Learning through the Arts in Larkin Community College
| The Learning through the Arts programme in Larkin College is a unique venture within Irish education. Students in the LATP classes compete at auditions to win places on this Scholarship programme, which focusses on Drama, Dance, Music and Visual Arts, as well as delivering other subjects taken as part of the curriculum - e.g. Maths, Geography, English - using Arts methodologies. Larkin Community College is the only one in Ireland to offer such a programme. |
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Why offer a dedicated Learning through the Arts Programme?
Surely not all students in the class will want to pursue a career in the arts? What else has it got to offer in educational terms?
The cross-curricular nature of the programme is its greatest strength. It has been long-established that students who learn in a cross-curricular and experiential manner retain information better and have a much more solid foundation in their learned concepts.
The Arts have played a central role at Larkin Community College since it opened; this programme has grown out of those years of engaging with artists, arts institutions and cultural centres, and the evaluation of how engaging with the arts has benefited students.
The school has found that engaging with the Arts Programme
* enables students to creatively construct and criticise their world
* provides students with specific arts skills thereby informing and supporting other educational skills
* enhances the personal, social and cultural aspects of students' and teachers' lives
* creates special working relationships with teachers and students and other school staff
* empowers social discourse and change in the classroom, the school and the wider community
* enables students to voice their opinions about the curriculum and broadly about the ethos of the school
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