POINT OF VIEW

Student Barbara’s sculpting process includes the use of her computer as an optical device.

Clyde Gaw

As schools resume a semblance of normalcy after the COVID-19 shutdowns, by my recollection, the world will have been under pandemic siege for over eighteen months. Within the context of K–12 education, there are children who can “roll with the punches,” seemingly unaffected by the pandemic. Yet millions of children and their families have been psychologically, emotionally, and physically affected by COVID-19. A Harris Poll on behalf of the American Psychological Association reports that eighty percent of adults in the United States are experiencing higher stress levels due to the pandemic. Parental stress plays a significant role in the exacerbation of abuse and dysfunction within family relationships. 

We can never fully understand the impact of the pandemic on the physiological health and well-being of children, but we can be sure this cataclysmic event has added additional stress in their lives. A glimpse at the 2020 U.S. Youth Survey reveals that more than thirty percent of participants experience hopelessness in their lives for two or more weeks at a time

To make matters worse, the contradictions in schools that existed before the pandemic, already problematic for millions of children, remain: a national focus on job, career, and college readiness, state and federal education initiatives geared toward hurrying children into adulthood and employment ignore the time-sensitive experience of childhood.

The value of children’s authentic creative experience lies not just in the external outcomes of the activity, but in the internal experience of the child.

Let us not forget that over the past three decades since federal and state legislation has cemented mandatory high-stakes standardized testing as the centerpiece of a child’s curricula experience, schools in the United States have increasingly become plagued by teacher shortages, bullying, school violence, and a mental health crisis. My observation is that education policies that dehumanize classrooms and learning experience through standardization, bureaucratization, and fragmentation of the child’s school experience, shoulder much of the blame for this problem. We should question those who push educational efficiencies as doing “what’s best for children.”

In order to humanize data-driven school settings, the smart move is to provide space for children’s psychogenic creativity throughout the K–12 curricula. This can happen in art classes where knowledgeable art teachers have an opportunity to support creative agency; where emergent, imaginative, and interest-driven learning experiences occur in stimulating environments with abundant materials; where children’s emotional disequilibrium may be restored.

Educators need look no further than the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, whose art education pedagogy provided children with inspiration, space, opportunity, and time-sensitive impetus to express authentic visual ideas about themselves, their situations, their observations, their hopes, and their dreams. What is extraordinary about Dicker-Brandeis is that she operated her art education practice inside the Terezin Ghetto in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for Jewish children forcibly evicted from their homes during the Holocaust.

Dicker-Brandeis, who would later perish at Auschwitz, was committed to providing children in her classes with freedom of expression in the face of unspeakable terror and trauma. An accomplished artist with training in psychology and philosophy, Dicker-Brandeis understood that preserving children’s individuality so they might tell their story through art, was a critical component of the creative process and important for self-formation and the development of resiliency.

Because each individual is unique in personality and creative capacity, assisting and supporting children in the realization of authentic creative experience is not something that can be concocted on an assembly line. The value of children’s authentic creative experience lies not just in the external outcomes of the activity, but in the internal experience of the child. It is within these kinds of curriculum structures where educational gold can be mined. To ensure meaningful learning experience for each child during these precarious times, art educators must redefine the boundaries of what “school art” is and can be. 

When children have the opportunity to develop their individuality through their own thoughts and actions, the experience of independent decision making and choice of materials during the creative event accentuates the children’s sense of responsibility, identity, and fellowship.

When governors, state legislators, and policy makers shortchange school funding or initiate educational directives that deprive children of authentic creative experience, they shortchange the well-being of children and, consequently, the future of democracy.

Clyde Gaw has been teaching in K–12 classrooms for the past thirty-eight years.
cgaw@newpal.k12.in.us