Arts Education through depiction, enactment and dramatization can help participants ‘get in touch’ with how they feel about a topic, issue, or internal state.
Robert Masters makes the following distinctions between affect, feeling and emotion: "As I define them, affect is an innately structured, non-cognitive evaluative sensation that may or may not register in consciousness; feeling is affect made conscious, possessing an evaluative capacity that is not only physiologically based, but that is often also psychologically (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling."
Masters, Robert (2000), Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger
One of the beauties of Arts Education is that depiction, enactment and dramatization help the participants 'get in touch' with how they feel about a topic, issue, or internal state.
Here is an example.
Sometimes in class I ask the kids to make a collage in Photoshop. They can gather their resources from any where on the internet or take digital photos. Perhaps they can scan parts of their own drawings or even flowers they have found. They don't have to know what the emotion is they are expressing at the time. After they are finished we talk about the composition. Once we have chatted the students write a short (or sometimes quite long) poem as an intrapersonal response. A brief Haiku is enough. It gives them something to bight into - emotionally speaking I mean.
Sometimes these kinds of experiences can create entry points. Students might want to create a story. What was this collage about? Who was the stone talking to? If the children set about to answer questions about their pictures a whole world of emotional/artistic material can be encouraged.
Educare means to draw forth or "to lead forth". When we start a pathway of inspiration like this one we need not always draw the students forward - sometimes it is enough to companion them while the create their script.
Often the Educator thinks that at some stage he or she should be interpreting the work of the student. We can intersubjectively respond but it is always better to be tentative. This allows the student to define and own his or her own world. The student is allowed a sense of authenticity.
These kinds of exercises can be great discussion starters and a great jumping off point from which to impart technique. No doubt at some stage someone will put up there hand and say "How do I?"
If you have work you would like to share email and I will post it for you. Or alternatively post it at your Blog and invite my readers over.
