{"id":12394,"date":"2020-01-31T16:44:45","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T16:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=12394"},"modified":"2020-07-21T14:54:01","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T14:54:01","slug":"more-than-100-stories-sharing-learning-through-creative-evaluation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=12394","title":{"rendered":"More Than 100 Stories<\/em>: Sharing Learning through Creative Evaluation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How do you tell the story of an arts program? How do you capture the learning process in a way that is useful to other practitioners and commissioners? Case studies? Evaluation reports? Tool kits? Or can art itself act as a teaching mechanism? Can we capture and share learning through creative work? These were the questions I considered when I replied to an open call to creatively evaluate the first three years of the Creative People and Places<\/a> (CPP) program. CPP is an Arts Council England initiative that invests significant funding and support in twenty-one places across England with low arts engagement historically, to enable local people to take the lead in choosing, creating, and taking part in brilliant art experiences. Projects range from a brass-band commission in St. Helen\u2019s town center, to ceramic-making workshops on an allotment in Blackpool, to a light festival bringing to life a suburban park in Doncaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nCPP is a program designed to change how participatory arts are \ncommissioned\u2014involving local people in the process from the very \nbeginning and arguing for the value of the arts in our lives. The CPP \nnetwork felt strongly that inviting artists to assess the program \ndemonstrated this commitment to and belief in the arts and would offer a\n distinct perspective on the program. I asked Holly Donagh, chair of the\n national steering group for the first phase of CPP, about the network\u2019s\n decision to commission the \u201ccreative\u201d evaluation alongside a more \ntraditional evaluation. She said:\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As someone with a strong interest in research, who is often critical of the quality of research produced by the arts sector, I was skeptical of the value of an arts-based approach to evaluation, and it took a number of discussions at the national steering group to agree to this approach. I now feel that the most authentic record we have of the last three years of CPP is within More Than 100 Stories<\/span>, and it has managed to capture the essence of the program in a way that more technically rigorous evaluation cannot.1<\/a><\/sup><\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Our commissioners, while initially reluctant, were ultimately convinced that an artistic evaluation was able to capture the energy, passion, and occasional magic of the program, and in a way that the more technical reports were not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was awarded the commission along with visual artist Nicole Mollett<\/a>. We both have our own socially engaged practices: my work as a writer focuses on people\u2019s relationship with place and on amplifying voices often ignored by mainstream society; Nicole also explores place, with an emphasis on mapping and on communities in areas undergoing regeneration. We were both drawn to CPP\u2019s ambition to revolutionize how art projects are designed, commissioned, and delivered, with a goal of increasing community participation from projects\u2019 early stages and building strong lasting partnerships with communities and places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were also interested in CPP\u2019s commitment to experimentation, evaluation, and implementation of changes based on learning. The program\u2019s architects recognized that for an initiative attempting to fundamentally change how arts activity is designed and delivered in places with traditionally very low arts engagement, those managing the projects needed to be encouraged and enabled to try new ideas\u2014and, more importantly, to admit to and learn from failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, finally, we were both excited by the commission\u2019s invitation to create new work in response to the CPP program\u2014to find a way to say something meaningful in the realm of evaluation about the program that would also stand on its own as art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approaching the commission<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nicole and I were somewhat intimidated by the prospect of trying to make a piece of art in response to such a huge program, one spanning twenty-one large-scale arts-led projects from Northumberland to Kent, Blackpool to Boston. The commission was substantial, but not huge, and though between us we visited each place and were in touch with program directors and staff on the phone and via email, there was no way we could genuinely understand the successes and failures of each and every element of each and every project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were also uncomfortable with the idea, inherent in the term evaluation<\/em>, of passing judgment. We were excited about exploring the stories and the learning of the program but did not want to put ourselves in the position of saying that specific projects were good or bad. We didn\u2019t feel qualified or informed enough to do so. More importantly, we didn\u2019t feel it was beneficial or relevant to what we were trying to achieve. We wanted to create work that looked critically and reflectively at the issues and challenges faced by CPP without singling out projects for praise or criticism. Our aim, right from the start, was to ask questions and invite others to do the same. We were particularly interested in the kinds of questions that often get brushed under the carpet with participatory work: What does it mean to fail? How can we talk helpfully about failure? How can\/should we talk about art with people who have little or no experience of it? Whose voice really matters? Where does the power in these kinds of projects really lie? We tried to answer these questions by asking deliberately open and provocative questions, and by listening hard to what people chose to tell us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our approach<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nicole and I also committed ourselves to creating a lot of work, and we were keen to build together a body of work that would tell a larger and more complex story than a single piece would be able to. Our title was also informed by the decision to make the final piece an online collection, one that was easily accessible and could be navigated thematically, rather than in a linear fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In titling the work More Than 100 Stories<\/em>, we voiced our commitment to tell a range of stories about the CPP places and projects we visited and learned about. Many of the places I visited, such as St. Helen\u2019s, Doncaster, and Burnley, are in the north of England and blighted by industrial decline\u2014places that once had strong identities built around mills or mines but are now struggling with unemployment, apathy, and a belief that they are forgotten. I felt a strong sense of responsibility toward these places: to represent both their problems and their often hidden potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We started with a set of deliberately open-ended questions, to start growing and developing our understanding of CPP. Nicole created hand-drawn postcards that posed these questions and invited drawings in response to prompts\u2014for example, \u201cDraw some art and something that is not art\u201d; \u201cCreativity is organic. Grow your own culture in the petri dish.\u201d These cards were disseminated at CPP conferences and posted to each project with an invitation to project directors to distribute them among staff and participants.
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Acknowledging the fact that we would never be able to get completely under the skin of each project, we started to look for commonalities and connections across the projects. We initially extracted ten key themes, which later structured a thematic list of questions that we distributed to project administrators through online surveys and email and phone conversations. Some examples follow:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
Two CPP participants, responses to a postcard prompt, May 2015, pencil and marker drawing (left<\/em>), pencil drawing (right<\/em>) (artwork provided by the artists) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nPeople<\/strong>
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