Young Vic's INNOVATE Programme Announces Visiting Project Associates and Research Partner

Taking Part, the creative engagement department at the Young Vic, today announces the addition of six Visiting Project Associates and the appointment of Royal Holloway, University of London researcher Dr Yvonne Robinson to INNOVATE, a radical two-year theatre-in-education programme designed to understand how the arts can enable students to engage, learn and thrive across all of their subjects. A collaboration between Young Vic Taking Part, two partner schools, multi-disciplinary artists and an advisory panel of educational and cultural experts, INNOVATE is exploring the role that artists and arts organisations can play in teaching the curriculum.

At the start of the 2021 academic year, INNOVATE embedded three multi-disciplinary artists at each partner secondary school, South Bank University Academy and Dunraven School, where over the past six months, the artists collaborated with teachers to co-create unique learning experiences. For 2022, six Visiting Project Associates will work across both schools to support INNOVATE by delivering specialist workshops, ad hoc project support and bespoke creative opportunities.

The INNOVATE Visiting Project Associates are Anyebe Godwin, Bruno Correia, Nadège René, TD. Moyo, Vicky Moran and Vincent Shiels. This increase in artists, the variety of artistic disciplines and the ability to respond to the needs and requests of the schools will broaden INNOVATE's impact as it is monitored by Dr Yvonne Robinson and Professor Helen Nicholson at Royal Holloway, University of London.

As INNOVATE Researcher, Dr Robinson will document, analyse and evaluate the successes, challenges and future of the flagship learning project. Their research aims to explore the programme's impact on teaching and learning approaches as well as the ability of the arts to influence students to understand, engage with and be excited by the concepts, modules and subjects they are studying. It will also find tangible ways to share the transferable learnings to benefit as many students as possible in the future.