Kio Kio School – Visual Poetry Jam – South Waikato – Ōtorohanga – (3 April 2024)

Glenda from the Ōtorohanga library originally promoted it to homeschooled students but we were only able to get four students enrolled. We realized we had the first date set for a school holiday after easter so we shifted the date and Kio Kio School invited us to come and bring the project to them which we did.

21 students and a librarian took part in the whole day’s training.

The students learned all about creative wellbeing skills as well as composition skills and visual storytelling. The day was beautiful and we began by having the students line up and show on a scale of 1-10 how much they liked photography. It was pretty much an even spread with clumps at the front back and middle.
However by the end of the day they were all clumped with “I love photography” side of the house.

One of the students who was reluctant initially to join turned to me and said “Thank you so much for coming today – This is SOOOOOOO much fun and will really help me with my film making.” We discussed what it takes to build effective creative teams and how to lead them in a way that supports everyone’s creativity and has people wanting to keep working with you over the long haul. We talked about quiet magnetic leadership vs. agressive shouty power over styles of getting things done. They all agreed that they prefered peaceful creative teams with lots of energy and so they brought that with them in their creative experimentation.

They worked through the emobdied creativity framework and all of the ways we can get out of our creative flow and their challenges were to combine their new composition skills with storytelling that helped them to better understand what happens when you get knocked out of your creative flow. They really seemed to thrive on the challenge of it and were working as teams to create stories that represented the concepts that they were learning about.

And as a facilitator, I discovered a new way that I could teach both the framework and the composition skills together in a way that fit beautifully and worked to seamlessly reinforce each other while at the same time really stretching the creative thinking skills of the participants.

Support provided by
Ōtorohanga District Council
Ōtorohanga Creative Communities
COGS Waikato South
New Zealand Lotteries