This week we caught up with UNESCO Creative Leader Nicholl Hardwick. Nicholl has been very involved with the Creative Leaders’ programme so far and has been instrumental in delivering key creative workshops to young people. Below, she offers her perspective on the positive outcome of these sessions for those involved.

‘The Lynx in Thetford Forest’ Workshop at Avenue Junior Primary School

Young minds are the future of the generations to come. Children approach, explore and attack life in a way that can sometimes get lost as we grow older. We become aware of how the world around us expects us to be, and we can allow that to become our substance when this shouldn’t be the case. However, in today’s society, it seems as if children are taught to dampen their creative senses in order to become more ready for the fast world they will soon be working in. To me that is a loss. A loss of talent, a loss of gift, and most of all, a loss of creative exploration.

This is why I wanted to take part in this workshop. The children were given full reign to create a collaborative poem not only with the volunteers, but with one another. They decided the sounds the poem would make, they decide the path the story would go and they let their creative senses run free, not feeling limited by sounds, expressions or movement. The poem we created together revolved around the subject of the Lynx and the possibility of it being re-wilded into Thetford Forest. The children had complete authoritative control over the Lynx’s behaviour, how it would think (because of course a Lynx wouldn’t think in sentences!) and how it feels whilst residing in Thetford Forest. The entire class were encouraged to become involved in shouting sounds and performing movements. The whole process was a chance for kids to really connect with their creative talents without restriction or the need to feel regimented in one way of learning.

I adored the class and the entire experience, and I was hugely impressed with the classes enthusiasm as well as the work they produced. When children are given the freedom to enthusiastically create something new and imaginative, the outcome is always beautifully unpredictable.

Harriet Martineau Creative Writing Workshop

Taking part in this workshop was a huge honour for me. Not only was it about a locally born woman who achieved amazing heights in the persual of equality and fairness, but it was also a chance to hear from the young women of today, and give them a platform for creative freedom and expression. The whole point of this session was to create a discussion, allow thoughts to be verbalised, and encourage ideas to become engaged.

Harriet Martineau created literature for those, who at that time, did not have a platform for their voices to be heard. Women, the poor and non-white citizens were all silenced through oppression in the 1800’s, and it is through this lens we wanted the young women of the session to start thinking. Who is silenced in our community today? Why are they silenced? How can we make them heard?

This sparked off a very challenging discussion which encouraged the young women to not only bring in their own experiences as females, but also to include the perspectives of a whole spectrum of people who continuously fail to have their voices significantly heard in today’s society. The main groups they came up with were the silenced voices of the young generation, women of all races and ethnicities, and those who suffer from mental health problems. Of course there are so many voices that go unheard in the society we live in, but in a short workshop session, these were the ones the young women decided to focus on.

Not only did we want to identify certain silenced voices, but we also wanted to deconstruct why these voices were being excluded from main stream discussions. The overall consensus was that it was down to the media, the patriarchal institutions around us and also the need for people to feel safe and not wanting to approach a stigma because that would then involve them being seen as disruptive to the status quo.

The discussion allowed the whole group to get involved and share personal stories as well as critically observe the world around them. The workshops aim was to hone in on the groups creative talent. We wanted to build a vision around them and their own personal ideas. Hence why once the discussion took place we challenged the girls to take everything they had learnt and contributed and use it to create an idea for a revolutionary novel. It could be in any format they wish, whether that be prose, fiction or non-fiction, poetry, visual art etc. The main rule was that it had to be something which resonated with them personally.

Far too often are not only women, but so many other demographics forced to silence themselves in order to conform to the pre-existing order of things. This workshop aimed to break away from that and allow these young women to really engage with the world around them, and feel confident enough to criticize its flaws in order to work towards effective change.