Expressive Arts and Culture

A thousand memories in a single metal band.

Four diamonds containing a thousand memories.

Three sapphires representing three generations of unconditional love.

Rarely admired, but without it I would not be myself.

Now a part of my body and heart, and it will forever be,

until my daughter after me.

Precious stones, worthless without the story,

always part of my story and my heart.

Today were the class presentations. These were extremely interesting as I got a chance to see what the Arts and Culture means to others in the class and the specific areas that they were focussing on. These ranged from art with children with special needs, art in the early years or, our topic, STEAM.

Our group discussed a variety of areas within STEAM, but my specific area was STEM to STEAM. I discussed the distribution and numbers of STEAM educators there are in the world, using an interactive map.

Below are the sourced that I used in my presentations:

STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) is a scheme that has been promoted through primary schools, encouraging the study of scientific subjects from an early age (Stem, 2017). This, however, does not include the arts, and the arts and the other curricular areas “are taught in isolation from each other” (Abbs, 1987).

STEAM (science, technology, engineering and maths) is a newer scheme with the integration of the arts in STEM (Stemtosteam, 2017). Today, we were discussing the importance of highlighting the art and design subjects in partnership with STEM as they are not effective without the other.

I believe, that in today’s day and age, every single person should have the right to express their thoughts and feelings through whichever method suits them best. This includes in the classroom. Every child learns in a different way and this means the children that learn visually and in other ways. We live in the 21st century where the arts are a part of our everyday lives, and this should be embraced in schools for every single child, even those who don’t prefer it as much as others. The “investigation, adaptation and transformation” (Dixon and Chalmers, 1990) involved in a child’s creative journey, reflect skills used in subjects like maths or English and prove that the arts are equally important.

Abbs, P. (1987). Living Powers: The Arts In Education. London: Falmer Press.

Dixon, G.T and Chalmers, F.G. (1990) ‘The Expressive Arts In Education’, Childhood Education. pg 12.

Stem. (2017). STEM. [online] Available at: https://www.stem.org.uk/ [Accessed 19 Mar. 2017].

Stemtosteam. (2017). STEM to STEAM. [online] Available at: http://stemtosteam.org/ [Accessed 19 Mar. 2017].

YouTube. (2017). Integrating Art with STEM Education | Océane Boulais | TEDxBocaRaton. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/DjpWQkmopgY [Accessed 19 Mar. 2017].

Scotland has a history of having some of the world’s most creative people; from Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Peter Howson, we have an incredible range of architecture, paintings, designers and inventors. Living in Glasgow, I have been brought up surrounded by amazing art galleries and museums. As a child, Kelvingrove and The Burrell were always my favourite, and even today these buildings are some of my favourite in the world.

I feel that having a cultural upbringing has resulted in me being an open-minded and creative person who went on to do Advanced Higher art at school. Yes, I may not be able to get every child to fall in love with art like I do, but I do strongly believe that experiencing and understanding the expressive arts in our culture leads to being a more rounded person and learner. It is this that I hope to bring to the classroom.

Children develop their ‘knowledge and understanding’, ‘skills’, ‘attitudes and values’, ‘enjoyment, inspiration and creativity’, ‘activity, behaviour and progression’ and ‘attitudes and values’ (Hooper-Greenhill, 2004). It is known that school trips are sometimes difficult in disadvantaged areas due to expenses, however many museums and galleries now do free bus links between the school and the building, therefore every school gets equal opportunity. Going to art galleries and museums are also not just educational, for a lot of people they are an escape and a type of therapy.

I strongly feel that children need to understand not only about our culture and history, but about the world. Museums are the perfect place to do this and with the creative partnership between the school and the education staff at the museums, young people can learn far more about the world than simply in the classroom.

Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2004). Inspiration, identity, learning. 1st ed. Leicester: University of Leicester.

Today was very much an exploration of engaging with the outdoors whilst doing art education. The outdoors is something which is available to any and every school, no matter if it’s inner city of rural. This makes for a great tool for learning in endless numbers of ways. The outdoors allow different ways of thinking, whilst exploring, investigating and discovering (Adams, E. 2008).

The classroom is not the only place where learning takes place, so why not explore the class topics/ subjects in relevant environments, or, to simply change the context for the children and engage them by making the most of the outdoors.

Also, with health and well-being being such a huge part of the Scottish curriculum, taking the learning outdoors immediately applies to this government policy. It also means that the children are not locked up in the school building, but are breathing in and learning more about their natural environment also, whilst covering other curricular areas.

Whilst doing placement in a primary school in the town of Kilmarnock, I realised that despite being in a town centre, they really do make the most of outdoor learning. Even if it just fitting in their daily run outside, doing PE in the ‘Mugga'(outdoor multi-sports sports cage) or taking lunch outside to eat, they are always promoting getting the kids outdoors. I saw that the children not only look forward to getting outdoors, but they benefit from it and it makes them more engaged throughout the school day, and develops children that love the outdoors.

Below, is an example of a school that make the most of their natural environment, and talk about the benefits to the children.

