MCAST and St Ignatius College students work together on alternative teaching methods through Art

The MCAST Institute for the Creative Arts collaborated with St Ignatius College on a Kreattiv Project whereby the MCAST students explored alternative teaching methods through the vehicle of Art to teach Maltese poetry.

The end phase of this collaboration was marked by an event held at St Ignatius College, Qormi on Wednesday, 25 May in the presence of Evarist Bartolo, Minister for Education and Employment.

This collaboration opened a constructive dialogue to propose creative new ways of teaching methods. The research objective of this project was to design and implement an educational methodology that helps students in preparation for the Maltese Matsec O Level. The project set out to combine two separate sets of learning outcomes, scholastic and vocational. This dynamic convergence of outcomes allowed the students to participate in learning in a variety of creative and alternative settings.

The methodology adopted was to select a number of Maltese poems from the Matsec O Level and to motivate students to participate in learning exercises using various creative art forms namely photography, movement, moving image and art and design with the participation of creative professional practitioners.

The project presented many challenges such as the creation of an interface between the vocational and the scholastic settings. Both settings are rhetorically different in aspects such as the fluidity of learning dissemination between formed type and creative endeavours.

This project was in line with the MCAST’s mission to provide students with the opportunity to engage in real-life projects, with real-life briefs. The Institute for the Creative Arts takes pride in developing innovative teaching pedagogies that motivate students to deliver. These projects deliberately push students to work on various levels of Arts application with the intention to produce an end product. The approach was innovative, embracing contemporary ideas as well as those traditionally associated with disciplines related to the Creative Arts.

This project is a Kreattiv project supported by the Arts Council Malta. The Kreattiv funding programme engages educators and creative practitioners in dialogue and collaboration while encouraging students and educators towards further engagement within the creative sector. Kreattiv aims to bring creative practitioners into schools and colleges to work with teachers and students to inspire, learn and create in a collaborative and innovative way.