Wales Artist Coaching Pathway

The 2019 – 2021 ArtWorks Cymru program is focusing on creating case studies of the ArtWorks Cymru Quality Principles, piloting the Wales Artist Coaching Pathway, and a training offer for the ArtWorks Cymru partnership.

The Wales Artist Coaching Pathway is being developed to support freelance participatory artists in Wales to develop their practice, and will focus on dialogue between an artist-coach and artist-coachees in which the coachees can explore their practice, aspirations, needs and potential.

Six artist-coaches took part in our training retreat where we developed the coaching program in collaboration with Courtney J. Boddie from the New Victory Theatre, New York. Each artist will coach up to five other artists using the program developed in a range of different contexts across Wales.

THE PILOT PROJECT COHORT

The 2020 Cohort Artists and sponsors:

Bethan Page (Aberystwyth Arts Centre)
Clare Potter (Literature Wales)
Jon Dafydd-Kid (Riverfront)
Martin Daws (Community Music Wales)
Pauline Down (Swansea Bay University Health Board)
Rabab Ghazoul (Gentle Radical)

 THE RETREAT

The Training Retreat took place in November 2019 and was led by Rhian Hutchings (Artworks Cymru) and Courtney J. Boddie (New Victory Theatre). It covered the following:

        •          Defining core values for Participatory Practice

        •          Exploring the Teaching artist pathway (TAP) tool created by Courtney J. Boddie

        •          Redesigning the TAP tool for Wales

 THE TIMELINE

Now the Artist-Coaches are ready to begin their coaching sessions. Each organisation must decide the context in which the coaches will work. Coaching sessions should take place between March and November 2020.

ArtWorks Cymru will undertake final evaluation meetings with artist-coaches and organisations in 2021, and will also interview one coachee from each of the artist-coaches cohorts.