Arts Award Champions!

Trinity Dyslexia Scotland is thrilled to announce that Trinity College London has selected us to be one of their Arts Award Champion Centres for 2019-20. Arts Award is a set of unique qualifications that support young people up to age 25 to take part in arts activities, learn about the arts and artists, express themselves through the arts and become young arts leaders in their communities. And by ‘art’, we mean any form of making a creative thing happen, from drawing to dancing, singing to sculpture, music to mosaic… Dyslexia and the Arts We know that art and dyslexia have a much talked about relationship. Dyslexia seems to be over-represented in creative industries, with visual artists and architects in particular excelling in their fields, and high proportions of dyslexic students in art colleges across the UK. This is thought to be the case because dyslexic people often have visual-spatial strengths, think in picture form and can imagine and rotate images in their minds, all which lend themselves to drawing and making. Or because they prefer non-verbal ways of managing information, so become adept at creating images and sculptures, or playing with words in unusual ways. Benefits of an Arts Education Art is a portal to wider learning; it can help young people form strategies to develop literacy, cultural awareness, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, history, problem solving, STEM subjects and much more. We offer Arts Award as part of our Career Development Service because it’s a very dyslexia-friendly qualification, it plays to dyslexic young people’s strengths, and gives them a formal recognition of their learning, in the form of a formal certificate issued by Trinity College London. Research by London South Bank University demonstrated that Arts Award helps young people to become more independent learners and has a positive effect on their early career development too. Being a Trinity Arts Award Champion One of our responsibilities of being an Arts Award Champion for a year is to promote the benefits of the qualification to other organisations and share our dyslexia-friendly practice. Our drive is to ensure that as many dyslexic young people as possible have access to the opportunity to gain an Arts Award qualification and make the most of their dyslexic strengths in a way that works for them. Take Part Are you a dyslexic young person (under the age of 25) taking part in arts activities? Find out more about our Arts Award offer. We offered Arts Award Discover to everyone who took part in our Youth Day in March. Watch our video case study. We’re always looking for art work, photos, stories, videos and animations for our magazine and website. Get in touch if there’s something creative you want to share! References: Brunswick, N. (2009) Dyslexia. Katie Carmichael, Career Coach, Dyslexia Scotland