17 August – 25 November 2007, Amsterdam/Holland

The project team will consist of full-time and occasional members, led by the initiator Annemieke Huisingh. The children’s work will be displayed in a professional fashion, along with extensive documentation, a website and a movie documentary.

The fifteen schools and fifteen artists will be submitted to the project team by four centres for art education, whose artistic consultants also serve as points of contact for the school teams during both the preparation and execution phases. Of the fifteen schools, twelve schools (four clusters of three schools) from Noord-Holland will take part and one cluster of three schools from Amsterdam.

The aims of the project are

• to develop a working method in which the creative learning process of the child takes centre stage and which gives primary schools the opportunity to improve their art education and to create a direct and meaningful relationship with an art museum

• to create a link between the expressive languages of young children and the artistic languages of Heringa/VanKalsbeek

• to create networks between the museum, clusters of primary schools and artists, enabling exchange, inspiration, education and reflection and providing continuity; to develop a website as an instrument of exchange

• to increase career options for artists, and to bring in groups of visitors to the Stedelijk Museum, who normally don’t go to museums

• to document, describe, evaluate and adapt the project and to produce a format for collaborative projects between museums and primary schools.

Fifteen artists, selected by the project team based on their artistic and pedagogical skills, will work with a group of primarily younger pupils (the age may vary per school from 4 – 8 years) at the schools for two half-day sessions per week. During the other days of the week the teacher can continue with aspects of the research with her group of children. This is to take place between 3 September and 15 October 2007.

This work is based on the children’s own research and experimentation under the guidance of an artist, teacher, student teacher and assistant/documenter (from the PABO and the Teacher Training Course for Art Education respectively). Research questions will be formulated and drawn up based on an analysis of the work of Heringa/Van Kalsbeek.

The children’s work process will be fully documented (in picture using photography and film and in text using audio recordings). The results will be compiled and selected for display at the Sandbergzaal in the Stedelijk Museum for the last four weeks of the Heringa/Van Kalsbeek exhibition. The participating schools, parents and teachers will then visit both exhibitions at the museum. It is therefore only at this point that the groups of children who took part in the project see the work of Heringa/Van Kalsbeek and their reactions during this visit will be recorded as well.

The Stedelijk Museum is looking into the possibility of also holding workshops for children, teachers and parents at the museum during the exhibition. Moreover a congress day will be held during the exhibition for museum education officers, artists and primary educationalists.

For some information: http://www.stedelijk.nl/oc2/page.asp?PageID=158