Organized for engineering students and co-operative engineers in their final year, cultural & artistic workshops (AOC) are wholly original classes. Visual arts, body language and vocal expression, critical reviews of sociological texts: these classes provide students with a refreshing break from their usual lessons, giving them an insight into other inspiring subjects.
Organized in small groups, AOC workshops are proving hugely popular with engineering students and co-operative engineers alike. Fairly easy-going, these classes do not require too much work on the part of each student, and are a breath of fresh air from their often hectic weekly timetables.
For the 2020/2021 academic year, three workshops have been organized:
- Visual arts: two artists, one a painter – Fred Tonnerre, the other a stone sculptor – Bruno Panas, will be helping students to commit their ideas to paper and encouraging them to give their imagination free rein by crafting original artworks.
- Body language and vocal expression: led by Martine Gerffraut-Cadec, an actress and stage director, this workshop gives students an opportunity to embrace different body language and vocal expression techniques to improve their public-speaking skills.
- Critical reviews of sociological texts: Jean Francès, a professor at ENSTA Bretagne, encourages students to decipher and analyze texts and to discuss them in a group.
We set up these workshops to give our students something extra in terms of general culture and above all opportunities to discover other ways of thinking. They encourage our students to become more open-minded and to develop their intellectual curiosity, their adaptability and range of action, as well as their knowledge of culture, art and society.
The Visual arts workshops chime with the educational considerations we are giving, alongside our research work, to training engineers in how to be innovative. To nurture an innovative mindset, we think that it is important to encourage the creativity, sensitivity and open-mindedness of our future engineers, simply by giving them opportunities to use their imaginations. This type of class has really gone down well with students – they are open to the world around them and enthusiastic about exploring different environments,” explains Linda Gardelle, Professor of Education Sciences and Head of ENSTA Bretagne’s Humanities & Social Sciences Department.
In all, twenty 55-minute sessions are organized on Monday mornings in Semester 5. These sessions combine theoretical knowledge shared by the workshop leader with activities for the engineering students and co-operative engineers to do. The sessions with sculptor Bruno Panas are held in the artist’s studio, a few miles from Brest, which is an ideal way for the students to experience this artist’s environment first-hand.
Most of the workshops have been able to take place physically, with permission from the Prefecture.
