EFDSS Education Department 

EFDSS Education runs educational and participatory arts projects, classes, workshops, seminars and other events, for children, young people and adults of all ages and backgrounds.

Drawing from the diverse traditional and folk arts of England and the British Isles – including dance, music, song, games, rhymes, storytelling, drama, traditions and visual arts and more - projects reach participants in schools and colleges, and informal community settings in London and other parts of England.

It also supports the continuing professional development of, and exchange between, artists and animateurs from folk and other arts backgrounds and provides INSET for teachers and other professional staff.

All EFDSS educational activities are informed by close working with the Society’s Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML), England’s premier resource for folk arts materials.

EFDSS Education works in partnership with a range of organisations fostering links with contemporary, classical, urban and world art forms, as well as across folk traditions, and within other related spheres such as education, sport and health.

To see the latest Education Newsletter please click here

Staff: :

Rachel Elliott (contact) – Education Director: Thanks to funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, EFDSS has created the new post of Education Director, to ensure that the Society develops a significant, national education programme which is cohesive, strategic and dynamic, forging links with key agencies and government departments as well as with regional and local agencies. Rachel took up the post in July 2008.

EFDSS Education Programmes:
Autumn 2008

Take 6
Hundreds of folk songs and tunes, representing a huge swathe of English traditional music heritage, are on their way back to the communities that gave birth to them.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), Take 6 is an 18-month archival, educational and community project which will be completed in August 2009. Through Take 6 EFDSS is archiving and conserving six unique manuscript collections and making them more widely accessible to the public, through digitising and putting the collections on line. (For more details on the archiving aspect of the project please contact the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Four of the six collections are:

• the Janet Blunt Collection, Oxfordshire;
• the George Butterworth Collection: southern England and Yorkshire;
• the Francis Collinson Collection, from the southern counties of England and;
• the Hammond Collection, mainly from Dorset.

The other two collections are being used as the source material for projects in primary schools and communities in Hampshire and Lancashire where the songs were originally noted, namely:

• the George Gardiner Collection of over 1600 folk songs collected mainly in Hampshire in the period 1905 to 1909 and;
• the Anne G. Gilchrist Collection of 214 folk songs plus children’s singing games, Lancashire Morris tunes, songs from customs, sea shanties, carols and street cries, all collected from the 1890s to the 1920s, mainly in Lancashire.

This is EFDSS Education’s first national education project springing from the Society’s unrivalled archival collections.
Folk Song and Singing Games Projects are being developed and implemented in eight primary schools. “Folk Song Alive” showcase events are taking place in each school to share the children’s learning and creative work with the wider school community.

Projects encompass singing, song writing, dance, playground singing games and rhymes. They are specifically designed to support several areas of the curriculum such as music, literacy, history, PE / dance, PHSE & Citizenship and to bring the songs to life for young people in a way that is fresh, contemporary and relevant.

Learning resources are being developed with all participating schools investigating and demonstrating how these heritage materials can be best used to support the curriculum and other key contemporary educational concerns. These resources will be made available online in summer 2009.

The complementary community-based programme is being developed in partnership with regional folk agencies and other local bodies, increasing community access to the Take 6 collections by touring display stands in community locations in Hampshire, Lancashire and Southwark and at major folk and community festivals.

Folk arts practitioners involved in Take 6 this autumn are:
• Pete Coe
• Carolyn Robson
•‘Doc’ Rowe
• Paul Sartin
• Roger Watson

Earlier in 2008 EFDSS Education successfully piloted the use of the materials in London, in conjunction with Redriff Primary School in Southwark which has a history of promoting singing games – an annual festival there in the 1960s led to an album of recordings on the prestigious Topic Records label. Work at the school was multi-layered encompassing a “Singing Games” project with all classes, from Reception to Year 6, and a complementary oral history and reminiscence project with local older people.

The project concluded with a wonderful afternoon ‘sharing’ event in the school playground where all children took part in performing past and present playground singing and clapping games, some children performing Maypole dances, and ending with a mini ceilidh for all children, staff, parents and visitors to the rousing music of the folk band Faustus.

Living Song
Living Song is a joint initiative devised by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) and Royal College of Music Junior Department (RCMJD) celebrating the English Folk Song as a living, evolving tradition, and coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams' death. Young composers and singers from Chamber Choir will be given a unique opportunity to participate in a workshop with professional folk singer, animateur and folk song collector Sam Lee, EFDSS’s London Links Officer, and access valuable resources at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House.

Three student composers will work directly from source material (introduced in the workshop), just as Ralph Vaughan Williams did a century ago, to create new work based on folk melody and text to be performed (alongside Vaughan Williams folk song settings) by RCMJD Chamber Choir directed by Joy Hill on 13th December in the Great Hall, Sherfield Building, Imperial College, London.

EFDSS Community Classes at Cecil Sharp House:
For details of the rich variety of classes, courses, workshops and talks in dance, music and song, for children and adults, that take place at Cecil Sharp House in the evenings and at weekends please see the What’s On] section of this website.

Other EFDSS programmes:

Open Dance Project
EFDSS is the British representative in a pan-European consortium which is half way through a three year European funded project to build a web resource for the teaching of traditional dance. Stage One developed WebDance materials (which can be edited through an on-line open editing platform); Stage Two is OpenDance which is aimed at assisting learning of traditional dance through interactive technologies.

Teaching & Learning Resources:
Please look at the Education Section of the EFDSS Shop for details of the extensive range of high quality educational materials available.

Future Developments:

Camden schools
EFDSS Education is currently developing links and planning tailor-made projects with local schools and educational organisations in Camden