Vancouver’s grunt gallery is marking the end of its year-long “Activating the Archive” project with the launch of six educational guides for secondary school instructors and students, centered around projects initiated or supported by the artist-run centre since its establishment in 1984.

Each educational guide provides a lesson plan for one of the following senior-level courses: BC First Nations, Communications, English, English First Peoples, Media Arts, and Studio Arts. The lesson plans offer instructors guidelines by which to introduce students to a variety of topics, including colonialism, stereotypes, social responsibility, national languages, and local activist, artistic, and new media practices. Provided resources include texts (articles, essays, and short stories), images, worksheets, essay and discussion questions, and outlines for group activities. The guides are available for download for free in PDF format:

Activating the Archive Study Guides
1. BC First Nations 12
2. Communications 11 & 12
3. English 12
4. English First Peoples 12
5. Media Arts 11 & 12
6. Visual Arts 11 & 12
 

Grunt’s educational guides combine the BC Ministry of Education curriculum with content from grunt’s archive that was recently made available to the public as a result of the “Activating the Archive” project. “Activating the Archive” resulted in a searchable online database and six curated websites that focus respectively on text-based artworks; sculpture; queer performance practices; socially-engaged art practices; the work of Cree/French Métis artist Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew; and “INDIANacts: Aboriginal Performance Art,” a conference presented by grunt gallery in 2002.