Blog 4 – Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3

The following blog posts have been written by the Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. They will share the story of Marino College’s ‘Creative Minds Festival of Art and Culture’. Find out all about their journey from initial ideas to realising their dream of arranging an Arts and Culture Festival for the community, by the community.

Marino College is a small City of Dublin ETB school. They are plurilingual (37 languages!), non-denominational and DEIS. The schools catchment area is a vibrant and rapidly evolving multicultural part of Dublin North East Inner City.

Under the leadership of Irish teacher Joan Lyne (now also a Teacher Creative Associate with the Arts Council), in 2022 Marino College became a Creative School.

In 2023 Marino College, together with various local schools and organisations joined a Creative Clusters scheme. The project is one of the recipients of the 2024 Arts in Education Portal Documentation Award read the announcement here.

We’re pleased to share the fourth and final blog in the series from the students and staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. In this post, Marino’s JCSP Librarian Robin Stewart shares the plans and story so far of the 2025 edition of the Creative Minds Festival of Arts and Culture, and how the story of the initiative’s success is being shared (and hopefully soon replicated) at home and abroad.

Each year, in the immediate aftermath of the Creative Minds Festival, students are surveyed as to what they liked the most, the least, and what they felt could be even better. Student input, insight and leadership are central to the Creative Minds project’s continues success, a festival by young people, for young people. We apply the methodology from Roger Hart’s ‘Ladder of Participation’ to empower students through increasing levels of agency. Staff provide soft rails and support for our students to take the initiative and run with it, whilst fostering their cultural, literacy, numeracy, communications, social, emotional and creative development. These aims tie in extremely well with the wider aims and ethos of the JCSP Demonstration Library Project, so it’s a natural fit that our outlets for students’ creativity and cultural expression are right at home using our school library as their base.

We also begin exploring and discussing the theme and objectives of the following year’s festival, so the 2025 edition was already being planned and discussed straight away after 2024’s ‘Marino 100’ goals were achieved. The theme for 2025’s Creative Minds Festival is “Global Myths, Local Legends”, exploring the many connections and similarities of folklore, myth and legend from the many cultures and communities in Marino.

We’re incredibly lucky to have Heather Gray as our artist-in-residence again this year, and even luckier that Heather was successful in her application for the Arts Council’s Young People, Children and Education (YPCE) Project Award. The generous support of the Arts Council has allowed us work extensively with a wider range of local schools, organisations and artists than ever before!

The following are some of the exciting, inspirational artists we’ve had the privilege of working with this year: Kerith Ogden maker and illustrator; Mavis Ramazani & Leina Ibnouf of Cooking for Freedom; Maddy Schmidt designer and artist; Steven Doody our former woodwork teacher and environmental artist; Helen Flanagan artist and filmmaker; Alessandra Azeviche Afro-Brazilian dancer & choreographer; William Ribeir musician and samba band workshop leader; Sara Serpilli artist and designer and Sinéad Lynch puppeteer and textile artist.

It’s an incredible opportunity to have such skilled and talented artists working across all the schools involved in the Creative Minds project. Ultimately though, it’s the students of Marino College, St. Joseph’s CBS Fairview, Mount Carmel Secondary School, St. Vincent de Paul Girls’ Primary School who are key to the successful running of hands-on artistic and cultural experiences such as prop-building, costume design, dance and drumming workshops, film-making, and photography sessions, and everything in between. Following on from last year’s successes, students from Art Club have been working with local primary school pupils, most recently the three 3rd class groups in St. Vincent de Paul Girls’ Primary school, Griffith Avenue, guiding the pupils in crafting costumes and props that they’ll wear in this year’s parade, accompanying the floats being made in Marino, St. Joseph’s and Mount Carmel. These include Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs, from Baltic folklore, Medusa from Greek legend, Dracula, written by Marino local Bram Stoker and famously associated with Romania, and the Children of Lir, to name just a few!

We’ve had a lot of interest in the Creative Minds project, and are always happy to share our ideas and inspiration. We’ve had wonderful opportunities to present our project at events including the Department of An Taoiseach, European Cultural Foundation webinars and conferences, Amsterdam Central Library, University of Cambridge, and upcoming appearances at the Library Association of Ireland/Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Joint Annual Conference in Cork and the Next Library conference in Denmark.

We’ve witnessed first hand the powerful impact involvement in Creative Minds has had on the education and wellbeing of all the students we have the privilege to work with, and are passionate in the belief that this project could be replicated by any school, anywhere!

We’ve not yet had the 2025 edition of the Creative Minds Festival, and already we’ve begun to imagine what 2026 might look like – it’s all quite loose so far, but it’s looking like a Community Arts Trail might be on the cards, as well as playful installations by the community, for the community.

It’s been a real privilege to share the story of the Creative Minds Festival with you, and if you have any questions, queries or are looking for inspiration, I’d love to hear from you, just drop me a line to marinocollege@jcsplibraries.ie, and as we always say, if we can do it, so can you.