Dr Esther Sayers

Esther is head of the MA Arts and Learning programme. She also teaches on the BA Education, Culture & Society and is a PhD supervisor for the Education and the Practice Based Art & Learning MPHIL/PhD programmes. Esther’s research interests are around arts participation and in particular pedagogies that enable the production of knowledge locally, where equality and emancipation are foregrounded. Currently this is pursued within the cultural context of the skatepark where immersive, reciprocal pedagogies are played out.

Professional projects

Esther’s professional experience began as an artist leading workshops in schools, youth clubs and galleries. She has been a gallery educator at Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery; a lecturer at Loughborough and Staffordshire Universities and Special Projects Coordinator at Camden Arts Centre. She worked at Tate Modern (1999-2011) as an Artist Educator and as Curator for School and Youth Programmes. Since 2011, Esther has worked as arts in education consultant at Southbank Centre, Camden Arts Centre, Xue Xue Institute in Taiwan, Wellcome Collection, Newlyn Art Gallery and for the North West Cambridge Public Art Development Programme. She is currently a professional mentor within the Practice Research (Learning) programme at Tate.

Research projects

Dr Esther Sayers is a creative practitioner, artist educator, curator, consultant and academic. Current research includes ArtScapers where creative practice and pedagogy impacts on a whole school community, and City Mill Skate, a research project using shared design processes to construct skateable architecture within the new UCL East campus in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Film: City Mill Skate Cots and Lockdown’ pays attention to coronavirus related restrictions introduced in March 2020 and the profound effect that social distancing, skatepark closures and other measures had upon young people, London’s skateboard community, and a result, the City Mill Skate project too. City Mill Skate Dots and Lockdown.

Article: A conversation with Henry Kingsford to talk about the project and its origins, the context of the Olympic Park, how Sam Griffin and Esther Sayers managed to save City Mill Skate from failing due to lockdown by adapting to the pandemic.

What are Skate Dots? – Skateboarding and London’s Olympic Park.

UCL Lunch Hour Lecture: Dr Esther Sayers, Professor Iain Borden, and Sam Griffin talk about how UCL's City Mill Skate project is working with East London artists and Skateboarders to form part of the UCL East campus, and explore the relevance of City Mill Skate to skateboarding, public space, and urban design worldwide. Watch the talk here.

UCL East Summer School:

Skateboarding lessons, skate dot making and media workshops with City Mill Skate (Age: 12-14). During this week-long course young people will learn how to skateboard, how to design skate parks, and how to shoot action photos and film!

ArtScapers:

Drawing on her expertise in arts education that spans creative practice, artist educator, curator, consultant and academic, the Contemporary Art Society and Insite Arts commissioned Dr Esther Sayers to write, ‘The Arts and Education Strategy for the North West Cambridge Public Art’ (2015) outlining a programme that would engage children, the community and artists. Using this strategy as a starting point, Sayers worked with the Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI) to develop a new educational approach, ArtScapers, that built on the value of co-creation and learning for children, their families, teachers and schools. This art practice programme aimed to empower young people to act as cultural ambassadors and teachers in their place-worlds and speaks to Page’s pedagogical praxis by enabling young people the opportunity to understand who they are in relation to where they are (Page 2019, 2020).

Positioning children, parents and teachers as co-researchers-learners-teachers or ‘ArtScapers’ enables communities to use arts practice and pedagogy to challenge power relations and realise social change. Understood through a practice research methodology, this act of placemaking, offers new ways of exploring the cultural politics of making, objects and events and new creative pedagogies (Sayers, 2018). By exploring how creative activity can help young people become confident citizens, ArtScapers addresses the marginalisation of creative subjects and creative teaching and learning by collaboratively constructing alternatives which can deeply and systematically effect change in school communities.

ArtScapers publications:

Ayliffe, P., Sapsed, R., Sayers, E. and Whitley, D. (2020) Artscapers published by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination with funding from the Art Fund. This publication challenges educational thinking and practice to demonstrate what happens for a school when they invite children and artists to implement creative pedagogy across the whole curriculum. http://www.cambridgecandi.org.uk/projects/reimagine/events#artscapers-–-being-and-becoming-creative

Celebrating Education | Creative Activism: learning everywhere with children and young people (Forum Volume 62 - Number 1 2020). Penny Hay, Ruth Sapsed & Esther Sayers with foreword by Melissa Benn and Afterword Sue Rigby. Creative Activism: learning everywhere with children and young people.

Impact case study:

ArtScapers was selected as an impact case study for the Department of Educational Studies for REF 2021 - ‘ArtScapers: children, art and creative placemaking’.

Children are Place-Makers online discussion in 2021 was chaired by Dr Esther Sayers with opening remarks from Daniel Zeichner, MP for Cambridge. It explored how arts education, creativity and imagination can have a transformative effect on children, teachers and school curriculum models through contributions from Paula Ayliffe, Co-Headteacher, Mayfield Primary School Discussing the Artscapers project in Cambridge, Dr Penny Hay, Reader and Research Fellow, Bath Spa University talking about Forest of the Imagination in Bath and Andrew Amondson, Artist and Film Maker talking about working with children and nature alongside his work with Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin.

The talk launched the Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination publication Artscapers: Being and Becoming Creative. You can watch it via this link: Children are Placemakers

Tate Practice Research: Esther Sayers has been delivering practice research training and mentoring for Conservation Managers and Education Curators at Tate during 2018 and 2020.

Spaces or Liberated Learning is a current research collaboration between Esther Sayers, Penny Hay, Bath Spa University and Forest of Imagination, Ruth Sapsed Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, Emily Dowdswell and Gabby Arenge, PhD students at University of Cambridge. Our work aims to explore: where does creative learning flourish? We are celebrating how creative learning with children can happen everywhere in our cities - from grand museums to the cracks between pavements, from city parks to scruffy hedgerows, from recycling centres to cramped classrooms. Together we want to map all the spaces in our lives for what we are calling ’spaces for liberated learning’ and share these with policy makers to continue to campaign for children’s and communities' creative rights.