Month: May 2021

attentiveness & community

• Attentiveness
• Community
• Application to Art

Attentiveness & community

Paying attention is something that is actually easy to not do. It’s easy to get caught up in your own head. But, the world and the communities that exist in it can be beautiful and inspiring if we do pay attention to them.

attentiveness

To pay attention to the world and its communities of course involves listening to others when they have something so say or watching what others do so that we can learn from them. Listening allows us to hear what others have to say and try to understand or learn from it. You can learn about another person and how they are different or similar to you, and then you can become closer to that person and create relationships to grow from. And getting to know new people can also help us encounter those differences that we don’t understand and try to understand them to that we can maybe bridge those gaps between ourselves and strangers, instead creating communities that people can thrive in through those connections. Watching can be just as important in paying attention as listening such as in demonstrations of tasks to learn something new or watching someone’s body language to try to understand how they feel, if they are okay, if they could be a friend, or if they should be avoided. And in watching you can see things you haven’t noticed before that could inspire you to do something new yourself or that could wake you up to something that may need to change. Paying attention also leads to the need to speak, to ask questions for clarity or to learn more, or to voice your understanding so that others can assess if you understand them or if you need more time. Or, you can use art as a voice to speak about things you notice while paying attention.

community

These elements of paying attention are vital to a community because to have a community we need to interact with those around us. That means you shouldn’t just watch from the windows but actually go outside and talk to people, talk about yourself, interview people, collaborate, etc. This is because a community involves relationships and socializing with others and being involved in the community to maintain those relationships and even improve them or improve life for the community. And, to maintain a community you need to be attentive to that community, observe how it functions, and observe and interact with the people in it to understand what the community needs in order to thrive. This is the case with any one-on-one relationship too. And, from that interaction comes communication and team work that can empower the community to be the best it can be.

Sometimes, improving the community means major changes, as we all change as we age in order to grow and mature and be healthy individuals. Those changes require paying attention to the community and society and the world and how everything works in order to diagnose what specific change the community needs. From that point of paying attention the community needs individuals to voice their thoughts and communicate with each other to work out the plan for that change to benefit the community. Sometimes you need to voice thoughts for others who can’t, which will require even more paying attention to make sure you are voicing their thoughts correctly.

Application to art

All of that paying attention and community can be done in the art classroom, or benefitted by art-making. Students can document what they see, hear, or learn about their communities, which can be done using art by the use of visual journals, or illustrations and sketches of places and parts or people of the community. Students can make art expressing their identity in relation to the community and what they noticed about it. Students can also take their documentation and learnings about the community and make that into other art that could even try to communicate a needed change in the community or a proposed new idea to benefit the community. Or, students could make art as a method of communication to direct individuals in their community such as in hand-made gifts or artsy messages like thank you’s. Students can study art from the community and how it affects or is affected by the community. That art can teach students about different places and cultures too, since different places means different communities and cultures which means different art based on local traditions. Even just making art for fun with others in the community can be a great way to bring the community together to be more friendly and welcoming to the relationships that make up a community and a home.

Related Reading Recommendations

• London, P. (1994). Step outside: Community-based art education. ERIC.
• Lai, A., & Ball, E. L. (2002).  Home is where the art is: Exploring the places people live through art education (Links to an external site.). Studies in Art Education, 44(1), 47-66.

Forming self & encountering difference

• Expression and Forming Self
• Encountering Difference
• Students

Forming Self & Encountering Difference

Art is a beautiful mode of communication that allows us to express ourselves. Within that, we can express who we are in our identities but also communicate our differences, which in turn allows us to overcome them.

expression and forming self

Expression is important for anyone but especially for students still trying to figure themselves out. The middle and high school years were such a stressful time for me being exposed to all those new emotions that I really valued having an outlet to express myself in art.

I could create characters as an extension of myself and imagine stories of her doing things I wanted to do but couldn’t due to limitations of self, confidence, or rules. That then allowed me to express frustrations or to develop goals for my future self. And with other forms of art expression I can also explore and experiment with what I like to do to develop my personal art style and express my personality through that. I can also explore and discover who I am by reflecting and thinking critically about myself and expressing that in my art, or I can do research into my past and explore how my past or my family has impacted my identity.

I think that expression can then be very valuable to students in discovering themselves through that reflection while expressing and making art. This can lead back to play in art by meditating and reflecting while just having fun with art. I’m 23 and still learning things about myself and learning new things to improve myself every day. Meditating and reflecting while making art or communicating those things in art helps me track my personal development and acknowledge those ideas about myself.

Encountering difference

And, when I express myself in art or see how others express themselves in art, you start to see the differences between people and their experiences. Those differences add to our identities too by setting us apart from others and making us unique individuals instead of a result of a factory. I can discover that I have different emotions about something from someone else when I see how they address or depict something differently than I do.

