Navigating Futures: arts education as a route to youth empowerment and pedagogical innovation

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This project seeks to enhance engagement with, and impacts from, research and resources produced from a previous project funded under the Global Challenges Research Fund (entitled 'From displacement to development: arts education as a means to build cultural resilience and community-led arts production in the Marshall Islands). It responds to particular development challenges in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) concerning the education, self-expression and wellbeing of young people. The RMI has the second youngest population in the Pacific, with 40% of the population under 16 years of age, but in spite of having one of the highest levels of per capita spending on education in the region, school dropout rates, and youth unemployment and suicide rates, are high. Our project responds to current government policy on improving student participation and attainment in education through developing more culturally relevant teaching resources, improving literacy in both English and Marshallese, and making better use of Information Technology for innovative teaching (PSS annual report 2016-17). It also responds to national and regional Pacific policies on young people, by seeking to engage and empower marginalised young people, particularly those in urban settings (SPC Pacific Youth Development Framework 2014-23; RMI National Strategic Plan, 2015-17). Further, it addresses several of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals focused around education, equality, and fostering partnerships for development. The project will involve:(1) A series of workshops with schoolteachers in four RMI elementary, middle and high schools during April/May 2019, with a further four workshops undertaken in June/July 2019. These will involve upskilling teachers in innovative pedagogical approaches to improving children's literacy and skills in artistic expression and interpretation, using a set of culturally relevant creative works, and accompanying teaching resource packs, produced from the project team's previous GCRF project. The project team will use feedback from participating teachers, and advice from our project partner Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) and the Curriculum Division of the RMI Ministry of Education, to align the teaching resource packs more closely with the RMI National Curriculum (completing revisions by October 2019, and undertaking further trials from November 2019-January 2020).(2) A series of workshops (also undertaken during April/May 2019) focused around creating animations, film-making, and implementing traditional navigational knowledge, to be attended by young Marshall Islanders, including those who have dropped out of the formal education system and/or are unemployed. These workshops have been requested by project partner Jambo Arts (a youth NGO) and various other RMI stakeholders, and will result in an animation of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's poem 'History Project' and various short films and reflective pieces by youth participants that will be uploaded to NGO websites (by October 2019), entered for competitions (such as the RMI film competition and AHRC Research in Film Awards) and further promoted by the project team via our website (map.llc.ed.ac.uk, to be launched August 2018) and social media, during the final stages of the project (and post-award).These activities bring potential benefits that resonate not just with RMI youth policy, but also with wider national sustainable development goals, outlined in the RMI National Strategic Plan (2017), focused around (a) creating an innovative population by improving education access and opportunities, and (b) mobilising local and traditional knowledge to address emerging challenges facing people communities and governments. Our project will empower teachers and young people to use arts education not only to develop literacy and technical skills, but also to enlist traditional cultural knowledge to address current development challenges.