Blog 1 – 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.

This first instalment is written by English & ESOL teacher and Marino’s Schools of Sanctuary Coordinator Cathy French and Junior Cert. Schools Programme Librarian in Marino College Robin Stewart.

Introducing Marino College and an insight into the evolution of our Creative Minds Festival of Arts and Culture.

We’re excited to share the story of Marino College’s ‘Creative Minds Festival of Art and Culture’ through this series of blog posts!

We are Marino College, a small City of Dublin ETB school. We’re plurilingual (37 languages!), non-denominational and DEIS. Our catchment area is a vibrant and rapidly evolving multicultural part of the North East Inner City. Students from inner-city families who’ve lived in the area for generations attend our school and up to 70% of our student population are from migrant and refugee families, including from Somalia, Syria and Ukraine. At Marino our non-immigrant-background Irish students are now one of the minority populations.

Creativity provides sanctuary for every one of our students who show up to learn together in our landmark listed building on Dublin’s famous thoroughfare, Marino Mart. The area of Marino was built 100 years ago in 1924 as social housing – a ‘garden city’ of ‘palaces for the people’ built by an impoverished new State.

Art has the capacity to transcend linguistic, economic, cultural and racial barriers. We have witnessed the potential for creative projects to engender social cohesion in our community. Appreciating the arts as essential to wellbeing, increasing student engagement with learning, cultivating parental involvement, embracing diversity by providing inclusive experiences, promoting youth voice, nurturing greater decision making, and communicating diverse ways of seeing the world.

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. We were granted €2000 per year for two years and hours with a creative associate, Heather Gray. Having a Creative Associate (now our ‘Artist-in-Residence’) has enhanced our school’s ability and capacity to facilitate creativity and meaningful cultural exchange immeasurably, it’s a perfect partnership of school staff – artist – students – community.

Heather surveyed our students and identified their key objectives and ambitions: to be outside (this was just post-Covid), to be active and to celebrate our multi-culturalism. The key aim of our work as a Creative School was to focus on inclusivity and collaboration, to see students and staff working together to achieve common goals and to foster creative thinking about the issues which impact, or will impact, our students’ lives, such as climate change/environmental instability, immigration, political polarisation, mental health and economic inequality. Creative Schools allowed us a space for conversation, collaboration and creativity, for students from diverse backgrounds to come together to work together.

Marino College 2022 Creative Schools Logo

After a fun, busy programme of making and doing, in May 2022 an in-school Culture Festival and Global Feast was arranged, led by students. We shared food, music and dance from the many cultures in our school.

This event was so impactful and successful, we decided to upscale it the following year. In 2023 our team applied for and were granted €1500 per school per year for two years for a pilot initiative of the Department of Education and Skills, Creative Clusters. Led by students, with buy-in from school management and local stakeholders, in May 2023 in addition to the Culture Festival, we held a Community Parade, with the theme of ‘Diversity and Biodiversity’, and the Creative Minds festival was born!

Marino College Student Ambassadors leading the 2023 Parade.

The whole school was involved, with floats and props made by students and in student-run workshops with local primary schools, guided by Heather and other visiting guest artists and craftspeople. After the Parade, we returned to school for music, dancing and an art exhibition. It was a huge amount of work – road closures, bus routes diverted! – but well worth it: a joyous occasion where everyone felt seen, heard and appreciated – many of our students are from ‘seldom heard’ backgrounds, so an opportunity to amplify their voices was wonderful.

Marino College retired Principal Mary McAteer as Mother Nature, leading the 2023 Parade.

For 2023-2024, the European Cultural Foundation granted us €5500 as a ‘Europe Challenge’ Project, with additional funding received from Dublin City Council Arts Office. Our ‘Challenge’ in Marino was counteracting anti-immigration narratives in the community by upscaling the Creative Minds Festival to be bigger, better and even more inclusive – the second Blog Post, written by students who had key leadership roles in this project, will cover the process of developing and realising the 2024 Festival. As previously mentioned, 2024 is Marino’s centenary year, so we were given a unique opportunity to work in close collaboration with the Local Residents’ Association and a wide variety of local groups, with the theme of 2024’s Festival and Parade being “Back to the Future: Marino 100”, exploring the past 100 years, celebrating the now, and imagining the next hundred years.

2024 Marino 100 Festival Poster

Our students have played a central role in developing, implementing and evaluating this initiative. Paying close attention to student voice is an established feature of the inclusive ethos at Marino College. Our students are valued stakeholders; their voices and involvement have been pivotal to implementing and ensuring the ongoing success of the project. We applied the conceptual framework of Roger Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation to our work from the outset. We are committed to hearing and acting on the voices of the seldom heard and to create an environment in which all learners are comfortable in expressing their ideas and opinions.

We hope this overview of the origins of our project has been interesting – next month, we hand over to our wonderful students, who’ll get into the nitty gritty of how we went about imagining and creating our Creative Minds Festival 2024: Back to The Future, Marino 100!