Culture, Arts and Refugees

Stella Barnes Head of Arts in Education, Oval House

Biography

Stella Barnes has worked in the arts in London for over twenty years, where she has specialised in working with young people. Stella’s expertise is in Participatory Arts, Theatre for Development and Theatre in Education. She is an experienced trainer and arts facilitator and has presented her work at conferences and seminars in the UK and internationally.

Since 2004 Stella has been Head of Arts in Education at Oval House Theatre in Kennington, South London where she develops partnerships with non arts sector agencies to deliver arts projects with marginalised young people and has set up the Living Here arts project for young refugees and asylum seekers. Before this she spent five years pioneering participatory arts work with young exiles in Greenwich and Lewisham. Stella is a founder member of Refugees and the Arts Initiative, a London-wide network for exiled artists.

Stella delivers national training in using the arts with young refugees and asylum seekers for Artswork, the national youth arts development agency. She was also commissioned by Artswork to write their guidance document for using the arts with young refugees and asylum seekers. In 2001 she created Flight Paths, a London-wide arts-in-education training programme for exiled artists that provided valuable training in arts education practice for exiled artists for five years.

Stella has produced two award winning short films with young refugees and in 2004 organised New Beginnings, the first youth-led conference about young people, the arts and exile. She is an advisor to Mixit, an arts project for young refugees in Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently working with the British Council in Southern Africa and the UK on the Identity Project, which trained twenty young people to be social action facilitators using the arts.

PLN Experience

I am definitely glad I have been part of the PLN even though it has at times been frustrating and been an added pressure and responsibility that I found hard to prioritise.

My frustrations stem from the somewhat confusing beginning to the programme, when we didn’t really have a collective understanding of the PLN and why we were involved. It took a while for the group to settle and for it to be clear who was going to follow the whole process through. It wasn’t really until quite late into the process that the group formed some sort of identity and identified a common purpose (though I am still not quite sure if we are all on the same page). It seems as though the work of the PLN is just beginning just as the funding has come to an end.

I have found it very difficult to keep up with the added workload that has come out of the PLN. I think people who work in this area are generally very over-committed in their working lives. I am not saying there shouldn’t have been any demand, but perhaps it would have been good to get an indication of the level of work that might be required at the beginning and then we could have planed it into our work timetable.

PLN has offered me opportunities to:

• meet other professionals who are engaging in similar thinking and exploring some of the same issues and a chance to have some exchange with peers about common concerns.
• take time out of my workplace setting to view the work from a distance and relate more strategic concerns to the every day practice.
• explore ways we can have a more strategic impact.
• have dialogue with key people in the cultural and refugee sectors and consider how their perspective might influence the way we work in the future
• identify my expertise and recognise my experience and knowledge.
• view the work from the perspective of others and shift my focus in response
• crystallise some of my thinking and consider how I might disseminate/share it more widely
• consider what I want to do next in terms of my career development

Study Visit Report

Click here to read Stella’s Study Visit Report

http://www.ovalhouse.com/