What does life look like for young people in different communities across Scotland? How do we capture different aspects of life happening in our communities? No doubt you'll have heard that we're 'living though history' at the moment. How do we create an archive for the future of what our lives are like right now?
We'll be exploring all these questions and more in our six week Arts Award Explore programme, open to all young people aged 11 to 18. The entire programme will take place online and brings together collections materials and expertise from five different University Museums in Scotland:
- University of Aberdeen
- University of Dundee
- University of Edinburgh
- The Glasgow School of Art
- University of Stirling
Each week will explore a different theme and medium of art, including photography, oral histories, landscape painting and public art. All instruction videos and resources will be posted online and you can work through them at your own pace. But we'll also put you into groups of 6 or 7 people and have weekly discussion group sessions on Microsoft Teams. You’ll be with the same people throughout the course so you can get to know each other well. Don’t worry, if you want to be in the same group as a friend, we can arrange that too.
You'll also get the chance to work with current students at the universities. Every participant on the project will be assigned a student mentor who will join your discussion groups and help you complete the assigned activities. Everyone who completes the assigned activities will be awarded an Arts Award Explore qualification.
The programme will run from 15th June to 24th July 2020. Don’t worry if you have to miss a week or two for holidays you can always catch up. When it is possible again to do so, we'd like to display some of the work you create in a pop up exhibition at the University campuses and in the meantime we'll be displaying it in an online exhibition.
Many thanks to Engage Scotland, who are supporting Weeks 3 and 4 of the programme as part of Children's Art Week. Children’s Art Week is run by Engage, the National Association for Gallery Education and supported in 2020 by Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and Arts Council of Wales and The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust.
Ready to #BePartofIt this summer? Sign up now, using the link below! No previous artistic experience necessary, the goal is to learn and have fun. The deadline for signing up is midnight on Monday 8th June.
Applications are now closed. We'll be in touch with all applicants by Wednesday 10th June at the latest. If you haven't heard from us, please check your Spam box for an email from heritagecollections@ed.ac.uk or get in touch with us directly.
Don't have an internet connection or a device to use? Get in touch with us on heritagecollections@ed.ac.uk to see how we can help.
Session 1 (available from 15th June): Introduction

Introduction to the project and the Arts Award Explore. Get to know your discussion group members.
Session 2 (available from 22nd June): Capturing Life Through Photography
Introduction to some of the photos from communities in Scotland in the past. Tips on how to take your own high quality photos using your mobile phone and some photography activities to complete (some of these are designed to be done inside if you can't go out!).
Session 3 (available from 29th June): History you can listen to
Learn what we mean by an oral history, listen to some recordings of people's lives in the past and learn how to take your own recordings. The activity this week will be to take an oral history recording from one of your friends or family members.
Session 4 (available from 6th July): Landscape Paintings and Creations
Introduction to the genre of landscape paintings: we'll think about why do people do them and share with you some paintings of Scotland that we have in our collections. Then learn how to do a landscape painting of your own. Don't worry if you don't have any paints, we'll provide lots of alternative creative ways of doing this task using regular household items.
Session 5 (available from 13th July): Public Art
What is public art? What makes public art? Is graffiti public art? What about murals? We'll discuss all these questions and more, plus we'll have an activity for you to do, making a piece of public art out of recycled materials.
Session 6 (available from 20th July): Sharing your work
This week we'll talk about some of the different ways that we can think about sharing our creative work with others. We'll also show you how to write exhibition labels for your work so that we can use these for our pop up exhibition in future.