我的小小天地 my little music

This is a response to what Wyona posted to me as question. I thought it is a valuable experience to share with all.

Hi Wyona,

Thanks for writing. I would love to see how I could help.
Below mentioned is just a possible scenario. The difficulty is in the execution, which I will pull examples from my various classes as case study later. I too face these problems at various stages.
Thanks for the questions.

__________________

The Root Cause (for 99% of the students)
The fear for drawing comes from the fear of being judged and a stigma that is already formed in their young minds. If we were to trace back on the history of those students (those with that fear), we would find somewhere, someone, sometime, passed him/her an unkind remark of “you can’t draw”, ” you are not good at art”, “art is useless”, “you are not talented” and etc of the same nature.

The Main Qualities of the Individual to Address
confidence
curiosity
playfulness
expressivity
emotional control

The Unorthodox Way to Undo the Damage (Suggestion)
So the approach is to bring ART, or DRAWING, totally out of context. (Transcending the stigma)

In other words, through careful RE-design, deconstruction and reconstruction of the activity of art in a way that even those who could draw (in particular ways) cannot gain any advantage.
(Leveling the playing field). With this, you build a condition necessary for learning to take place.
Socrates - Not knowing is when learning can begin.

Few things to keep in focus for this first phase of training.
1) focus on building confidence. think EMPOWERMENT.
2) focus on creating PLAY activities
3) focus on throwing everyone off their feet and forget (they are in fact) doing art. DISPLACEMENT OF FEAR

Watch out for nice accidents that happens when these activities happen (guaranteed). At appropriate time (intuitively), point it out, celebrate these seemingly nonsensical outcomes.
Preparation must be done in ploughing through tons of art especially of the 20th century by the teacher (guide) prior to this. Create a data bank of such art works.
Then when the students so called conclude the session, spend time discussing what they experienced.
Finally pull out examples from your data bank that have striking similar qualities with what they have done. Examples of these art works done are most probably labeled under modernism, dadaism, abstract expressionism, expressionism, impressionism, pop and post modernism.

Reconstruct their notion of art and deconstruct their stigma.

This process will not go away in a short time. You are likely to take around 3-6 months before something special begins to take over those stigma formed a long time ago.
From that point onwards, other forms of learning can take place.

End Note
It takes confidence from the teacher (guide) to make this happen too.
But from my experience, what I can share is that while the beginning stage seems to go nowhere sometimes, the majority of the students will end up excelling beyond what we can imagine later.
It will take a lot of patience and figuring out as you take this bold step forward.

Best wishes.

(more later, as promised)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Notes for Teachers, notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.