Partner Organisations
Sweden, Stockholm, Rinkeby
Förskalen Torget - Tellusbarn AB
Förskolan Torget (FT) is a preschool situated at the heart of Rinkeby, Stockholm, Sweden. The preschool is a part of Tellusbarn AB, a private company with 13 different preschools in the county of Stockholm and Uppsala. The mission of the company Tellusbarn AB, is based on the holistic needs of children, Creativity, Empathy, and Responsibility. The education combines care, nurturing and learning to support each child’s well-being and development.
Tellusbarn AB wants to nurture future cosmopolitans so they know their rights and their obligations. This is achieved by teaching children how to be a responsible person and the importance of being a good friend as well as to safeguard the environment. FST has four overall goals; the Swedish language, Mother tongue and identity, Art studio of our own, And home-cooked meals. The Education Act and the National Curriculum is the foundation with extra focus on Language, Creativity and Health: Förskolan Torget (FT) has been running for 11 years. FT has 6 departments, 102 children, 24 personal, 4 trainees, 1 chef. FT has 16 languages. The children is between 1-5 year old. FT is working from the grounds of the Swedish curriculum. FT concept: Swedish language - Most children in Rinkeby have a foreign background. Some are newcomers. Others are part of families that have lived in Sweden for a long time. It is of great importance to work with the Swedish language and we adapt our methods to that most children have another first language than Swedish.
Our teachers are used to handling groups that have a very mixed command of Swedish. Some children are fluent while others hardly speak a word. By combining storytelling, visits to the theater with drama games, sign language, and dialogue, we put words on everything we do and experience. Play is important in the development of speech and language communication. Through playing, the imagination, empathy, speech and ability to interact are stimulated. Mother tongue and identity - To have and to know your own identity and your native language is very important to children if they are to grow up with self-esteem and respect for other cultures. It also makes it all the easier to learn Swedish. Research and experience show this. Therefore, we see native language training and the children’s cultural background as an important part of the work to prepare the children for Swedish society. Our multi-cultural staff makes all this possible.
Studio of our own - children have access to more languages than what we call verbal or spoken language. They can convey thoughts and feelings by drawing, painting, singing or creating different types of modeling. Learning is multi-sensory. Torget has a studio that gives the children, whatever age they are, great opportunities to develop their minds and express themselves through the creations of various materials, all with the support of a contemporary artist/art educator. The preschool has its own art association, The Art Association Torget/Konstföreningen Torget (KTF), the studio is its starting point. Appreciated home cooked meals - In the same way that food is an important part of life, it is also an important part of our preschool. It is in preschool, we teach the children good eating habits. At Torget we serve breakfast, lunch, and snacks. All the meals are cooked from scratch in our kitchen.
Sweden, Stockholm, Rinkeby
KFT
KFT was founded in 2014 as an art association for the preschool Torget. The heart of KFT is the studio of FT where the children of FT attend at least once a week. KFT works from the perspectives of contemporary art pedagogy and socially engaged practice, with the children and the visiting artists.
Socially engaged practice, also referred to as social practice or socially engaged art or participating art projects can include any art form which involves people and communities in the debate, collaboration, or social interaction. This can often be organized as the result of an outreach or education program, but many independent artists and art organizations also use it within their work. The participatory element of socially engaged practice, is key, with the artworks created often holding equal or less importance to the collaborative act of creating them. As Tom Finkelpearl outlines in his book
Artists and art organizations who work within this field will often spend much time integrating into the specific community which they wish to develop, educate, or simply share with. KFT invites professional and contemporary artists to hold workshops complied with exhibitions. The artist can also be residence artists in the preschool's studio. The artist has access to work in KFT between one day up to 2 months. The artist works together with the art educator and artist of the preschool, Jenny Berntsson, with the children and sometimes the staff and the parents in the studio. The outcome of the work is shown as exhibitions in the gallery space of KFT (in the preschool) or somewhere in the public space in Rinkeby; often in the shopping mall of Rinkeby; Rinkeby Centrum. KFT is the only contemporary art initiative Rinkeby.
KFT has about 4-6 exhibitions per year. The exhibitions are not only made by professional contemporary artists but also the children. The exhibitions is reaching a public of 200 parents, 130 children, and 30 adults every time. When the art is shown in the public space, the crowd is uncountable. KFT has sustainable cooperations with the shopping mall Rinkeby Centrum, the Secretary of Culture i Järva, the Culture Group for Children in Järva, with Husby Art Hall, Tensta Art Hall, contemporary artists and is a member of The National Association of Swedish Art Societies. KFT has 24 members and is running from an ideal basis. The board contains staff working at FT; President; Jenny Berntsson, artist and art pedagogue.
Denmark, Aarhus, Gellerup
Sigrids Situe
SIS is an art project and platform based in the neighborhood of Gellerupparken/Toveshøj, Aarhus, (Denmark). SIS develops art projects together with local, national, and international partners and works on long-term collaborations with independent international artists and curators. In the last couple of years, one of SIS’s biggest focuses has been the Drawing School for children, a weekly appointment for the children living in the area for developing creative projects guided by a variable group of volunteers with different artistic backgrounds (artists, art historians, teachers, documentarists, anthropologists, etc). SIS promotes art in social contexts as a practice that fosters dialogue, participation, and community building within the multiethnic local context of Gellerupparken. Gellerupparken and Toveshøj are, just as Rinkeby and Tarlabaşı, segregated from the city center. In this complex and continuously changing framework, SIS uses art to critically explore how to create opportunities for joint action, influence, and participation in the public debates, both in terms of its own projects and for the inhabitants of the area. BV offers an incredible opportunity for exchanging innovative practices about using the creative language of art as a tool for community building, integration, and collaboration in difficult and marginalized areas. SIS is located in the neighborhood of Gellerup/Toveshøj, and it is active in the area with different ongoing projects: Sigrids Garden - kitchen garden within the local garden-association Grønærten. Sigrids Stue residence - a 3rd-floor apartment in the Gellerup estate, for danish and international artists coming in residence. Sigrids Udestue - wooden temporary pavilion located in the very center of Gellerupparken. Sigrids Stues Drawing School for children Cafe SiGo - project for women in collaboration with the Somalian Cultural Association Gobaad Kulturforening.
