Junior Arts

Junior Arts workshops prioritise skillsets embedded within Faculty of Arts programmes, and will be delivered in your classes by our Senior Arts students. This is a unique opportunity for your students to take part in workshops that explore issues relevant to their lives.

Words to action

Writing and language is at its most exciting when it is able to make readers, receivers and/or audiences enter into the world of the storyteller/orator. In this workshop, students can expect to be challenged to delve deeper into poetry through engaging exercises that effectively allow one to put their own thoughts into action.

By the end of this workshop, students can expect to have skeletons of poems that they can then develop into spoken word poems or re-purpose into another poetic form. Furthermore, students will have time to gain valuable presentation and public speaking skills with dedicated time to practice performing their writing out loud.

Skillset: Communication and problem solving

Beyond the binary

What is a binary and how does binary language - visual and text - shape our everyday world? Students will develop the skills necessary to identify examples of binaries in visual and popular culture, and think critically about how they shape our lives. Examples of binaries which will be covered are human/machine, man/woman, rural/urban and future/present.

Thinking through the challenges and innovation required to create a 'non-binary' world, working in teams, students will be given one of three scenarios set in a non-binary future – a planet inhabited by cyborgs, a post-climate change aquatic world, or a newly discovered celestial dimension. They will be asked to think creatively in order to envisage a future beyond one of the following binaries: human/machine, human/animal, or human/spirit using images from popular media and culture.

Skillset: Lateral thinking and visual communication

Hack to the future

Set in 2024, when life has been discovered on Mars, this activity will be based around an election in New Zealand. In this scenario, the New Zealand voting system has been hacked by citizens of Mars. In groups, students will have to use clues to ascertain if they are black hat hackers, grey hat hackers or white hat hackers. They will also use the clues provided to ascertain why their group has hacked the New Zealand elections and which type of hackers they are representing.

Using prompt worksheets, students will problem solve and speculate about how the media might cover their hacking and what this means for society. This will enable a discussion about decision making and risk revolving around motivations for hacking as well as a general debate on the social construction of crime.

Skillset: Digital literacy and problem solving

The secret art of music videos

Increasingly we live in a world that is saturated by images and visual information. Being able to read and understand images and their references across a range of media and platforms is crucial in articulating ideas and communicating effectively.

This workshop offers students the opportunity to identify and understand the ways that musicians and producers are influenced by and reference art in popular music videos. Pop music and videos offer a familiar and engaging point of departure for students to explore and come up with their own visual analyses of sequences and moments in videos by Drake, R.E.M., Rihanna, Kimbra and Jay-Z, among others. They will learn how music videos reference street art, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and their symbolism, Abstraction and Performance Art.

Skillset: Visual literacy and visual culture

What's hidden in arguments?

Everyday, people offer arguments to support their viewpoints and decisions, but they seldom fill in all the steps of those arguments. These missing, unspoken steps are known as 'suppressed' premises, without which the arguments will not work.

Interestingly, the unspoken premises are quite often either dubious or controversial. In this workshop students will be introduced to the task of identifying, and then questioning, suppressed premises.

Skillset: Critical thinking

If you would like one of the Junior Arts workshops to be delivered in one of your classes, please contact us.

Molly Sutton
Email: juniorarts@auckland.ac.nz