Over a period of six weeks, Michiko worked with Year 3 and 4 pupils at a primary school in Eccles, Manchester on behalf of Artists & Education. The project aimed to explore self-identity and the children’s expectation of themselves and those who make up their community. It also aimed to deepen the children’s understanding of what ‘community’ means. Michiko facilitated classroom workshops, which incorporated collage, drawing, text and collecting objects to begin to build a concept of ‘ourselves and our identity’. Later the children were taken out to Eccles town centre to interview people in the street and take photographs of their surroundings, in order to begin to build a sense of the local community.

Michiko’s personal achievement was watching the face of a young boy who discovered that he was actually “good at something” as both his creative photographic and construction skills had emerged throughout the project. Before then he had thought that he was only “rubbish at things like Maths and English.”