participatory arts based
strategies and festival education, which privilege the traditional knowledge of local
communities. To this end the project will be situated in 8 primary schools between
Port of Spain and Sangre Grande, engaging students and teachers in participatory arts
education, festival education, and the implementation of their own arts based,
biodiversity projects; the key learnings of the latter to be documented and
democratized via social media.
By the end of CLEAN 2015 this would have been achieved, along with the training of 32
teachers in introductory drama-in-education strategies that may be used in shaping
environmental lessons. The teachers would also have been exposed to introductory
training in videography for the purposes of documenting and promoting lessons in
biodiversity to the wider public. In addition, 400 students would have been exposed to
8 theatre-in-education workshops on biodiversity, one festival education field trip, and
8 school-workshops by facilitators from traditional communities, culminating in the
planting of 80 new trees across the 8 schools; all geared towards increasing awareness
about culture and its relationship to biodiversity.
The total cost of the project US$68,482.00 and the amount being requested from the
UNDP GEF Small Grants programme is US$49,939.00.