Creative ID: 236
Immediately! We can work anywhere in Hawke's Bay including Napier, Hastings, Havelock North, Waipawa, Waipukurau and Wairoa.
My arts or creative practice (including details about my specific focus within that art form/practice and my strengths)
I manage the Visitor Engagement team at an award-winning museum and home of the region’s taonga and other treasures. In our collections we have over 90,000 objects, and these form the core of our changing exhibitions of art, culture and social history.
We also have a chamber concert/theatre with cinema capability onsite where live performances take place, and a dedicated Education Suite. We develop quality exhibitions that showcase our collections/taonga, and have skilled practitioners to support this process including curators, graphic designers, exhibition designers, archivists, technicians, educators, marketers and a customer engagement team. The creative opportunity for students is vast!
My track record of experience and success - or the track record of experience and success of the creative or artist that I will partner with
Hawke's Bay is an award-winning regional museum recognised nationally as a quality cultural facility. Creativity is at our core. We use treasures/taonga to tell stories, share experiences, inform and inspire. We support students to develop their creativity in a range of different ways, using our internal team and external experts including artists, designers, performers and writers.
Describe the experience you have had working with children or young people, teaching or facilitating creative processes
In my team I have four experienced educators, three of whom are registered teachers and one who is fluent in te reo Maori. All are police-checked and our workplace complies with the Vulnerable Children Act. I am also an experienced secondary school teacher. We currently have two Ministry of Education contracts to deliver programmes to students aged 5-18 from around the wider Hawke's Bay region from Wairoa to Waipukurau.
These programmes, LEOTC and Raranga Matihiko, focus on the taonga in our museum and in our community; at the heart of our learning lie local stories. We also offer school holiday programmes and a wide range of community engagement activities which involved our educators, curators and other museum experts as well as experts from the community including artists. Conservation and sustainability are consistent themes throughout the programme and activities we provide. We would love to extend our offering to facilitate even more creativity with the students we work with, or those we have yet to reach.
Why I want to be part of the Creatives in Schools programme and how my involvement will link to my creative practice
We already work closely with many schools in our wider community but we hope by becoming a 'Creative' in this programme we will reach many more students, including those from low decile schools. We want students to develop a lifelong love of museums, art galleries and theaters, and we want them to feel like this space is their space, a place where they can feel free to unleash their creativity in multiple ways.