When art is used as communication of stories and experiences, I can also start to see how other people experience life differently from me. I can see things in life that I hadn’t noticed before and see other perspectives about a topic that I hadn’t considered. This opens you up to an opportunity to develop empathy too in seeing reality as someone else sees it and how situations can affect others through their expressed stories. For example, I can’t fully know what it’s like to be black in America, but I can start to try to understand by seeing the art created by individuals who are black and listening to what they have to say about their experiences through their art. I can then learn a little more about them and what they go through via the issues they address in their art.

Students

Students experience and understand more complex experiences than we give them credit for and no two people experience life or express themselves the same way. So, I think it’s important that we give them opportunities to express themselves with open-ended art projects and opportunities to share their reflections or statements about their artwork and, as a result, their identity from what and how they express. If we allow this expression, reflection, and discussion about our art and make a point to not censor out controversial topics that students still experience regardless of what we think then we can hear what others have to say and let them tell us who they are, and let them discover who they are.

Play and its possibilities

• Sometimes a plan just gets in the way
• let yourself learn something new
• let your brain think
• creative awakening
• Related reading recommendations

Play and its possibilities

Sometimes a plan just gets in the way

I’ve recently been exploring the benefits and possibilities of play in art-making. I remember that I used to focus more on play in my art than any major concept, and I enjoyed the process of art-making a lot more in those earlier years of my life. When I was a kid I would just make art for the fun of it and the self expression but recently I feel like there’s been a pressure to always have a big concept behind your art so it means something, which isn’t always fun. When you have a plan for everything then there’s a lot more stress when things don’t go your way and there’s a lot of stress do make your art look “perfect.” But, when you go into art-making with no plan, then the art doesn’t have to look a certain way because there’s no expectations for it, and the possibilities are endless.

Let yourself learn something new

In that act of playing with art instead of trying to make something “perfect,” you can also learn a lot since you’re more actively making and doing the whole time and just seeing what happens as you go. And, that process of just seeing what happens with play leads to experimenting and discovering new materials, new patterns, and new ways to make art. “Mistakes” become part of the design because – since there was no goal to begin with – it doesn’t matter if there’s a big paint spill in the middle. When art isn’t precious, you stop looking at those paint spills and sloppy marks as mistakes and you just have fun with it. In my own play, I’ve found new patterns I like by just repeating a weird mark or series of lines just for the sake of it; I’ve discovered that white out can be used to make marks as well as hide them; and, I’ve explored how many things an ink blot can look like.

Let your brain think

Playing with art with no plan on your mind is also a great chance to let your mind wander. This creates a meditative state where you can reflect on whatever else is on your mind, or just completely throw your mind into being creative with the marks. This can actually be great for students by giving them time to process what they’d learned recently by thinking about it as they make art. They might even think of something new about that recent lesson because they have had that time to let their mind think instead of watching TV or reading a boring text.

Doodling, I have learned, is actually great for learning like this. When I was a student, I would doodle just to keep my brain and hands actively doing something instead of just sitting and staring at a teacher talk. Sitting still makes me want to take a nap, but doodling lets me listen to the teacher while keeping my eyes on a simple pattern or character sketch instead of the distractions of other students or room clutter. Since there’s no plan for the doodling or art play, my mind isn’t on anything but making the art so it’s not actually distracting much from the class. I think that this limit on visual distractions from looking at the paper instead of the teacher or the rest of the room allows my brain to send more processing power to my ears, so I actually usually listen better when I’m doodling or doing some mindless task with my hands than when I’m looking at the teacher.

Creative awakening

Even without the learning benefits, I feel like I’ve had a creative re-awakening since getting back into play in my art making. Planning takes a lot out of me with the pressure of wanting it to look good but just making art to have fun is in fact really fun. And, that fun gets me a lot more excited about actually making the art and discovering new things and seeing what I can do. I love learning and exploring even as an adult in college and allowing myself to play in art opens myself up to the mysteries and possibilities in creating in that exploring mindset. A lot of my art includes using spontaneous but controlled paint splatters by putting watery paint on the paper and blowing it to see where it goes, but controlling the paint still with the direction and force of the blows. I thought it was fun so I started using a lot but when I started planning to use it a certain way it lost it’s fun and meaning to me. But, working on a piece that I really don’t care about from the beginning sets me up to actually be spontaneous and in that spontaneity I can go down whatever path I want by making things up as I go with the art and seeing where it takes me. That then lets the art show me something new and creative by problem solving the random marks. Since doing this, I feel more creative in the past week than I have in the past few years.

Related reading recommendations

• Eliza Pitri (2001) The Role of Artistic Play in Problem Solving, Art Education,
  54:3, 46-52
• Adetty Pérez Miles & Julie U. Libersat (2016) ROAM: Walking, Mapping,
  and Play: Wanderings in Art and Art Education, Studies in Art Education, 57:4, 341-357
• George Szekely (1994) Shopping for Art Materials and Ideas, Art Education,
  47:3, 9-17
• Rachel Branham (2016) “What’s So Great About Art Anyway?”: A Teacher’s Odyssey. Teachers College Press.