Art-making Experiences Research Articles

Drawing Involves Caring: Fostering Relationship Building Through Art Therapy for Social Change

The art therapist's ability to foster the creative process in service of relationship can be a foundation for infusing a social change paradigm into existing practice. For clients affected by discrimination and stigma, art therapy can promote empathy and understanding of the societal forces involved. In this qualitative study, 46 people participated in a guided viewing experience of artworks by individuals who were living with mental illnesses. After providing data on their familiarity with mental illnesses, their attitudes, and their level of empathy, viewers created an art image in response to an exhibiting artist and participated in a discussion. Results indicated that the facilitated experience helped to foster empathy, allowed viewers to relate to the exhibiting artists, and promoted attitudinal change. By facilitating meaningful art-viewing and art-making experiences art therapists can attend both to individuals in need and to community structures that hamper full participation in society.

Exploring the Benefits of Music-Making as Professional Development for Music Teachers

Although much has been written about professional development in general education and music education literature, little has addressed the benefits of music-making as meaningful professional development for music teachers. For music teachers, music-making and meanings of music-making have been connected with teachers' identity, well-being, beliefs, and effectiveness, as well as being a powerful pedagogical tool and a way to develop presence in teaching. Presence in teaching is linked with self-awareness, attentiveness, and pedagogical knowledge. The purpose of this article is to explore the benefits of music-making for music teachers in order to convince policymakers of the value of music-making as a professional development activity for music teachers. This article explores theories from psychology and education that link engagement, well-being, and identity to lay the foundation for a justification of broadening professional development policies. Then, literature is presented that connects teachers' art-making experiences (past and present), identity, teaching, and student learning. The third section draws on my previous work to illustrate the intersections between teachers' music-making and teaching. Then, suggestions for implementing professional development programs with music-making components are made. Although there are many ways music-making could be included as professional development, I offer four suggestions: including music-making in departmental or district-wide meetings, granting professional development credit to music teachers who make music outside of the classroom, setting up in-classroom reflection opportunities/action research based on integrating music-making and music teaching, and initiating a collaborative teacher study group that includes chamber music collaboration.

Using Visual Art to Teach Prepositional Phrases

A preposition, as one of the eight parts of speech, indicates a relationship between persons, places or things mentioned in a sentence. Many state curricula introduce prepositions at intermediate grade levels. Other states wait until middle school to do so. Students at such advanced levels of language learning should be able to readily assimilate prepositions into learning. Developing youngsters’ ability to recognize and use spatial language, such as the preposition, is an extremely important goal in the language arts. Fundamental, perhaps, to gaining entrance into the world of prepositions is the ability to visualize spatial relationships. The visual arts provide an ideal venue for discussing spatial concepts in written and spoken language, particularly through the use of prepositions. This article describes a unit of instruction used to engage pre-service generalist educators in an artmaking experience in illustration, printmaking, and bookmaking. The aim of the unit of instruction was to teach these undergraduates how to enhance their future students’ visual literacy in order to familiarize students to prepositions as a part of speech and the functions of prepositional phrases in a sentence. The goal of the unit was to create an alphabet book of illustrations representative of a variety of prepositional phrases. Since a prepositional phrase is comprised of a preposition, its object and any associated adjectives or adverbs, the visual arts provide an excellent way to envision the relationships between the preposition, its object, and any modifying words. In the unit of instruction, the students generated a variety of prepositional phrases derived from a collaboratively selected theme. Using a provided chart, students were assisted in generating outstanding prepositional phrases. Students were encouraged to create a sentence that provided rich visual imagery that could easily be illustrated. Students illustrated the prepositional phrase using a simple linoleum block printmaking process. The class’s finished illustrations were then collected together for a class book.