The Youth Arts Camp (YAC), well into its fifth year now, attests to the strong intent of inculcating art as a learning tool and further developing a creative-critical approach towards problem-solving among the young.
The place-based learning programme, as part of the Cultural Heritage Education Programme (CHEP) organised by Arts-ED to provide innovative community-based arts and culture education in rural and urban communities, aims to introduce and promote understanding of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in a specific site, i.e. the local wet market to secondary school students through creative art workshops.
Facilitated by artists, the nine-day camp required young participants to sharpen their communication and observational skills by engaging with vendors and customers of the Chowrasta Market in discovering, mapping, documenting, and interpreting the many cultural heritage aspects of the site.
Their findings were later presented through three different art mediums taught during the workshop: physical theatre, woodcut and comic drawing. In so doing, students not only learn the how-to of conducting research, but also learn to communicate and share their learning processes and creative outputs.
