ENGLISH

NUACHTLITIR


The Portal Team is delighted to announce Creativity in the Classroom with five Primary Schools in Dublin 8 and Dublin 12 as the second recipient of 2025 Arts in Education Portal Documentation Award. This special award celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Arts in Education Portal.

Project: Creativity in the Classroom

Creativity in the Classroom is an artist/ teacher collaborative initiative that emerged from the social and economic devastation of working-class communities in Dublin 8 and 12 in the 1980s & 90s. At that time teachers were witnessing signs of trauma in children in local schools and sought to find ways for children to support the emotional and social wellbeing of the whole child.

In 1997 a cross sectoral discourse led by the Canals Communities Partnerships resulted in the founding of Creativity in the Classroom, (CIC) a school-based creative arts programme in the belief that the arts could actively and positively contribute to the holistic development of the child and their educational experience.

Today, Creativity in the Classroom, continues to enrich the lives of our children, enriched by the ever- growing diversity of our school communities. Children continue to inform the direction of this process-based arts project, working together with artists and teachers. Despite the many challenges facing our children and their families, creativity continues to thrive amongst this generation of makers and doers.

The longitudinal nature of this project has allowed thousands of children to access excellent quality arts education in their classroom supported by the important dynamic of teacher and artist working collaboratively

Schools currently involved
• St James Primary School, Basin Lane, Dublin 8
• Loretto Jnr. Primary School, Crumlin, Dublin 12
• Loretto Snr. Primary School, Crumlin, Dublin 12
• Warrenmount, Presentation Primary School, Blackpitts, Dublin 8
• Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, Inchicore, Dublin 8

Artists currently involved
Liz McMahon graduated in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1981 and has been involved with many art programmes, in and out of primary schools since. She is the longest serving artist on the project (since 1997) and continues to provide mentorship and support to artists.

Deirdre O’Reilly is a Ceramic artist with a collaborative and personal practice. She has developed a process based practice with children and teachers over the last 20 years in Creativity in the Classroom.

Jane Groves is a visual artist who specialises in working with young people, inspired by her own observations of nature and informed by children’s innate playfulness, and curiosity.

Duffy Mooney Shephard is the newest member of the team. Duffy is an Illustrator and Story maker. She is an experienced art education professional with expertise in workshop facilitation & programming for children, families and schools.

Melissa Hogan: Teacher/ Co-ordinator
Melissa is a primary school teacher with a special interest in the creative arts and the positive impact creative expression has on well-being. She has been involved with Creativity in the Classroom for over 25 years and is passionate about how this wonderful project has enriched the lives of the children it serves in each of the school communities

We’re delighted to share the third blog in the series from the students and staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. In this post, staff and students reflect on collaboration in the planning and organising of their Creative Minds Festival of Arts and Culture, Marino 100: Back to the Future, and talk about some of the artists, groups and organisations they worked with.

Turning the idea of our Creative Minds Festival into reality took a lot of engagement, involvement and collaboration with a wide variety of groups in our community. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the people organisations we partnered with and how our collaboration enhanced the scope and ambition of what we were able to achieve.

The first, and key, partnership that led to the Festival’s success were having our Artist in Residence, Heather Gray, to work with. Heather initially came to the school as a Creative Practitioner in the pilot stages of the Arts Council’s Creative Schools Programme. She’s the creative force behind the project, guiding students, staff and community members in making and doing.

Irish teacher Joan Lyne, who first dreamt up the Festival Parade, is a constant source of great ideas and problem solving, a driving force of creativity in the school, who now coordinates the TY Creative Schools class. Our Art, Music, Home Ec., SEN and Guidance departments have collaborated extensively with visiting artists and craftspeople to facilitate opportunities for learning and fun for students. Ms French and Ms Connor’s organisational and communication skills are world class, and we’re lucky to have buy-in from all our enthusiastic and supportive staff in Marino College: all members of staff were involved in some capacity. Special mention to our Special Needs Assistants, Teresa, the two Helens, Mary, Grainne, Aisling and Tamlyn too – their indefatigable good humour and incredible way with our students made planning and organisation so much easier.

School Management, our former Principal Mary McAteer (retired) and current Principal Lisa Reid, and Deputy Principal Grainne Cullen, understood the added value creativity outside of (but linked to) the classroom brings to the school, and support Heather’s working with us in Art Club every Wednesday afternoon. Their buy-in as key stakeholders was essential, as was the support of our Board of Management. The Chair of our Board, Deputy-Lord Mayor of Dublin and local City Councillor Donna Cooney, who also helps arrange the local Welcome Fairview initiative for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, was very supportive and joined us on the day, alongside the then Deputy-Lord Mayor Cllr. Deirdre Heney.

