All about D•A•R•T
DART is ‘Digital Action Research Transformation’, which is a really fancy way of saying it’s all about teaching digital skills to serve cultural organizations, their staff, and their visitors. It’s a program we’ve developed in partnership with Culture24/The Audience Agency who have run similar types of training, in order to bring these skills over to Canada.
The History of D•A•R•T
DART started out as a conversation between Culture24’s Anra Kennedy and Jane Finnis, and Surface Impression’s Peter Pavement. Culture24 have run a program in the UK called ‘Let’s Get Real’, focusing on skills development for cultural workers that deals with issues and challenges they are facing *right now*, especially around developing digital skills. Surface Impression was really intrigued by this idea, especially as there was nothing similar in Canada.
A small Canada Council for the Arts grant allowed us to create a pilot program to test out the idea in Ontario. It was very well received, and so we made a 3-year application to CCA to scale the program up and reach cultural workers across Canada. We are now wrapping up year 3 of this full program, and we have learned many lessons and participants have learned many skills. We plan to create more training opportunities in the future.
D•A•R•T Collaborators
Partners