SIS art project and platform have been present in the neighborhood of Gellerupparken/Toveshøj since 2012, carrying out many collaborations with local institutions, organizations, and groups. One example is the collaboration of SIS in local initiatives like “Gellerup Together” (June 2017) where the neighborhood’s square hosted different workshops for children and adults under the theme “community and participation”. SIS and the other local organizations (as the library, the hostel, the rap academy, etc…) were involved in the arrangement facilitating the different activities. The strong connection and network with the actors living in the neighborhood will be an asset for better spreading and disseminating the BV’s project outcomes, and for organizing the final exhibition and book release in Gellerupparken. Thanks to its “Art in Residence” program, SIS has a consolidated experience in working with longterm international projects, collaborations with transnational partners, and the organization of people’s mobilities. Some of the artists involved in the strategic partnership for the BV project participated in the past years in the residence program in SIS’s apartment. The BV project is an opportunity to consolidate and reinforce the positive collaboration with PASAJ and KFT and, not less important, to encourage the exchange of innovative ideas for the future. One of SIS’s biggest ongoing projects is the Drawing School for children of different ages. The children in the area meet in Sigrids Udestue (wooden mobile pavilion in the center of Gellerup) two times a week and get the opportunity to be together and to work on various drawing tasks. SIS’s drawing school walks the children through learning drawing techniques and producing small creative works. With playful, fun, and hands-on methods, the children approach and reflect on important issues like democracy, community, equality, and participation in decision making. Last year, in the occasion of the Labour Day (1st of May) the children drew and placed around in the area a series of stickers illustrating their reflection about people’s rights and their wishes for a fair society.
Turkey, Istanbul, Tarlabasi
PASAJ represented by BIS
PASAJ is an Istanbul based artist initiative that has been running an independent art space since 2010. PASAJ hosts exhibitions, interventions, workshops, talks, performances of local and international artists that do socially engaged and participatory art projects. It seeks ways to facilitate skills exchange and tries to establish an environment where artists may encounter different communities. It respects the local knowledge, history, and memory of a place.
Relocated 5 times, each time PASAJ experienced different milieu’s conditions and social assets, functioning continuously in different conditions with still the same excitement as the first day. Since 2013 PASAJ has opened its studio in Tarlabasi - a historical and multiethnic neighborhood in the heart of Istanbul that is going through a complex process of gentrification. Between September 2014 to June 2017, PASAJ realized a temporary project, in which a tiny restaurant located in Tarlabaşı market street becomes a contemporary art venue named PASAJ Tarlabasi. In PASAJ Tarlabaşı the target audience of the activities is mostly the children of the local population coming from very different cultural and social backgrounds, whose family had to face displacement inside Turkey or from other countries. A large range of children stops going to school quite early in order to get married or start working around the age of 16.
The activities of PASAJ Tarlabasi aims to facilitate the connection, through art exhibition involving both locals and artists, workshop, performance, in close collaboration with the families, artist, shop keepers. The art activities are considered as a way to share the know-how of local families, and the artist but also a way to share their vision about the changing of the neighborhood in urbanism level, social level, professional level. The children from Tarlabaşı neighborhood are from different cultural minorities and most of the families have been displaced, from other countries or other regions of Turkey, because of economic reasons or conflict. Diversity is something familiar for them, but this diversity of language can be an obstacle for school learning, as well as cultural patterns, leading some of them to get married at an early age and work around the age of 15 for boys. For the local children, all activities and meetings with artists are a way to allow them to increase their communication skills, learning skills, learn any kind of hand-craft technics, and be more familiar with contemporary art. It is a way of empowering them. From April 2018 on, PASAJ settles in a 16 square meters room in Nimet Han, Karaköy under the name of PASAj Karakoy. The main team of PASAJ is made of 4 people and has interns and volunteers, and normally functions as 6-8 people., and pending on project we collaborate from different professionals. The grants PASAJ is getting is used for the maintenance of the space and some expenses of the artists. PASAJ transforms itself with the support and the creativity of artists and participators.
Turkey, Istanbul
Istanbul Kultur University
The Istanbul Kultur University Faculty of Education, which was established based on the principle of raising teachers that have strong subject matter knowledge, high self-confidence and motivation and an understanding of “learning/teaching through application/experience”, aims to be an institution that trains Turkey's most distinguished teachers. In the 2013-2014 Academic Year, we accepted our first candidate teachers to the undergraduate program of our Faculty. Our start with a hundred percent placement rate made us extremely proud. As a reflection of our teaching philosophy, we aim to train our teacher candidates with an applied teaching process. For this purpose, two elementary schools, one science high school, and three kindergartens within the Istanbul Kultur Educational Institutions will be the natural application areas of our prospective teachers.
The Department of Elementary Education Early Childhood Education Undergraduate Program is committed to ensuring the development and learning of our children in preschool institutions with a fun and educational process by creating rich learning environments. Our goal is to train qualified teachers who can contribute to preschool education practices at a national and international level, lead the field, and who have a reflective and critical mindset.