Me and my friend had conducted a 2 day art workshop at a government school. Our main intention for this workshop was to work towards solving a global issue where create awareness of visual arts among the students there, as it has been observed by us that students studying over there, aren’t equipped with the resources(due to poverty and restricted opportunities) and so don’t get an exposure for the same. This workshop would give the students a platform to showcase their talents and fill the pages with their ocean of creativity.

It was a 2 day workshop of 3 hours each. We had planned to teach them the basic elements of drawing, such as line, color, value, form, texture, shape and space. We decided to take 3 elements each session. The children would be from classes 5 and 6. Activities line relay, warli painting, clay relay, were done in order to cover all of the elements of visual arts.

I was quite excited and confident for this workshop. Being a good orator, speaking in public was not a difficult task for me. However, language was a barrier, as the students spoke Gujarati and neither I nor my partner were well verse with the language. This lowered our confidence to conduct the sessions. However, we geared ourselves and took help from one of the faculty there, who helped us to fill the gap of communication.

We had not planned for this workshop well in advance. Our planning was last minute, and this stressed me up and I started to panic. We were not able to generate sufficient ideas to teach the students, which they would enjoy as well as learn something out of it. However with a lot of research and brainstorming we generated a good plan. Also as it was last minute, our supervisors were not available for the amount of time we needed them. Getting an approval for the idea was quite a difficult task as we weren’t able to co-ordinate with our supervisors to get our plan checked. Due to this, we were not able to get our resources on time, with the enough amount of quantity. I remember, that we were short of a brush on the first workshop, and this created a huge fuss among the children. No one was ready to share their brush with the child who didn’t have the brush. However, after a lot of convincing, they started to share the resources with each other. If we would have planned well in advance, then I am sure that these challenges would not have arose.

Also I feel that if I wouldn’t have my partner too support me, then I would have never been able to conduct the workshop. Working collaboratively helped us to make the workshops successful and also share our knowledge with the students effectively. Since there were 20 students, and 2 of us, we divided the students into 2 equal groups of 10 students with each of us. This helped us to give more personal and quality time to the students and this way the students got to learn a lot. Also this helped me to develop team building and communication skills.

All in all, it was an amazing CAS experience. I learnt the importance of planning and working collaboratively with different people and also learnt how to handle a challenge. The students enjoyed the workshop thoroughly and also were able to see a change in themselves.