(YouTube, 2017)

Our task was to create a piece of artwork using the materials fund outdoors. We were allowed to take one or two things from the art store cupboard to help us.  I decided to take outside with me, a couple of pieces of wire for structure. I then, once outside, I decided that due to the autumn weather, I would make the most of all of the fallen leaves. I made an interpretation of the arch in the university grounds, weaving the leaves onto wire. This activity made my learning ‘multi-sensory’, independent and developed my ‘awareness of the environment’ (Nct.org.uk, 2017).

I strongly believe that this kind of art-based learning ensures that every child doesn’t just have a ‘paint and paper’ art lesson, but we meet their health and well-being needs and also allow them to explore their natural environments and use this as a stimulus for expressive art projects with hardly any boundaries.

Adams, E (2008) Art and Design Education and the Built Environment. In Coutts, G. & Jokela, T [Eds] Art, Community and Environment: Educational Perspectives. Bristol: Intellect.

YouTube. (2017). Teachers TV- Outdoor Learning with Forest School. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/tjzFfU43wuQ [Accessed 12 Feb. 2017].

Nct.org.uk. (2017). Importance of outdoor play activities for kids. [online] Available at: https://www.nct.org.uk/parenting/why-outdoor-play-important [Accessed 12 Feb. 2017].

Today, we explored the concept of print-making. This print making was the next step in exploring our evocative objects and will be a part of a final product. On a piece of rubbery plastic, we engraved a minimalistic representation of our objects, using lines and shapes to make an image. This image did not need to be realistic, it just needed to be a personal reflection of the object. I feel that this is a good thing to do with children as they can sometimes worry about being ‘a good drawer’, so this encourages children that as long as they are happy with the drawing that they have created, then they do not need to worry about it being realistic. I do feel, however, that this activity would need to be very much supervised as we used sharp tools that were fiddly to use. The printing could, though, be done with other media like potatoes or paper, which are easy to access.

My print included the band and geometric shapes of the sapphires on my ring. We were also given a choice of paper and ink to use, showing us that teachers should not limit children to A4 white paper, but should allow them to express their project through choices like coloured paper too. I feel that this made it more personalised also. I feel that an effective teacher ‘ensures that during the course of a lesson a contribution is drawn from each pupil in a variety of ways, at a variety of levels, according to each pupil’s capacity’ (Johnson, 2004).

Johnson, M. (2004). Personalised Learning – an Emperor’s Outfit?. London.

This week’s focus was animation. “Animation is created when you film one still image of your subject, change it a bit, film another still image, change it again and so on until you build up a sequence of still images” (Movingimageeducation.org, 2017). And when it’s played back, it appears to move. (quoted from powerpoint). Animation is a technique that has been around for centuries and in present day is in our daily lives; from Hollywood films to computer games to television, we can’t escape how much animation speeds our lives up.

In education, animation plays a huge part in a child’s development. It offers many benefits and skills development in schools such as

-developing visual literacy skills

-develop literacy skills (including writing, storyboarding and editing)

-encourage critical thinking

-build problem solving skills

-encourage collaboration and co-operation

-develop sequencing and order concepts

-work collaboratively

-engage in contructing meaning (asking questions, discussing, researching)

-cross-curricular

(quoted from powerpoint).

During the workshop, we explored concepts such as the Thaumatrope, Flick books and Stop-frame animation. It was through this session that we were able to use video equipment, paper, play dough,  projectors, sand and laptops.

In a classroom, this type of learning can be time-consuming and will need organisation, however, can be worth the planning when several curricular areas are combined and there is a finished product that the children are proud of (Movingimageeducation.org, 2017).

Movingimageeducation.org. (2017). Animation | Moving Image Education. [online] Available at: https://movingimageeducation.org/create-films/animation [Accessed 20 Jan. 2017].

Today’s first class was an introduction to the Expressive Arts and Culture module and a brief overview of the weeks to come. There was also an introduction to exploring ‘Learning through evocative objects for teaching and learning’. We were shown a few examples of previous work that has been developed from the stimulus of an evocative object such as the book ’26 Treasures’ (Simmons, 2012) before discussing our chosen evocative objects and what they meant to us. My choice of object was my ring, which was given to my mum on her 21st birthday by my grandma and I wear it every day.

I hope by the end of the module, I will fully understand the possibilities of using a stimulus like this to create a final piece that not only includes art but a variety of other curricular areas. I also hope that I can successfully create a piece of artwork that represents my evocative object.

Simmons, J. (2012). 26 treasures. 1st ed. London: Unbound.

I chose the Expressive Arts and Culture module because I enjoyed the Integrated Arts module so much. Art has played a huge part in my self-development, education and development as a teacher. I believe that “the teacher’s role is to interact with individual children who are finding their own identity, their own means of understanding and communicating and their own powers of creativity” (McAuliffe, 2007), and I feel that the arts play a huge part in this. I hope that throughout this module, I will deepen my knowledge of art in education and learn more teaching methods to use in schools. I believe that no child can deepen their understanding of the world or their education without the aid of expressive arts and their culture.

McAuliffe, D. (2007) Teaching Art and Design 3-11. Edited by Sue Cox, Robert Watts, Judy Grahame, Steve Herne, and Diarmuid McAuliffe. London, United Kingdom.