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All of Blue Cabin’s associate artists benefit from ongoing training, support, and access to paid therapeutic supervision. Learning topics include social pedagogy and trauma awareness – which underpin all of our work – through to self care and staying safe as a creative practitioner.
Ruth Mary Johnson, who has worked with Blue Cabin since 2021, explains how the training has helped shape her work as an artist.
When I look through the library (and it is indeed a library!) of notebooks I have filled up since starting my journey with Blue Cabin in 2021, it only begins to speak of the vast amount of investment, time and training they have given me as an associate artist.
I started my Blue Cabin path with in-depth training on life story work and precious time with Professor Richard Rose to understand how his model of Therapeutic Life Story Work underpins the whole work of Blue Cabin and their Creative Life Story Work approach. This training has subsequently underpinned my practice as I have grown as an artist whose main passion is working with others to tell the story they want to share with the world in a safe way.
Since then I have undertaken a range of training with Blue Cabin throughout the last four years, including regular safeguarding training, social pedagogy training, trauma awareness, compassionate practice and self care, staying safe and effective as a creative practitioner, and film-making, along with regular opportunities to learn from and reflect with each other as Associate Artists through the buddying framework and regular reflection sessions.
All of this training stands out on its own, but patchworked together throughout my practice it becomes a rich tapestried quilt that I can keep coming back to, time and time again. What is also very notable is that Blue Cabin doesn’t run training in a specific area then mark it as done or finished. Instead, they invite us to return to it, with fresh eyes, newer perspectives and the opportunity to engage in the training again with the insight of new areas of work.
One of these areas that I have found particularly useful is the social pedagogy training that I have undertaken twice and I am about to return to again soon.
Even in my early career as a teacher and my 15 or so years as a creative practitioner, social pedagogy was not a term I had heard until I started working with Blue Cabin. However, in my first training session on this, I felt very connected to the theory being explored and felt such moments of familiarity and connection with the key principles. Maybe I had been doing this, or elements of this, without even realising?
Social pedagogy runs throughout Blue Cabin as an organisation with a key focus being placed on the importance of building relationships and developing new skills through learning and doing together to create a shared sense of achievement, with the child being the expert. This chimed so much with the work I do as a performer and director making work for young audiences and as a Clown Doctor, where the young person leads and we follow. A quote that was shared in the last social pedagogy training session I had that really struck home to me was that leading means ‘often walking behind the one who is led.’ (Max Van Manen, 1991)
The training placed the work of Blue Cabin within the history of social pedagogy and allowed time and space to discover a range of influential figures in the field and reflect on ways in which we felt connections with this work.
This gave me words for what I have aimed to do all my working life in trying to create an environment where the needs of the individual and the group as a whole shape the course of the activity and that my role is to support and respond along the way to a shared goal. I might ‘lead’ a session, but this word has always felt quite uncomfortable to me and now I feel like I can interrogate the meaning of that word and encourage the ways I can ‘lead’ a session which empowers the individual and the group alongside creating a strong sense of community and team.
The social pedagogy training has helped me in the way that I approach any project, working with anyone, in how I can create and co-create an environment, space and process that allows relationships and connections to grow and thrive with care and compassion planted at the very root of the planning process.
I believe this is vital for any work that I do across my practice, from directing professional actors in a rehearsal process to plotting where to hide a whoopee cushion with a child in a hospital setting and it is essential in all the work I do for Blue Cabin.
The projects I have been involved in with Blue Cabin are wide-ranging, from Cool Things with Darlington Virtual School, Makers and Creators with Newcastle Virtual School, developing All About Us alongside care leavers, researching digital Creative Life Story Work with care-experienced young adults in Scotland with Articulate and most recently my work on Creative Aid, working with a group of 10 care-experienced young men in Deerbolt prison. Whether in an online space, a theatre, a community venue or a prison, using social pedagogy as my groundrock throughout these processes where we are learning and developing our creative skills together, with the young people as the experts, and fostering relationships that can live beyond the boundaries of the project.
The theories and principles of social pedagogy feel so entwined in all of my work with Blue Cabin and beyond and being able to revisit this regularly with the team allows me to interrogate my practice in a way I had not been able to do before. It was almost like there was some invisible ink running through my planning that I was never quite able to define and the beauty is that I am still on that journey!
Language is powerful and the social pedagogy training I have been given (and will keep returning to) has allowed me to fill in the invisible ink that was hiding in my practice and given me more of a vocabulary and ability to reflect on what I do and why I do it.
With this blog I am very much in danger of mixing my metaphors (something I am prone to do!) but being able to revisit this training means I can get my beautiful tapestried quilt of learning out and give it a spring clean, ready for the new adventures it will take me on. Metaphortastic!
Thank you Ruth for sharing the impact of this training on you and your practice.
Find out more about Ruth and her work with Blue Cabin here>>
Blue Cabin’s team of associate artists work across a range of artforms including theatre, creative writing, graphic design and printmaking.
They are all specialists in co-creating with care-experienced children and young people and all benefit from training and learning opportunities in topics including social pedagogy and trauma awareness as well as access to paid therapeutic supervision.
