You don’t just forget the thing that you’ve learned, even though it wasn’t like school. The other day I was in the library in the nonfiction section and there was a book about Jasvinder Sanghera, I now know this person, she fought for women who were being forced into marriage. The journey was the most fun for us. If you read a story, the beginning is okay and then in the end, something bad or good happens. But the middle is the interesting part. It’s the best bit. This range of comments gives insight into the richness of the process: of the girls’ reflections on their own sense of self and how this has shifted in response to their relationships with the older women who participated in the project with them, with the women in the world beyond the project, and how the arts based process supported this development. Vanessa Ogden distilled this sense of potential when she said, When you’re involved in arts work it’s very much about you and how you develop as a person, who you want to be in the world and how a project helps you to become that person in the way that you want to be. As a school, we are not there to mould a particular shape of person. We support young women to become themselves and to become more than they imagined they could be. That’s very much about them and their choices, knowing that they can exercise that power of choice about their lives in the world.
Wild Wild Women, Dr Caoimhe McAvinchey
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