The Welcome Fairview Group worked on creating ceramic tableware with students and parents that we used to share food from different cultures at our Global Feast and BBQ. The BBQ couldn’t have happened without the support of Swan Youth Service on Dunne Street, supportive champions of young people in our area.

We were also lucky to be accepted, along with St. Vincent’s Girl’s National School, Mount Carmel School and St. Joseph’s CBS Fairview, in our application to become a Creative Cluster, an initiative of the Department of Education. This collaboration saw secondary students work with primary pupils in making props and costumes and artists ran workshop sessions in each of the schools. For the 2025 Parade, Heather’s already run workshops in the JCSP Library in Mount Carmel making The Morrigan puppets, which the Mount Carmel students will have in this year’s parade, along with students from all the other schools.

We received generous funding from The European Cultural Foundation’s Europe Challenge Project, which allowed us to upscale and extent the festival in year two. This project saw us work in close collaboration with the Marino Resident’s Association, and in particular their Marino 100 Committee, who coordinated the local celebrations of the area’s centenary. Our school is also extremely fortunate to have one of only 30 State-funded school libraries in the country, under the Junior Cert. Schools Programme Demonstration Library Project, allowing us to place cross-curricular teaching and learning at the heart of all of our collaborations and to host workshops and sessions in the library, linking to the library’s print and digital stock.

Fairview’s Viva School of Dance taught students to dance to the tune most associated with our area, the famous Marino Waltz, through workshops in school and with local residents. RTE Junior’s Senior Producer, Nicky Coghlan, came along on the day of the Parade and recorded a podcast with students, and Irish Times photographers took fantastic shots of the Festival and Parade too, featuring in both print and digital editions of the paper.

As part of the festivities, under the theme of Diversity and Biodiversity, we worked with Easy Treesie to plant native trees in the area, hiding a forest in the city. We worked with Dublin City Council Parks and planted trees in Fairview Park as well as in the grounds of St. Joseph’s CBS and at the Mater Step-Down Unit on Phlipsburg Avenue.

A group of students from Marino College stand around an Easy Tressie sign and potted trees

Students from Marino College in Dublin planting trees with Easy Treesie as part of the Creative Minds Festival

Our goals to challenge anti-immigrant sentiment were informed and supported by AkiDwA, Black & Irish and East Wall Here for All, alongside Mud Island Community Garden. On the morning of the Festival last year, we welcomed the assessment team from Schools of Sanctuary, who met with students and staff and awarded us our School of Sanctuary status.

Roisin Lonergan, Creative Director of the Five Lamps Arts Festival, has been a constant support, sharing her extensive skills, knowledge and contacts with us. Dublin Port Company were also very generous in their support. Many visiting artists and craftspeople enhanced the skillsets that enabled our making and doing, including Samba drummers William Ribeiro and Simeon Smith, fibre artists Sinead Lynch and Helen Gaughan and artist Maddy Schmidt, to name just a few! Local artist Steven Doody can turn his hand to anything and is always reliable for help and advice.

Closing roads for the Parade required collaboration with An Garda Síochána, whose community liaison officer in Clontarf Station couldn’t have been more helpful and helped to coordinate stewards on the day. Dublin Bus allowed us hold up the 123 bus route, and Dublin City Council Arts Office, and the City Council more widely, provided great supports, funding, advice and encouragement. We had to create a detailed Event Plan and Risk Assessment to most of these organisations. We also had to create a detailed plan showing who needed to be where, when, doing what, with an assigned role for everyone in the school and plenty more people besides!

A screenshot of a spreadsheet detailing peoples roles during the festival

Marino College Festival organisation – A designated role and an individualised schedule for everyone in the building!

St. Vincent’s Infants School on Griffith Avenue and St. Vincent de Paul School North Strand welcomed Marino students into their classrooms to run creative prop- and costume- making workshops with their pupils. Cathal Brugha Further Education and Training College, North Strand Campus, were generous in allowing us to use their facilities for creativity and for storage. Music Generation’s Peter O’Toole supported the music department, and Irish teacher Niamh Murray coordinated choreography. Local Businesses proudly promoted the festivities – literally all of the community were involved!

Logos of all the groups and organisations who supported Marino Colleges Creative Minds Festival

The many groups and organisations who supported Marino College’s Creative Minds Festival

Collaboration across our community was key to the project’s success – there are so many great organisations out there working to achieve the same goals, so it’s great to discover one another and find opportunities to work together to build on our community connections. We’re gearing up for this year’s festival, with the theme of ‘Global Myths, Local Legends’, and look forward to telling you all about it in our next blog post!


