Young refugees get their hands on art projects

This spring, the Duncairn has been working in partnership with the Education Authority to bring the great benefits of engaging with the arts to refugee children.

Our brilliant facilitator Aroona Murphy delivered 6 art sessions at Malvern Primary School’s Welcome Club from March to the end of June. During her time at the Welcome Club, Aroona worked with child refugees aged 4 to 11 who recently moved here from Sudan, Syria, Eritrea, and Ukraine.

The Welcome Club is an opportunity for the children who recently moved to the country, to ease into their new life, learn English and prepare to enter mainstream education. For the children, this is a crucial period of transition in their lives and the art sessions were a chance for them to play, relax and just enjoy being children.

Aroona introduced them to a variety of art media through small and big projects, encouraging them to express their creativity while building their confidence in their abilities.

I loved working with the children. Seeing their smile when I walked into the room made me confident that they were enjoying the activities and were looking forward to participating.

Some children were not there for the entire period as they settled into new accommodation, so I was trying to engage them in smaller projects and have something to take home at the end of the day. But we also completed a few larger projects that we then hang on the walls of the classroom and the corridor of the school.

My main objective was to give them space to release, let them experiment and relax. All activities were especially designed to accommodate fluid and flexible engagement.

During the sessions, the children decorated a variety of objects exploring their own designs, from paper butterflies to canvas bags. They decorated a page using an ink marbling technique onto paper, which was then laminated and used as a cover for a notebook that they kept for personal use.

Canvases decorating the school corridors

The larger project was meant to provide the children with both an artistic and sensorial activity, as the children were allowed to dip their feet in paint and walk all over the canvas. The activity was very popular and the result striking. The canvases produced are now hanging along the corridor of the school and it has been fantastic to see the children keep engaging with it while looking for their own foot and hand prints.

The impact of these sessions on the children has been amazing:

Knowing their personal stories and all the terrible things they went through, it was really heart-warming to see them smile and having fun.

Reflecting on the impact of the project, Ciaran McPeake (Asylum Seeker and Refugee Support Coordinator at the Education Authority) states:

I have seen first-hand the positive impact the art sessions have had with the children in Welcome Club. The teachers and pupils alike spoke warmly of the art classes with Aroona and how her skills as an artist were able to overcome the challenges in communicating with the class. The final outcomes of the project can’t just be measured in terms of finished pieces displayed on the wall, but also in the wider sense of enjoyment, engagement and opportunity to explore the benefits of creative arts that otherwise may not have been available to this vulnerable group.