Teachers' Professional Development
My practice has led me to working with Pallabs.org. For Performing Arts Laboratories Ltd I designed and delivered a programme of performative sculptural activities designed for people from different education sectors such as food technology, science, and for teachers and artists who work with volatile and challenging young people.
Quote from a Pal Lab Evaluation written by Dr Anne Douglas of On the Edge Research October 2005 "Rod Harris’s methodology is informed by his practice as a sculptor working directly with materials. Within his sessions he created a space of interaction framed by a sculptural ‘task’ – the building of a clay tower to the height of the shortest person in the group; the building of a large-scale land drawing of a particular aspect of Bore Place (the venue) using found materials; constructing individual fruit puppets as intimate self-portraits that were enacted in the puppet theatre to an audience made up of fellow group members. Rod took a decisive but non-authoritarian role as leader or facilitator by setting up the creative space and related task and by overseeing a process by which individuals needed to work with others to achieve a result. They needed to give spaceto others to come forward and offer suggestions, skills, to make mistakes and move on. Rod realised a high level of aesthetic experience both in the formal sense – quality of materials, colour and texture, but also in a transformative sense of something becoming something else in ways that were completely unimaginable at the outset. Rod enabled individuals to make new things that appeared from the outset to be impossible to achieve by developing both self-reliance and collaboration.”
“There was a closing session that was characteristically that of Rod Harris. It involved the task of making a tapered line of clay the length of the Large Barn and transforming this into a tree image. This was highly physical and collaborative, focusing energy outwards on a shared endeavour at the end of the Lab.”
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