Schools wishing to access a plethora of free resources to mark TuneUp Tuesday 2022, the arts education programme run for teachers by teachers, still have time to register.
This year’s TuneUp Tuesday will be held on Tuesday 21 June 2022. Schools can register with TuneUp Arts for free, enabling them to make full use of an extensive suite of digital resources including digital theatre, exclusive five-minute skills videos and career advice designed to engage the next generation of artists, dancers, musicians and theatre makers.
New content added to the TuneUp Arts platform – www.tuneup.life – for 2022 includes online video workshops made by six professional artists for TuneUp’s Culture in Common project, which is part of the Birmingham 2022 Festival. Generously funded by Birmingham City Council as a Creative City Project, Culture in Common is encouraging children and young people to explore culture and identity through six different media – performance poetry (Jasmine Gardosi), dance (Jamaal O’Driscoll), visual art (Window Artists), music (Annie Mahtani), street theatre (Vamos Theatre Company) and photography (Kate Green). Culture in Common content on the TuneUp website includes an “introduction to culture” video, six 15-minute workshop videos delivered by the professional artists, and details of how to share the results of any work created through the project. Content is suitable for both primary and secondary school audiences.
Established in the autumn of 2020 by a team of teachers at Birmingham’s King Edward VI High School for Girls (KEHS) in response to the impact of COVID-19 on the arts, TuneUp Arts aims to provide opportunities for school pupils to learn creative expression through a variety of media, experience the value of performance arts and their impact on community, and have exposure to a spectrum of arts careers and the routes into them. It held its first free online art school in November 2020 – an event known as TuneUp Tuesday – reaching more than 100,000 children aged 4-18 in 440 schools across the UK, and others around the world. More than 580 UK schools are now registered with TuneUp online.
Hannah Proops, TuneUp’s Co-founder and Creative Director, and Director of Drama at KEHS, said: “By choosing six different media for Culture in Common, we aim to give young people a wonderful grounding and introduction to the wide range of disciplines in the creative arts. Ideally, we will inspire the next generation of artists and performers and at the very least we’ll hopefully ignite a hobby and offer a new and uplifting experience.”
As well as preparing digital resources – that are unrestricted by geography – Culture in Common’s professional artists will visit six Birmingham state schools to deliver in-person workshops. They will be supported by 20 young Arts Ambassadors from three schools in the King Edward VI Foundation, who are working towards a unique accredited course in conjunction with Birmingham City University, which will enable the vision of TuneUp to be sustained into the future.
This year’s TuneUp Tuesday is set to be an even bigger celebration than the first of the impact the arts have on the development and mental health of young people. Schools in any location can visit www.tuneup.life for more information and to sign up for the programme.
