Red Room's secondary schools program, Papercuts, is a unique opportunity for students to appreciate poetry - from the inside.

The Ian Potter Foundation, who have generously funded this program, have recently made a feature of Papercuts on their website. Have a read of it here.

Papercuts is currently the only national poetry program available to high school students across Australia. The program was piloted with the support of the Ian Potter Foundation in 2007. In 2010, Papercuts has grown to include over 20 schools, and has moved interstate to include schools in Queensland and Western Australia.

Papercuts is a unique school program, in that it is designed to be a flexible unit of study that matches syllabus teaching and learning outcomes with the creative development and expression of students, through exposure to practising Australian poets. This exposure to contemporary poetic practise provides a level of insight that cannot be achieved through other means, allowing students to interrogate the process, as well as the end product, of their own and others' works. Our view of the importants and potential of poetry has been endorsed by students, teachers, poets, and education professionals, as well as by our benefactors.

Currently, Papercuts is comprised of two poetry education kits that have been written to match NSW Stage 5 outcomes. These kits are The Cabinet of Lost and Found and Toilet Doors, both of which have sprung from successful Red Room Company projects, and re-engineered for high school education. The Red Room is developing another education kit around the Sea Things project, and there are further plans to turn Pigeon Poetry into another kit.

In the near future, The Red Room Company will be redesigning the Papercuts website to cater more to rich media content, providing a better platform to showcase the individual school and student projects, as well as potentially implementing an online learning environment that will be used for cross-school collaboration and allow schools in remote locations to participate.

Register your interest

For more details about this program and to register your interest, please direct enquiries to our Education Officer, Fiona Curran. Please include information about your school, your class, when you would ideally like to run the program, and with which of the two kits you would like to work.

Endorsements

"It made me appreciate what a powerful tool poetry was... there was so much opening up, respect, and sharing, from the most unlikely group of poets!" - Sarah Johnston, Mt Carmel High School

"I recently saw this program on display at a high school in Melbourne... It seemed to spark the students' interest in language and verse to a degree I had not anticipated." - Professor Geoffrey Blainey

"The Red Room Company... brings poetry to where students are and to where their interests lie, and then transports them beyond." Eva Gold, ETA NSW

Papercuts is proudly supported through 2009-2010 by the Ian Potter Foundation.