Imbali Visual Literacy Project

Imbali trains craftspeople, art teachers, and museum education staff -

To work towards social and personal development, including self-reliance, through art and culture education training
To enable learners to develop art and craft skills and knowledge
To promote visual literacy and awareness of our arts and cultural heritage

Objectives

Imbali trains in art and craft-making in order to

Provide crafts training to the unemployed and youth at risk
Provide skills that encourage and enable economic independence
Train crafts-teachers, building capacity through educational training
Promote awareness of South Africa’s diverse and varied cultural heritage in the community
Provide students with access to outlets for marketing and selling products
Provide basic business and marketing skills
Encourage and support craftsmanship, instill concepts of quality and originality
Train in creative thinking, to develop innovation and problem solving skills

Develop self-expression, self confidence and a sense of individual worth, through the acquisition of creative skills, towards self-reliance.
Enable teachers to develop and teach visual literacy and art-making skills

Help learners develop a creative imagination, and to use art-making skills to express that creativity

Courses offered

Crafts training; Craft Enterprise; Arts and Culture teacher training, Museum education; Street children education.

Course content

IMBALI has run courses and workshop programmes to train teachers in art education, in many different contexts: short intensive courses in teachers’ centres, and rural community centres, longer in-depth courses in schools, in the inner city, in informal settlements, and in townships.

To enable teachers to develop and teach visual literacy art making skills
To help learners develop imagination and powers of observation
To train in creative thinking, critical analysis and assessment skills as well as to develop innovation and problem solving skills
To cultivate creative relationships between teachers and learners
To understand the ways in which our cultures embody the ideas and values of both individuals and communities
To acquire skills with which we can observe, question, challenge and contribute to the values and directions of our communities
To develop self-expression, self confidence and a sense of individual identity

The training takes the teachers from a basic level in which they are highly supported to the point where they can develop their own lesson materials. Teachers have been involved in every stage of writing and testing our teaching materials.

Fees

R30 per month for craft students; no fee for teachers

What we offer the industry

Training, Workshps (e.g. for children)at events; demonstrations of crafts, general help and support

History

The IMBALI Visual Literacy Project was created as a project ofWomen For Peace, when it became clear from the results of a children's national art competition that children who had little or no access to art at school showed extremely poor perceptual skills.

Since at that time only a tiny minority of schools taught art, this affected the vast majority of children in our country. Today, the learning area "Arts and Culture" is officially on our school timetables; but in reality, by far the majority of teachers throughout the country are untrained and feel totally ill-equipped in this field.
And so the need continues, to train and develop skills, and above all to instil self-confidence in the creative abilities of teachers, learners and youth.

In recent years IMBALI has responded to new and growing issues in the country - such as the need to confront poverty. IMBALI has thus developed its mission and extended its programmes to target not only teachers and learners in school, but also unemployed youth, inner- city homeless street-children and self employed crafts people.

Additional info

Our Student Profile
We have approximately 60 students at a time. When they have completed their training students go into the craft industry as producers, arts administrators, into education or into museum education.

The Imbali Shop

Are you looking for something new? The recently launched Imbali shop at Museum Africa has an exciting range of high quality handmade craft and design products including home ware, textiles and funky jewellery. It's the perfect place to come shopping for unusual Christmas gifts.
Imbali is a non-profit organisation involved in art education and craft training. The products in the shop are made by craft people in the Imbali training programmes who come from a far afield as Voslorus and Kagiso. A large percentage of the price of the products goes directly to the maker.

The shop is open from 10h00 to 17h00 from Tuesday to Sunday.
For further information contact the Imbali office ext 221