This newly launched Creative Education CPD course has been designed to help educators to reflect on their teaching and learn new skills that will allow them to implement small changes to their professional practice, and support their teaching in this new and uncertain world.

The global pandemic has massively impacted teaching staff, who have had little or no time to keep up with changes necessary or reflect on how to transform the landscape of teaching and learning.

Pupils’ deteriorating mental health, exam confusion, excessive workload, pressures of assessment targets and inspections, infection risks… The stressors in teaching are many and varied.

Led by Natalia Ernstman, Plymouth College of Art’s Senior Lecturer on their MA Creative Education: Making Learning, this new course, which will be delivered solely online, focuses on the belief that creativity is the route through which wider systemic challenges in education and personal resilience can be addressed.

Natalia said, “Teachers are at the front line of the pandemic in so many ways. Apart from having their own health to worry about, they are also dealing with increased feelings of anxiety and disillusionment among pupils, as well as fears and frustrations from parents. They are carrying enormous amounts of responsibility, yet it seems that they haven’t received the necessary support to be able to deal with this mental and physical burden. Nobody was prepared to deal with what Covid did to our society, but where other sectors have had more leeway to get it wrong and try again, teachers are under constant pressure to handle and solve the situation correctly and immediately. They are just expected to get on with it and make it work, because if they don’t, it’s our children’s futures that are on the line. It personally really worries me that so many teachers suffer from mental health issues as a result. It is harrowing to hear how many ambitious, enthusiastic and capable people decide that the teaching profession is too stressful for them and quit. It puts even more strain on the ones that remain, it’s desperate on so many levels.”

“At Plymouth College of Art, we don’t have the solutions to all of this, but we do know about creating safe and creative spaces where people can learn together to tackle challenging societal, professional and personal issues. That is what this short course is all about: creating a space to catch our breath, take stock and using the arts and research to design and implement small changes that support our teaching in this uncertain world. I have designed the course in a way that allows for ‘relaxed’ sharing of experiences and playful approaches to exploring where we are and where we want to go. Experts will share their view and will provide theoretical pedagogical underpinning.”

The course will also welcome guest speakers and educators to two of the sessions, one of which will be Dr Penny Hay, artist and educator, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning, Senior Lecturer in Arts Education, Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries; School of Education, Bath Spa University and Director of Research, House of Imagination (formerly 5x5x5=creativity).

The course is open to teachers in both primary and secondary education, as well as headteachers and managers in education, NQTs, and support workers. A limited number of places are available. The course will comprise of 5 online evening sessions over a period of 10 weeks. The first session will take place on 22 February 2021. Click here to find out more and to book your place.

London based Vivo, the award-winning recognition and rewards platform, is already used in 650 UK schools, including 20% of secondary schools. The platform is a content-rich social network for students, geared towards making ‘doing good things’ fun. Think charity campaigns, careers advice, inspiring celebrities and volunteering opportunities. It’s a safe environment to access the most enlightening content on the net. Vivo allows teachers to track and analyse student achievements and behaviour. Gamification tools enable students to compete against each other, unlock rewards and build up a Vivo profile. Students can also accumulate vivos to exchange with a number of retail partners, such as New Look and Argos. The partnership with Mobento will significantly increase the multi-media content available to the Vivo user base and help further enrich classrooms.

Mobento, headquartered in New York, is a cloud-based video learning platform, providing multimedia educational content.  It offers over 4,300+ videos, from NASA to Cambridge University, TED Talks, Stanford, Yale and the Khan Academy. Schools can sign up for private accounts to easily centralise, distribute, create courses and track student progress with a blend of multimedia content from their school’s resources and world-class teachers, scientists, business leaders and institutions in Mobento’s public library. Students can engage with diverse content from every field across the education spectrum from footage of Mark Ronson talking about music and remixing to Mark Zuckerberg on how he built Facebook.

The partnership with Vivo means that teachers subscribing to Mobento’s school accounts can now achieve a higher level of engagement, motivating their students to use multi-media content, with Vivo’s gamification and system of rewards.

George Grima, founder of Vivo comments: “We believe that this partnership gives schools and colleges major benefits in terms of accessible content and engagement, with the added motivation provided by gamification and reward.  Vivo’s userbase has grown significantly over the last year.  We now have 80% market share and working with Mobento is an important partnership as part of our international growth strategy.”

The partnership will mean that VivoLite, Vivo’s free-to-use platform, will be available to all Mobento subscribers offering reward based gamification for every video watched.  In addition, schools subscribing to VivoMiles will be able to access Mobento’s diverse range of multimedia content and curation.

Sumner Murphy, founder of Mobento comments: “Contemporary students have grown up with multi-media content and gamification. It makes perfect sense to combine the two to help teachers promote a higher level of engagement in schools.  Our user base now spans 196 countries and we are very excited by the additional motivation we can now offer.”