!!!! 2025 Documentation Award: Creativity in the Classroom Announced as Second Recipient

The Portal Team is delighted to announce Creativity in the Classroom with five Primary Schools in Dublin 8 and Dublin 12 as the second recipient of 2025 Arts in Education Portal Documentation Award. This special award celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Arts in Education Portal.

Project: Creativity in the Classroom

Creativity in the Classroom is an artist/ teacher collaborative initiative that emerged from the social and economic devastation of working-class communities in Dublin 8 and 12 in the 1980s & 90s. At that time teachers were witnessing signs of trauma in children in local schools and sought to find ways for children to support the emotional and social wellbeing of the whole child.

In 1997 a cross sectoral discourse led by the Canals Communities Partnerships resulted in the founding of Creativity in the Classroom, (CIC) a school-based creative arts programme in the belief that the arts could actively and positively contribute to the holistic development of the child and their educational experience.

Today, Creativity in the Classroom, continues to enrich the lives of our children, enriched by the ever- growing diversity of our school communities. Children continue to inform the direction of this process-based arts project, working together with artists and teachers. Despite the many challenges facing our children and their families, creativity continues to thrive amongst this generation of makers and doers.

The longitudinal nature of this project has allowed thousands of children to access excellent quality arts education in their classroom supported by the important dynamic of teacher and artist working collaboratively

Schools currently involved
• St James Primary School, Basin Lane, Dublin 8
• Loretto Jnr. Primary School, Crumlin, Dublin 12
• Loretto Snr. Primary School, Crumlin, Dublin 12
• Warrenmount, Presentation Primary School, Blackpitts, Dublin 8
• Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School, Inchicore, Dublin 8

Artists currently involved
Liz McMahon graduated in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1981 and has been involved with many art programmes, in and out of primary schools since. She is the longest serving artist on the project (since 1997) and continues to provide mentorship and support to artists.

Deirdre O’Reilly is a Ceramic artist with a collaborative and personal practice. She has developed a process based practice with children and teachers over the last 20 years in Creativity in the Classroom.

Jane Groves is a visual artist who specialises in working with young people, inspired by her own observations of nature and informed by children’s innate playfulness, and curiosity.

Duffy Mooney Shephard is the newest member of the team. Duffy is an Illustrator and Story maker. She is an experienced art education professional with expertise in workshop facilitation & programming for children, families and schools.

Melissa Hogan: Teacher/ Co-ordinator
Melissa is a primary school teacher with a special interest in the creative arts and the positive impact creative expression has on well-being. She has been involved with Creativity in the Classroom for over 25 years and is passionate about how this wonderful project has enriched the lives of the children it serves in each of the school communities

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

We’re delighted to share the third blog in the series from the students and staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. In this post, staff and students reflect on collaboration in the planning and organising of their Creative Minds Festival of Arts and Culture, Marino 100: Back to the Future, and talk about some of the artists, groups and organisations they worked with.

Turning the idea of our Creative Minds Festival into reality took a lot of engagement, involvement and collaboration with a wide variety of groups in our community. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the people organisations we partnered with and how our collaboration enhanced the scope and ambition of what we were able to achieve.

The first, and key, partnership that led to the Festival’s success were having our Artist in Residence, Heather Gray, to work with. Heather initially came to the school as a Creative Practitioner in the pilot stages of the Arts Council’s Creative Schools Programme. She’s the creative force behind the project, guiding students, staff and community members in making and doing.

Irish teacher Joan Lyne, who first dreamt up the Festival Parade, is a constant source of great ideas and problem solving, a driving force of creativity in the school, who now coordinates the TY Creative Schools class. Our Art, Music, Home Ec., SEN and Guidance departments have collaborated extensively with visiting artists and craftspeople to facilitate opportunities for learning and fun for students. Ms French and Ms Connor’s organisational and communication skills are world class, and we’re lucky to have buy-in from all our enthusiastic and supportive staff in Marino College: all members of staff were involved in some capacity. Special mention to our Special Needs Assistants, Teresa, the two Helens, Mary, Grainne, Aisling and Tamlyn too – their indefatigable good humour and incredible way with our students made planning and organisation so much easier.

School Management, our former Principal Mary McAteer (retired) and current Principal Lisa Reid, and Deputy Principal Grainne Cullen, understood the added value creativity outside of (but linked to) the classroom brings to the school, and support Heather’s working with us in Art Club every Wednesday afternoon. Their buy-in as key stakeholders was essential, as was the support of our Board of Management. The Chair of our Board, Deputy-Lord Mayor of Dublin and local City Councillor Donna Cooney, who also helps arrange the local Welcome Fairview initiative for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, was very supportive and joined us on the day, alongside the then Deputy-Lord Mayor Cllr. Deirdre Heney.

