WORKSHOPS FOR
CHILDREN AND YOUTH
Working On It designs and facilitates creative writing workshops to meet the challenges facing youth in your program spaces.
Our facilitators prompt youth to investigate complicated feelings and ideas, furthering their emotional literacy skills - skills that support youth's ability to self-regulate, empathize with others, and confidently express themselves.
PAST WORKSHOPS OFFERED BY WORKING ON IT
POETIC MAPS
An Introduction to Poetry
Poetry can be intimidating. Combining visual and literary arts offers youth a playful introduction to the basics.
Think of a place that has meaning to you. It can be as big as a country, or as small as your bedroom. Combining visual and literary arts, Working On It will support youth in translating the meaningfulness of their chosen space to readers.
Youth will leave this workshop familiar with basic poetic terms, contemporary visual poets, and with the confidence that what's important to them is worthy of a multitude of art forms.
To see Working On It's founder and director, Heather Brunet, facilitate the Poetic Maps workshop for Spectrum Productions click Here.
INSTAGRAM EKPHRASTIC POETRY WORKSHOP
How does social media impact me?
Comparison sucks. Let's talk about it.
An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a work of art. By narrating and reflecting on a painting, sculpture, or, in the case of this workshop, a social media post, youth will be encouraged to express their experiences with a social media post of their choosing.
This workshop will begin important conversations about body image and comparison, information literacy, and empower youth to use metaphor in their writing.
OTHERING: 'US' VS. 'THEM'
Using Form Poetry to Understand
the Dangers of Othering
In 2021, Haida artist Tamara Bell placed 215 children’s shoes outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in response to the 215 Indigenous children found in a mass grave on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Working On It's facilitators will facilitate a conversation discussing this piece of performance art and its significance by providing discussion questions, defining concepts such Anti-Indigenous Racism, and illustrating the dangers of othering within the context of the colonization of North America.
To link their work to Tamara Bell's performance art, prompt personal reflection, and retain the key ideas discussed, youth participants will be instructed how to write a form poem within the borders of a tracing of their own shoe. Facilitators will support participants in expressing their understanding of othering while offering poetic tools such as alliteration, assonance, and simile, to strengthen participants' means of expression.