The Welcome Fairview Group worked on creating ceramic tableware with students and parents that we used to share food from different cultures at our Global Feast and BBQ. The BBQ couldn’t have happened without the support of Swan Youth Service on Dunne Street, supportive champions of young people in our area.

We were also lucky to be accepted, along with St. Vincent’s Girl’s National School, Mount Carmel School and St. Joseph’s CBS Fairview, in our application to become a Creative Cluster, an initiative of the Department of Education. This collaboration saw secondary students work with primary pupils in making props and costumes and artists ran workshop sessions in each of the schools. For the 2025 Parade, Heather’s already run workshops in the JCSP Library in Mount Carmel making The Morrigan puppets, which the Mount Carmel students will have in this year’s parade, along with students from all the other schools.

We received generous funding from The European Cultural Foundation’s Europe Challenge Project, which allowed us to upscale and extent the festival in year two. This project saw us work in close collaboration with the Marino Resident’s Association, and in particular their Marino 100 Committee, who coordinated the local celebrations of the area’s centenary. Our school is also extremely fortunate to have one of only 30 State-funded school libraries in the country, under the Junior Cert. Schools Programme Demonstration Library Project, allowing us to place cross-curricular teaching and learning at the heart of all of our collaborations and to host workshops and sessions in the library, linking to the library’s print and digital stock.

Fairview’s Viva School of Dance taught students to dance to the tune most associated with our area, the famous Marino Waltz, through workshops in school and with local residents. RTE Junior’s Senior Producer, Nicky Coghlan, came along on the day of the Parade and recorded a podcast with students, and Irish Times photographers took fantastic shots of the Festival and Parade too, featuring in both print and digital editions of the paper.

As part of the festivities, under the theme of Diversity and Biodiversity, we worked with Easy Treesie to plant native trees in the area, hiding a forest in the city. We worked with Dublin City Council Parks and planted trees in Fairview Park as well as in the grounds of St. Joseph’s CBS and at the Mater Step-Down Unit on Phlipsburg Avenue.

A group of students from Marino College stand around an Easy Tressie sign and potted trees

Students from Marino College in Dublin planting trees with Easy Treesie as part of the Creative Minds Festival

Our goals to challenge anti-immigrant sentiment were informed and supported by AkiDwA, Black & Irish and East Wall Here for All, alongside Mud Island Community Garden. On the morning of the Festival last year, we welcomed the assessment team from Schools of Sanctuary, who met with students and staff and awarded us our School of Sanctuary status.

Roisin Lonergan, Creative Director of the Five Lamps Arts Festival, has been a constant support, sharing her extensive skills, knowledge and contacts with us. Dublin Port Company were also very generous in their support. Many visiting artists and craftspeople enhanced the skillsets that enabled our making and doing, including Samba drummers William Ribeiro and Simeon Smith, fibre artists Sinead Lynch and Helen Gaughan and artist Maddy Schmidt, to name just a few! Local artist Steven Doody can turn his hand to anything and is always reliable for help and advice.

Closing roads for the Parade required collaboration with An Garda Síochána, whose community liaison officer in Clontarf Station couldn’t have been more helpful and helped to coordinate stewards on the day. Dublin Bus allowed us hold up the 123 bus route, and Dublin City Council Arts Office, and the City Council more widely, provided great supports, funding, advice and encouragement. We had to create a detailed Event Plan and Risk Assessment to most of these organisations. We also had to create a detailed plan showing who needed to be where, when, doing what, with an assigned role for everyone in the school and plenty more people besides!

A screenshot of a spreadsheet detailing peoples roles during the festival

Marino College Festival organisation – A designated role and an individualised schedule for everyone in the building!

St. Vincent’s Infants School on Griffith Avenue and St. Vincent de Paul School North Strand welcomed Marino students into their classrooms to run creative prop- and costume- making workshops with their pupils. Cathal Brugha Further Education and Training College, North Strand Campus, were generous in allowing us to use their facilities for creativity and for storage. Music Generation’s Peter O’Toole supported the music department, and Irish teacher Niamh Murray coordinated choreography. Local Businesses proudly promoted the festivities – literally all of the community were involved!

Logos of all the groups and organisations who supported Marino Colleges Creative Minds Festival

The many groups and organisations who supported Marino College’s Creative Minds Festival

Collaboration across our community was key to the project’s success – there are so many great organisations out there working to achieve the same goals, so it’s great to discover one another and find opportunities to work together to build on our community connections. We’re gearing up for this year’s festival, with the theme of ‘Global Myths, Local Legends’, and look forward to telling you all about it in our next blog post!